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00:00 The Jetsons 1963, issue 18.
00:03 George trusts Jane's judgment enough to ask her which suit he should wear to the Lodge dance.
00:09 And she chooses the blue one because she thinks he looks dignified in it.
00:14 I wonder if this panel will have a point.
00:16 Then she warns George no fancy steps tonight as she's being driven to the Lodge.
00:22 Where a new Lodge member says his wife looks young.
00:26 George complains that the suit makes people think he looks too old.
00:30 Because apparently he can instantly lose faith in his wife's judgment on anything.
00:35 And she reassures him.
00:36 And on the way home he complains that everyone at the dance somehow commented on how young Jane looks.
00:43 Jane is younger than he is but I didn't want to bring that up for a reason.
00:48 So that's all him going to a Lodge amounted to?
00:52 He could have gone to a high school reunion for all it mattered.
00:56 I expected an actual plot to come out of him suddenly going to a Lodge.
00:59 That establishes what it is.
01:02 But he was in and out of there.
01:04 George tries to go shopping for new suits and even though those aren't suits.
01:09 But regular men's clothes.
01:11 He somehow considers getting them when he sees them in the window.
01:15 Why is he even considering buying clothes that look like the old fashioned prisoner's uniform but with a blue collar?
01:23 Isn't it obvious he'd get teased or somehow mistaken for a fugitive?
01:28 Jane must be with him because he trusts her judgment in fashion.
01:32 So much that he still does even after he thinks she made a mistake picking out a suit.
01:38 She thinks stripes are for college students and under because it's the future.
01:43 And he's assertive around her and buys the suit anyways.
01:46 Because he seems to stand up for himself and do what he wants only when she's right and he's making a mistake.
01:53 And because it's necessary for an entire plot.
01:56 It's sad.
01:57 She warns him not to soil the suit in case he'd want to take it back.
02:01 When you'd think the future would have people perfectly capable of cleaning a suit perfectly.
02:07 So he could take it back anyways.
02:09 They'd even have machines to fix the suits.
02:12 If they've got a machine with buttons to automate every other homely activity.
02:17 George has a sort of good point that just because a guy is getting older doesn't mean he has to dress like it.
02:23 He makes it too obvious that he's getting a midlife crisis because he says he's been thinking of getting a rocket cycle like he had in college.
02:31 It's annoying that she disapproves without properly explaining herself.
02:35 Making her look like she's no fun.
02:38 I guess the rocket cycle is a parallel to the motorcycle.
02:41 Which is more dangerous because you're not protected by walls around you and so on when driving it.
02:47 They're already taking their lives into their hands every time they drive a flying car.
02:51 When I've seen flying cars in this comic suddenly have car trouble a lot.
02:55 So it's not like they're immune to that.
02:57 So at any point someone could have the kind of car trouble that make them plummet out of the sky.
03:02 She tames them a lot about being childish.
03:04 And then after buying a rocket cycle.
03:07 A space patrol officer instantly assumes that George is an escaped prisoner from Upstate he heard about.
03:14 That nobody would be selling shirts with black and white stripes if this could happen to anyone.
03:19 He assumes with barely any evidence that the car and rocket cycle are stolen.
03:24 And threatens George with a gun.
03:26 Even though he'd only think the car was stolen if it was reported stolen.
03:31 And somehow he still thinks George is the escaped prisoner after seeing him up close.
03:36 Even though he'd think he'd be issued a wanted photo to prevent stuff like this.
03:41 This was the most predictable, lame direction for the story to take.
03:45 I don't think it needed to happen by this shirt just because it was having a midlife crisis.
03:50 If stripes were just a childish fashion style back in the 60's and that's why this was written.
03:56 Well still the writer should have known that fashion would be different in the future.
04:00 Meanwhile after we have to see Rosie and Jane making fun of George behind his back.
04:05 Which is hard for me to watch.
04:07 They assume that the escaped convict that's lurking around their house by a wild coincidence is George.
04:13 And that he's sneaking around because he doesn't want anyone to see him in that suit after being teased.
04:19 So Rosie throws George's clothes down to him and tells him to throw his suit up to her.
04:25 Then the two of them find out by the numbers on the back that's the escaped prisoner.
04:30 Wasn't he supposed to be all the way from Upstate?
04:33 And he just escaped right?
04:35 It's not impossible that he'd be here. People can travel especially fast in the future.
04:40 But it's so silly.
