When I heard a few years ago that C. H. Greenblatt was working on a cartoon reviving multiple Hanna-Barbera properties and putting them all in one universe, I was both excited and a little scared.
Half of me was excited because I LOVE the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jabberjaw, Top Cat.... some of the most well-remembered toons to this day.
Their cartoons' animation may have been limited, but that was more than made up for by all of the delightfully quirky and memorable characters, and loads and loads of belly laughs.
However, the other half of me was skeptical because anyone who's a cartoon fanatic like I am knows about the boom of TERRIBLE cartoon reboots that happened in the mid-10's with the eye-gougingly bad resurrections of Teen Titans, The Powerpuff Girls, and Ben 10.
(I also think the new DuckTales and Animaniacs are pretty bad as well, but they're not nearly as ill-received as the others for reasons that escape me.)
And although Ol' C. H. did excellent work on the first four seasons of SpongeBob, and his own cartoon Chowder, I found his later effort Harvey Beaks to be lacking his signature wackiness and charm, thus it fell flat for me.
Seems like I wasn't the only one who felt this way either, as the show died a rather early death and was banished to Nicktoons late in its run. Probably for the best.
Initially intended to come out in 2020 (though for reasons you can probably gather yourself, that ended up not happening), Jellystone finally debuted on July 29, 2021 after a few delays, through the sleazy streaming service HBO Max .
Which finally leads me into my thoughts on Jellystone. And I'll preface this by saying that this review is going to be very lengthy and in-depth, and I naturally will spend a big chunk of it comparing this re-incarnation of these beloved cartoon characters to their original source material.
And now, without further ado....
....HEAVENS TO MURGATROYD, is this revival TERRIBLE! Just.... so.... much.... wrong.
Before I say ANYTHING else, let me just state for the record that I know, for a FACT, that C. H. Greenblatt and co. Can do SO much better than this.
Not surprisingly, the many wonderful toons from the Hanna-Barbera library have been "revamped" for a modern-day audience. Many characters that were originally male are now inexplicably female, characters have been given new personalities, and they now interact with all the advanced technology we have today.
And I really thought this show was going to be better than this due to Greenblatt's (mostly) excellent track record, and well, it's Hanna-Barbera.... sort of.
But unfortunately, Greenblatt's natural talents do not come through here.
I'd say, after thinking it over, that there are four key areas where Jellystone fails, and the original cartoons succeed. So let's pick this apart, shall we?
______________________________________________________________ NUMBER ONE: VISUALS
Now, it goes without saying that the original Hanna-Barbera cartoons had.... far from the best animation, even for the time. Those cartoons were made on a tight budget, so of course, things had to be sacrificed.
Animation was frequently re-used, characters changed colors (sometimes even within the same shot), and the lines didn't always sync with their mouths. Yet somehow, many of these cartoons still managed to look good.
Jellystone, on the other hand, makes the aforementioned limited animation of the originals look like a Miyazaki flick, with its depressingly stiff animation and ugly character designs.
I'm almost positive that Jellystone is animated with Flash. It looks so cold, so sterile, so dead, so lifeless. Stiff. Choppy. The characters move like robots.
Now, that on its own is one thing. But it's also coupled with the characters looking absolutely hideous.
Visually speaking, Jellystone is an ugly, Picasso-esque nightmare. All of the characters look really crude, amateurish and incredibly flat. It's a harsh contrast to the original cartoons which although had limited animation, characters were still seen from multiple-angles: front, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, behind.
On the other hand, characters in Jellystone are almost ALWAYS seen at a 3/4 angle, sometimes very rarely from the front (THANKFULLY rarely, might I add, because like lots of other recent cartoons, the characters in front view are hideous). It's like Peppa Pig.
The limited but charming style of the originals has been reduced to a flat, hard-to-look-at, synthetic and ugly one, much like the Teen Titans Go! And PPG 2016 which also had severe art downgrades from their original incarnations.
And boy, is it a sad sight.
____________________________________________________________________________ NUMBER TWO: CHARACTERS
As I mentioned earlier, many characters' personalities have been changed to relate more to a modern audience.
Now, some of these changes aren't that bad (Snagglepuss hasn't changed much, nor has Captain Caveman, Wally Gator, or Huckleberry Hound), but the majority of these characters have been significantly watered down from their original counterparts.
Remember Yogi Bear? The slow-witted, yet loveable bear who always cooked up wonderfully zany schemes to get his hands on those picnic baskets? Or his funny deadpan sidekick Boo Boo, who often also served as the voice of reason during their hilarious misadventures?
Now, Yogi's just braindead and obnoxious, joining the camp of "fat and stupid because LOL" characters such as Gumball's dad, Zombie Simpsons Homer, and modern Patrick Star.
