YMMV / The Jetsons

• Accidental Aesop: In the time of the series, all the bungling inventions and strange machines were just a funny idea of all those wacky things people might come up with in the future. In a modern context, with how often George's life is upset, humiliated, and nearly destroyed because of one errant contraption that can do anything from ease his teeth (albeit as accidentally-given dog dentures, so naturally they go awry) to a remote that rewinds and erases time and ends up causing him no small amount of grief after he exploited it horribly, it accidentally creates the message that people shouldn't readily trust every other new fad or invention out on the market and that some of these things are just plain reckless to ever give to a consumer or even create.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You)" from "A Date with Jet Screamer". The song is so fondly remembered that the Violent Femmes did a cover for the Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits tribute album in the mid-'90s.
  • The opening theme. "Meet George Jetson! His boy Elroy!" It gets stuck in your head and never leaves. It's one of the most well known theme songs of all time.
• Base-Breaking Character: Orbitty. While a portion of the fanbase find him adorable, clever, funny, and a good addition to the cast, others find him almost as annoying as the trope namer for The Scrappy and another reason to ignore the '80s seasons, to the point that even his creators didn't like him.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some of the fanbase don't like to acknowledge the '80s seasons. Many different reasons include the direction of the studio in the '80s, the more sci-fi storylines, or the addition of Orbitty.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Mexican broadcasters normally put more emphasis on the '80s version, with reruns of the '60s version being much rarer.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Remember how funny it was to see George complain about pain at work when all he did was push a button? Nowadays, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (pains brought about by repetitive tasks such as typing on keyboards) is a concern.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The treadmill gag at the end. Now there really IS a dog-walking treadmill.
  • The televiewer is remarkably similar to an LED TV.
  • One episode features a robot vacuum. Many years later, we get the Roomba.
  • The pilot features the Peek-A-Boo Prober, a little robot which will examine George from the inside. Sounds just like the Spider-Pill, doesn't it?
  • "Private Property" showed a building being built in less than a minute via extrusion from a device labeled "Instant Concrete". It's essentially a slightly more fantastical version of current 3D printed buildings.
  • Could count as Harsher in Hindsight if you're a cable executive/regular cable viewer; in "Miss Solar System", George complains about having to pay the television set once in a while to watch TV, with George remarking "This pay TV's gotta go."^note Cable television was at its infancy by this point, before exploding in the 1980s. Come The New '20s, and "cord-cutting" has become an industry-wide phenomenon as more and more people cancel their cable and satellite television subscriptions in favor of cheaper, internet-based alternatives.
• Improved Second Attempt: Some people weren't too sure about the lack of racial diversity, with some calling it racist and some even speculating that the show is set in a dystopia where only white people exist/can be happy. While later episodes still largely lack representation, people of color crop up from time to time. Eventually, The Jetsons & WWE: Robo-WrestleMania! would show a much more racially diverse future. The DC comic book adaptation was also racially diverse.
• Jerkass Woobie: Spacely. Despite being a Mean Boss, he often has to deal with his snobbish wife and a bratty half pint son who has little to no respect for him, and has to deal with his company rival W.C. Cogswell stealing his ideas before Spacely puts patents on them. Also for as often as he mistreats George, his frustrations towards the latter endangering his company and personal well being aren't often unfounded.
• Memetic Mutation: HE IS ALMOST HERE.^ExplanationJokes about George Jetson being born in the year 2022 naturally emerged when that year stopped being the future. This went viral in November 2021 (thanks to his two unconfirmed birthdays of July 31 and August 27 spread by The Other Wiki) with most assuming he was conceived on Thanksgiving weekend. Morphed into "HE IS HERE" for two brief resurgences at the turn of the new year and on the actual (supposedly) birthday(s).
• Newer Than They Think: Comparisons to Blondie are almost inevitable when discussing the show today, but these went completely unnoticed during the show's original run in The '60s. Reviewers instead focused on the far more obvious parallels to The Flintstones.
• Nightmare Fuel: The "Robots Revenge" episode from the 1985 revival. George pisses off one robot who then issues a "code red" where robots and machines everywhere turn against George, including Rosie (though she ultimately can't go through with it)!
• Older Than They Think: Some fans mistakenly believe that RUDI was created for the 1980s revival, when he actually did appear in one episode of the 1960s season, and only received more prominence in the later seasons.
• Salvaged Story: One episode features Jane having trouble learning to drive. Some viewers have seen this as playing into the stereotype that women can't drive, especially due to some of George's comments in the episode. In a later episode, Judy successfully learns to drive and nobody implies that she won't be able to because she's a girl. Furthermore, Jane is occasionally seen driving.
• The Scrappy:
  • Orbitty. Even the people working on the series hated him, and John Kricfalusi has gone on record as having frequently tried to work in scenes where he'd get abused in the episodes for which he was an animation supervisor.
  • Judy seems to get this a lot, with many mostly remembering her for her whining about the usual teenage event which many found obnoxious (ironically being the point of the character, to showcase the teenage generation in the setting).
• Seasonal Rot: The 80s revival seasons aren't nearly as popular or well-received as the original '60s season. Boomerang has this viewpoint as well as the '80s seasons are rarely aired on the channel.
• Shocking Moments: When Jane is mad at Elroy for breaking the pitcher, she tells George that she wants to "warm [Elroy's] bottom". Doubles as Values Dissonance; when the show was made, spanking as a punishment was much more universally acceptable.
• Squick: The Season 2 episode "Grandpa and the Galactic Gold Digger" features Grandpa Montague falling in love with a teenage girl. ^note She is explicitly stated in the episode to be a teenager. George says "In love? With that teenager?" George is blatantly uncomfortable with this, and in the end the girl turns out to be a Fille Fatale con artist. How they let blatant ephebophilia slide on national children's television is anyone's guess.
• Spiritual Adaptation: As mentioned on the show's TV Tropes page, The Jetsons is a futuristic version of the classic comic strip Blondie (1930)IN SPACE! with even the titular character's actress Penny Singleton voicing Jane Jetson.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Orbity was a major gripe for some people who watched Season 2.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • It captures mid-20th-century futurism with flying cars, a workday that lasts an hour, and space travel akin to a family vacation as reasonable predictions for the 21st century.
  • The family structure, with a wife staying at home to take care of the house, also dates this movie to the postwar era.
• Values Dissonance:
  • An episode deals with Jane getting her driver's license, which is treated like a living nightmare for everyone else involved simply because she's a woman and "You know what they say about women drivers!"
  • Since Jane is 33, George is 40, and their oldest child Judy is 16, that would mean that George (24) got Jane pregnant at 17 years old. An age gap like that would not fly today, even though it was accepted at the time the show aired.
  • Invoked, to a certain extent, by the show's premise; while the writers didn't know precisely how the future would change, and therefore couldn't anticipate the precise points of dissonance, having it be exactly like a standard '60s family through a futuristic version of a Recycled In Space filter is mostly played for laughs. Later revivals tend to lean into this more intentionally.
• The Woobie:
  • George, obviously, considering he has to put up with Mr. Spacely as a boss.
  • Also Astro whenever George is too harsh with him and especially in "Elroy Meets Orbitty".