04:41 Still it's nice for him to thank them and say they're okay.
04:44 Then it's finally explained why he's a fugitive. He's a bank robber.
04:48 I'm glad the story cared enough to explain that because it was taking a little while too.
04:52 The way they're talking they make it obvious that they regret helping him.
04:57 So it's nice of him to still say that the next bank he robs he'll give them a third of the loot.
05:02 Well he doesn't have to say that. He might be lying though.
05:06 He asks for some food as I still wonder why he's all bent over. I guess he has back problems.
05:12 Rosie smartly says yes and tells him to go to the kitchen.
05:16 So Jane's able to call the police.
05:19 You'd think you would've heard her say this a few feet behind him.
05:22 And he should've trusted her not to do this because of how obvious they made it that they only helped him by accident.
05:29 The very next panel George is in has him get told that the real prisoner was captured.
05:33 And he's even told he can get the suit back because it's too tight for him.
05:38 He admits he should've known better than to buy that suit.
05:41 But this doesn't teach the lesson that you shouldn't buy clothes that are too young for you.
05:46 Because this only happens to him because of the specific way the clothes looked that most young people clothes wouldn't look.
05:53 And he still has no apparent reason to decide to take back the rocket cycle.
05:58 Of course it couldn't show the grisly way riding a motorcycle could go wrong.
06:03 But we still could've been reminded by dialogue alone that rocket cycles have barely any protection for the riders in accidents.
06:09 Not to mention there's plenty of cartoon slapstick without gore in this franchise.
06:14 So he could've still crashed the motorcycle.
06:16 He goes home complimenting his wife.
06:19 And relatably he's still sensitive about the launch.
06:23 So he refuses to go.
06:24 Until he finds out it's a costume dance.
06:28 Jane ends up wanted on the phone from someone at the police headquarters.
06:31 As someone somehow thinks George is her son, even though a guy who saw George earlier is here.
06:37 George won't pick such an embarrassing costume.
06:40 They try too hard to make him funny.
06:42 But it's better to just have one comedy character.
06:45 It's just that if he's able to do cool technical stuff like fix a futuristic car or a food-o-matic,
06:52 I feel like he should be spared making him this dumb.
06:56 In the next story, George happily tells Jane they can move into a bigger apartment any time because the lease was signed.
07:03 I'm guessing they won't get to live there for the rest of the comic because it's allergic to change.
07:08 Even though I really don't see why I'd refuse to give them a new house because it's not gonna make any potential plot impossible.
07:14 So it doesn't matter if they move or not.
07:17 And it's not like it's a show where they can reuse assets.
07:20 The artist has to draw the background in every panel, and I'm sure there isn't 100% consistency the artist has to have,
07:28 so he won't ever get the layout of the house wrong.
07:31 So he won't have to memorize a new house layout if things are sort of different every time with the old one.
07:37 I guess the plot will have them give up the new apartment because it'll be too big for them to handle.
07:42 Even though it's not The Simpsons where they have to have the same neighbor all the time.
07:48 Jane says the lease forbids pets, which doesn't explain why they won't get a lease for a different apartment without that rule.
07:56 And it's weird to me that George is really reluctant to give up Astro and Sesi's family because he hated him in his first episode.
08:03 I hope there'll be an explanation for why the lease says no pets when George's apartment allows them.
08:09 I hope it's actually realistic that he didn't find out about that rule in the lease until the last seconds.
08:16 Then their visit phone gets a call, as opposed to their visual phone.
08:21 And the landlord's portrayed as a cartoonishly evil straw man by arbitrarily mentioning that his tenants are petless.
08:28 He calls Astro his boy. George must be under the desperate assumption that he was hallucinating instead of just sarcastically calling him boy,
08:37 which he must have been doing for some reason, because in the next panel he says he'd better take care of it while looking menacing.
08:44 The landlord wouldn't know he was about to say it's awful that he lives in the same building as him.
08:49 He wouldn't buy it when he said "I mean, afterwards."
08:52 So the rest of the plot shouldn't happen because he should get offended by him and say the deal's off.
08:57 George is somehow dumb enough to say he has a nearsighted landlord, and Jane doesn't correct him.
09:04 So they didn't get the obvious hint that he wanted Astro gone because he somehow didn't feel like outright telling them that.
09:12 It goes without saying, but being nearsighted doesn't mean you're so colorblind that you'd mistake a big dog for a kid.
09:20 Especially not when the dog is right behind the person you're talking to.
