You may have noticed there are tons of versions of A Christmas Carol floating around this time of year. But did you know there are literally hundreds? Even The Jetsons have their own take on this classic tale.
An item of note about Christmas in the future. We’ll all have a “laser tree” instead of a Christmas tree.
Anyway, Mr. Spacely (the Scrooge here) has poor George (presumably, the Bob Cratchet) working overtime on Christmas Eve. Interestingly enough, George is aware of A Christmas Carol and even says that Mr. Spacely is a “Scrooge,” who he wishes would be visited by some Christmas ghosts.
The ghosts show up with only 9 minutes left in the episode, so things move at a pretty tight clip. We get to see a little tiny Cosmo Spacely and little tiny George Jetson when the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Spacely how he paid George only a penny for running little Spacely’s lemonade stand. Then it’s off to visit an old flame, who Cosmo told he loved more than Space Ball but less than money. (The romance didn’t last too long.)
Spacely wakes up at his desk for a moment and then quickly falls asleep again, only to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas present. In the present he visits the Jetsons’s house, where poor Astro is near-death, having injured himself by chasing around his gift: “a robot cat.”
In the future, Spacely learns that The Jetsons are incredibly rich, having won a significant lawsuit against Mr. Spacely. As it turns out, Mr. Spacely manufactured the sproket that killed Astro. (R.I.P. Astro).
Unlike Scrooge, he seems to have a genuine change of heart, Spacely seems more afraid of being sued than anything. On Christmas morning, he shows up at The Jetsons’s house with a vet, who is able to save Astro.
Very Special Lesson: You can make mean people be nice to you by threatening them with lawsuits. ‘Tis the season.
The Very Special Blog 
Yup. Hundreds of versions of A Christmas Carol. This year, I’ve already watched the George C. Scott (my personal favorite), Jim Carrey, Seymour Hicks, and Reginald Owen versions.
The bit about Astro falling I’ll after chasing a robot cat sounds familier. I must have not known that it was Jetsons at the time, but I remember watching some Christmas special with Dad when I was very little, where a talking dog was chasing a gear-operated toy, and then it exploded, and the dog was sick, and they took his temperature, and it was normal (I remember a sign with the temperature written on it popping out of the thermometer), and then at the end, he got an x-ray, and it turned out he had a gear inside him. I remember turning to my dad and saying (smart little kid as I was), “That must have come from the toy he was playing with.” And Dad said, “Yup.”
If I remember correctly, that was the same year where, a few days later, my parents tape recorded a whole bunch of Christmas specials off of TV while my brother and I were sleeping. The next day, they popped the tape in and showed them to us. But there was on special on it that they always fast-forwarded through when they came to it; “The Night B4 Christmas” (yes, that’s actually how it was spelled). They said they didn’t like it, and didn’t want us to watch it, and the only reason it wasn’t recorded over is because they didn’t have time and just put the next Christmas special after it.
A couple years ago, I came across the tape, and popped it in and went to the special, to see what it was my parents were objecting to. It’s basically a parody of “The Night Before Christmas” with rapping Christmas elves. A better title would have been “A Hip-Hop Christmas.” It was awful and full of stereotypes. It was supposed to be funny, but I only laughed at the sheer stupidity of the whole thing. Worst Christmas special ever,
Oh my gosh. I have NEVER heard of that special hahahaha. Probably with good reason.