The Jetsons Cut-Outs: Space Mart paper doll set
date: label: date made
content: 1963
name: label: maker
content: Whitman Publishing, LLC
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: Set of paper dolls sold as The Jetsons Cut-Outs: Space Mart. This set includes representations of the main characters of the animated sitcom as well as articles of clothing and household goods featured in the series' vision of the technologically advanced future. The perforated paper pieces of the set are held in a paper folder printed with colorful scenes of Jetsons characters and sets.
label: Description (Brief)
content: The Jetsons was an animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera that aired on ABC from 1962 to 1963 and in reruns for decades after. The primetime sitcom was set in Orbit City in the distant future and focused on the Jetson family – father George, who works at Spacely Space Sprockets, mother Jane, a homemaker, children Judy and Elroy, robot maid Rosie, and their dog Astro. Despite the high-tech gadgetry, labor-saving devices, flying cars, and space colonization of the Jetsons’ world, the series presented the family as a normative American nuclear family of the era, dealing with many of the same issues with work, family, and neighbors faced by the protagonists of The Honeymooners, Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best. The Jetsons featured many futuristic technologies that have now become commonplace - video calling, tablet computers, robotic vacuums, smart watches, flatscreen televisions, drones, and holograms – as well as many others that seem misguided or still far-off in the 2000s such as flying cars, high quality instant food, robot housekeepers, and communities built on pillars in the sky.
label: Description (Brief)
content: The series drew from a rich American literary and entertainment genre of futuristic science fiction from Edward Bellamy’s 1887 utopian novel Looking Backward to the pulp and comic book adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, not to mention contemporary space travel entertainment like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Americans in the early 1960s were fascinated by the technological innovations of the Space Age and the brighter future promised by the flood of devices, services, and improvements that marketed “better living through chemistry” and material progress. The broad economic growth and prosperity of the post World War II era had allowed many middle-class Americans to purchase luxury goods and participate in leisure activities beyond what seemed possible in the difficult 1930s and 40s. Advertisers marketed new and more inexpensive consumer goods as modern, sleek, and forward-looking, while the NASA space program and race to land a man on the moon captured the world’s attention.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Wisconsin, Racine
topic: label: Subject
content: Television
label: Subject
content: Technology
label: Subject
content: Toys
setName: label: See more items in
content: Culture and the Arts: Entertainment
label: See more items in
content: Popular Entertainment
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2021.0094.01
label: accession number
content: 2021.0094
label: catalog number
content: 2021.0094.01
objectType: label: Object Name
content: paper dolls
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: paper (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: printed (overall production method/technique)
label: Measurements
content: folder (closed): 13 in x 10 in; 33.02 cm x 25.4 cm