09:25 I'm nearsighted, so I would know. He should have said "farsighted," because then it'd make more sense that he wouldn't see him when he's so close to the screen.
09:34 But even then, he wouldn't think a gray and white blur represented his son.
09:39 This could have been somewhat believable if instead he knew it was a dog, but then George told him it was a costume for his son's costume party.
09:47 George says it'll be "fun" and thinks that it better when he already signed up for a year's rent.
09:53 So, relatably, he's only trying the doomed plan out of desperation.
09:57 It's very convenient that none of the kids show any angst about having to move, when really they'd find it quite a shock having to adjust to thinking of a new house as home.
10:07 They must not have to change schools or have any attachment to their neighbors.
10:12 George lets Elroy answer the door, and somehow the landlord asks him how his cold is.
10:18 Which is supposed to have us believe he literally did think Astro was Elroy for no reason.
10:24 Even though now that he can see him because he'd be right in front of him, he wouldn't think it was the same person he saw before because his color scheme is nothing like Astro's.
10:34 So it's more believable that he's just asking this to joke around.
10:38 Elroy's smart enough to let him believe he used to have a cold without being prompted to lie first, just so the plot can happen.
10:45 George presses a button telling Astro to hide in a closet, and for no reason a huge pile of stuff crashes out of it.
10:52 And George says he has too much stuff and needs to throw some of it away.
10:56 So he finally gets it. No sign of Rosie, by the way.
11:00 This is a different universe, where she's getting some work done on herself.
11:05 The landlord tries to help Jane by telling her about the modern features of the home, like electric eye-controlled lighting.
11:12 George lies down that Astro is an old-fashioned lamp because he's got a lamp on his head.
11:18 But it's blatantly obvious that this would be seen through instantly because he'd be moving ever so slightly, even if he avoided breathing.
11:27 Because he's somehow smart enough to know English enough to know George wanted him to do all of this, he'd still move.
11:34 The landlord presses a button and George says he might bite, and logically this would instantly give the game away to him.
11:41 I guess he thought he only said that as a slip-up because a dog lamp that wouldn't exist looked so realistic.
11:48 But it'd be far more believable if the landlord knew a dog was there, and was intentionally making him agonize over trying to hide the dog from him all day as a punishment for having him there,
11:59 and was waiting until he'd be about to leave before telling him to get rid of the dog.
12:04 Without that being the case, this is an unbelievable story that doesn't really take advantage of the sci-fi environment.
12:10 So it doesn't have any business being in the comic,
12:13 as it seems like the scene's gonna be nothing but moments where he should catch them and somehow doesn't.
12:18 It got old the first time.
12:20 The landlord hears Astro sneeze behind him, and George lets him believe he sneezed.
12:26 It's nice of him to say he'd better take care of himself.
12:29 He brags about the burglar alarms, and presses a button saying he installed them because he has something worth stealing,
12:36 while Jane expectably says they don't have anything worth stealing, which she should know isn't true of any household.
12:43 I can't imagine any burglar would go through the trouble and risk of entering a house just to leave with nothing.
12:50 Somehow the landlord leaves, as we see another panel where the family's in the house without him.
12:56 So I guess he's planning on making them wait until the very last second before they go to bed, before ringing the doorbell.
13:03 And eventually the landlord introduces his wife to them, who's so hideous I instantly thought she was supposed to be a guy pretending to be a woman
13:10 for the sake of the landlord pulling a trick on them, until I read the word "wife".
13:15 He says his wife is interested in antiques, so she'd want the dog limp.
13:19 The only way this story would be believable would be that the reason he didn't tell them before leaving to get rid of the dog
13:25 is that he wanted to put them through even more misery with this.
13:28 George calls Astro a "he" in front of the wife.
13:32 If she was somehow too stupid to notice his slight movement, she'd brush this off as a mistake because the dog looks so realistic.
13:41 Then we see a burglar think that no burglar alarm can stop him, but it's the future, that's impossible.
13:48 He also has a convenient "diamonds detector" box that clicks to let him know which apartment to steal from.
13:56 Jay thanks the wife for showing up, and he walks into the apartments while people are awake instead of doing this when they're so asleep
14:03 that there's no chance any of them would get to call the police on him.
14:07 If he does this during the day a lot, he'd get attacked by dogs constantly because they'd be awake.
14:13 The burglar doesn't explain how he got past the burglar alarm because the writer doesn't know the answer.
14:19 This just makes it obvious that this shouldn't have been written.
14:22 It could have worked if the burglar was established to be a genius mad scientist who just got fired.
14:28 The wife gives him his jewelry, and then Astro stops him, and the landlord asks where the dog came from.
14:35 Why still keep up the act?
14:38 I get him hating big dogs.
14:40 Why would he trust them not to hurt him just because they're on top of a burglar?
14:44 So either way, seeing Astro would put him in a bad mood.
14:47 George explains away that they have an instant "watchdog machine".
14:51 He says this rule against pets doesn't apply to "brave, alert watchdogs".
14:57 And George thanks him.
14:58 The wife looks like an idiot by apparently believing George's story.
15:03 To be fair, anything could be summoned by nanites if Archie Sonic is to be believed.
15:08 So instant watchdogs could be possible in the future if they have summoning nanites too.
15:13 But she should say that.
15:15 Somehow the story ends with the landlord happily telling the police they caught a burglar.
15:19 Even though I'm sure we'll never see this horrible character again.
15:23 So why end the story on something besides the status quo when it makes no sense to have an ending like this?
15:29 Why did the landlord make a fool out of himself by pretending he totally bought George's lie
15:34 when he could have easily told him he's making an exception for Astro because he saved his wife's jewelry,
15:40 like I expected, and made me tell the jealous neighbors the instant watchdogs lie?
15:45 You'd think instant watchdogs would qualify as pets under the lease because they can be petted.
15:51 But his wife at least has to be assuming they're really temporary creations.
15:55 Too temporary to have the problems he associates with pets in apartments,
15:59 like barking too much to disturb the neighbors.
16:02 And that's it. He's not the one who has to take care of them after all.
16:06 It's so frustrating that the story doesn't even try to explain why it has to know pets rule them.
16:12 When I saw Astro sneeze, I thought that if he said he was allergic to a lot of animals,
16:17 that'd perfectly justify it.
16:20 In the next story, Elric complains about homework, and George asks him what's wrong anyways,
16:26 which has to be because he wants him to be more specific because he just told him.
16:31 He gives him the old chestnut that school days are the happiest days of your life,
16:36 and says his job is troubleshooter for the complaint department of his factory,
16:40 when I always thought it was button pusher.
16:43 Instead, this is a separate universe just to give him a more interesting story.
16:48 Elric bets his job is more interesting than school,
16:51 and George thinks he needs straightening out, as if it's a crime to be bored by homework,
16:57 and offers to let him go with him on his job because he doesn't have to go to school tomorrow.
17:02 Elric yawns the next day, but still doesn't mind that he had to get up early
17:07 because this is more fun than school already,
17:10 even though he hasn't experienced anything but a car ride yet.
17:14 George says he's gotta repair a trash collector at the park,
17:17 certainly more interesting than his real job.
17:20 Maybe he got promoted.
17:22 George complains that the trash detector of the machine at the park is flawed,
17:26 so he wants Elric to help him test it by taking bits of paper over to the other side of the park.
17:32 What if someone sees him do that and punishes him for littering,
17:35 even though nobody should be at the park yet?
17:38 He decides to put the paper under the bush to give the machine a real test,
17:43 and thankfully nobody spots him.
17:45 Instead, he luckily finds a suitcase full of money that the trash collector sucks up,
17:50 and George ends up congratulated by the police for returning the money,
17:54 because finding the lost robbery loot winds up their case.
17:58 I guess George thought these were marked bank notes because the suitcase was hidden instead of in a house,
18:04 so he brought them here in case he'd get tracked down and arrested otherwise.
18:08 I can already tell what the pattern of this plot's gonna be like.
18:11 It seems like it'll be a great story,
18:13 even if it gets in the way of George proving his point to Elric,
18:16 but I don't really care.
18:17 Even then, there's nothing stopping him from doing this with Elric again,
18:21 and he should know that and relax.
18:23 George says his next job is to fix the food-o-matic of someone he knows the name of for no explained reason.
18:29 I guess she's the wife of someone who works at his company.
18:32 Elric assumes they'll get to eat, and gets told he won't,
18:36 but the woman insists on talking about food for a good long while anyways,
18:40 so I'm guessing they will get to eat.
18:42 George hands Elric a flashlight as he's complaining about being hungry.
18:46 George thinks that at school, they have a snack at mid-morning.
18:50 George finds out the growling's predictably not coming from Elric,
18:54 and it's an angry dog that barks too much beside George,
18:58 but somehow his slip-up fixes the machine already.
19:01 Or the woman came to the wrong conclusion because the slip-up caused the machine to generate the breakfast she ordered hours ago.
19:08 Because she thinks it's too late to eat it now,
19:11 and she already had something else planned for lunch,
19:13 she gives it to Elric.
19:15 George tells Elric he has to go to the Arctic to fix an instant igloo machine for a contractor.
19:21 I wonder if he'll turn out to be wrong about having enough fuel because we're shown this panel.
19:27 His customer just has to be shown as bad at English,
19:31 which of course is unrealistic,
19:33 and Elric doesn't like how cold it is, but still insists on trying to help because he's brave.
19:39 George asks him to hand him a wrench as he's planning to sadistically take longer than normal to fix the machine when his son is freezing.
19:47 Somehow the wrench slips out of his hands and he apologizes,
19:51 and fortunately justifies that his fingers were too cold to properly hold it.
19:56 I suppose that's believable because the cold makes you go numb.
20:00 The wrench went against the lever and that turns the machine on,
20:04 and that makes someone happy that he's back in business.
20:07 Nobody thought to try that lever before because they must have assumed it wouldn't do anything.
20:12 Elric says happily that school was never this easy.
20:16 He's just lucking out repeatedly and he should know that.
20:19 The car runs out of fuel.
20:21 Somehow a guy who can fix futuristic cars in Futomatix was so bad at math that he miscalculated something.
20:28 They land near a polar bear in the middle of nowhere and he plans to radio the police for help.
20:34 The story cuts ahead to the police using an emergency refueling unit on their car,
20:39 as the cop says every schoolboy knows the fuel formula.
20:43 I guess it's believable that schoolboys are taught the fuel formula because it's the future where school is supposed to be at its best.
20:50 But why would they teach them that when it'll take forever for them to be allowed to drive,
20:55 and by then they'll forget it?
20:57 So that's a day that's not gonna force us to be taught that lesson,
21:01 when it really should be taught in a more natural way that's actually convincing.
21:05 And then there's a page where Rosie likes someone's curly hair and sees her own reflection in a store window and thinks she's plain.
21:13 So she gets some springs and thanks the guy in charge of the store, looking ridiculous.
21:19 I guess robots have a different idea of what makes a robot look nice, even though they are programmed by non-robots.
21:26 The first story is about George having a midlife crisis and somehow deciding that buying a shirt resembling a prisoner's uniform is a good idea.
21:34 And somehow when a space patroller predictably thinks he's a fugitive, he doesn't see the blue collar and realize his mistake.
21:42 But by a wild coincidence, the same fugitive meets Jane, who mistakenly had Rosie give him George's clothes to get his trust,
21:50 and so he gets rounded up right away.
21:52 This plot didn't require a sci-fi setting, and it was too frustrating to be worth it.
21:57 The second nonsensical story was about George having to fool an impossibly stupid or blind landlord into thinking his dog in his new apartment is a dog lamp,
22:07 when obviously it'd move even slightly eventually and give itself away.
22:12 But instead the landlord invites his wife to try to buy the lamp.
22:16 The whole time he was acting impossibly stupid, I was hoping it'd be revealed that he was never oblivious and just messing with them out of sadism.
22:24 He ends up letting Astro stay not because he saved his wife's jewelry from a burglar that somehow got past the futuristic alarm,
22:31 but because George said he was an instant watchdog.
22:35 Without saying that he's made of force fields, or nanobots.
22:39 Why end on the non-status quo just to forget this character?
22:43 Make it obvious that this takes place in a different universe.
22:46 The story only needed the sci-fi environments to explain away the landlord letting Astro stay.
22:52 But it didn't really need that, because it could've let him stay because he stopped a burglar like I expected.
22:59 So it'd actually make more sense if this wasn't in the future, where burglar alarms should be impossible to get past.
23:06 And then there's a much nicer story where Elroy gets sick of school and goes on a car ride with his dad when he's going around fixing things for people's homes in this alternate universe.
23:16 And Elroy looks out over and over, until they run out of gas and he realizes school is important because George didn't do the fuel formula right.
23:25 Which Elroy had no excuse for knowing because he's too young, and were never told he's in an advanced program.
23:32 So it really is a shame they screwed up teaching you a valuable life lesson.
23:37 Other than this story, this was a bad issue.
23:41 [BLANK_AUDIO]