Meanwhile, Boo Boo is just a rambling joke machine. And no longer do Yogi and Boo Boo go after picnic baskets; now they just live together in some apartment building. Awful.
Also, were the gender changes really necessary? Like, I get that there were more male characters than females in the originals, but it's not like there WEREN'T female characters.
Jabberjaw and Brain are now annoying valley girls and it's every bit as as terrible as it sounds.
No offense to Augie Doggie's new voice actress (it feels so weird to even type that), but her new voice really grates on the ears. Just because she's a kid doesn't mean you have to make her sound as irritating as possible. Same goes for Yakky Doodle. Just, ugh
Magilla Gorilla has been dumbed down to a nerdy loser, and Mildew Wolf is a walking stereotype.
Oh, and for some reason, Peter Potamus is now a hardcore weeb that owns a dakimakura (which he believes to be real).
____________________________________________________________________________ NUMBER THREE: HUMOR
Jellystone rivals Cartoon Network's MAD and the aforementioned Teen Titans Go! As one of the most painfully unfunny cartoons ever made.
Greenblatt's first cartoon Chowder delivered with its absurdist humor and genius fourth-wall breaks, while his second show Harvey Beaks wasn't really comedy-driven like most of its ilk (and the sparse jokes it did offer were hit-or-miss).
Jellystone, on the other hand, shares Breadwinners and Sanjay and Craig's obnoxiously low-brow style of humor.
Immature toilet and fart jokes run rampant, and they are all awful and incredibly distracting.
All of the genius humor of the original Hanna Barbera cartoons has been thrown out the window for sophomoric, juvenile humor that surely nobody over the age of 10 will find funny.
Even the jokes that aren't related to butts and flatulence are incredibly lame and groan-inducing. The simplest and most basic form of humor there is.
Even when the rare good joke DOES sneak by (and believe it or not, there actually are a few of them), it just isn't worth it amongst the sea of potty humor and flat jokes.
____________________________________________________________________________
NUMBER FOUR: PLOTS
And the muddy icing on this mudcake of a mess would definitely have to be the plotlines. The plots of these episodes are, for the most part, unbelievably dumb.
Let me just describe some of these plots to you and tell me they're not stupid....
Yogi Bear eats everybody in town and Boo Boo and Cindy have to travel inside him and get everyone out.
Yogi gets jealous of Boo Boo's cool new boots and the two buy increasingly big boots to outdo each other.
Yogi thinks he's a cat after taking a DNA test and crashes with Top Cat and co. To stupidly unfunny results.
Yogi passes Shag Rug as his kid to get into a [[Main/SuckECheeses Suck-E-Cheese]] with the Cattanooga Cats as animatronics. These characters have like, zero chemistry.
The Top Cats sell expired fish sticks to the populace of Jellystone that turn them all into fish-heads. Definitely a worst episode contender - pure, unadulterated stupidity with no rhyme or reason whatsoever.
Augie Doggie learns about corporate culture and her mind grows to the size of a giant that zaps laser beams which turn everybody into businessmen/women.
After a freak accident, Yakky Doodle gets trapped in a watermelon and Augie Doggie treats it like her baby. Easily one of the creepiest, most unsettling episodes of any cartoon I've ever seen.
The original shows had stories that were fun and made sense for their characters.
Most of Jellystone's stories are either incredibly stupid, make no sense, change plots midway through, have abrupt/forced conclusions, or sometimes even all of those in the same episode.
But thankfully, despite all of these problems, nobody has to watch this waste of a revival if they don't wish to.
____________________________________________________________________________
At the end of the day, I highly recommend the ORIGINAL Hanna-Barbera cartoons. They may be old, some of them may be a bit dated, and the animation may not be the greatest, but all that is worth it thanks to the library of fun and wonderful characters, and brilliant comedy.
Go ahead and enjoy the originals, then MAYBE give Jellystone a shot if you're curious, only to experience what is called the mind-numbing power of difference.
Half of me was excited because I LOVE the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jabberjaw, Top Cat.... some of the most well-remembered toons to this day.
Their cartoons' animation may have been limited, but that was more than made up for by all of the delightfully quirky and memorable characters, and loads and loads of belly laughs.
However, the other half of me was skeptical because anyone who's a cartoon fanatic like I am knows about the boom of TERRIBLE cartoon reboots that happened in the mid-10's with the eye-gougingly bad resurrections of Teen Titans, The Powerpuff Girls, and Ben 10.
(I also think the new DuckTales and Animaniacs are pretty bad as well, but they're not nearly as ill-received as the others for reasons that escape me.)
And although Ol' C. H. did excellent work on the first four seasons of SpongeBob, and his own cartoon Chowder, I found his later effort Harvey Beaks to be lacking his signature wackiness and charm, thus it fell flat for me.
Seems like I wasn't the only one who felt this way either, as the show died a rather early death and was banished to Nicktoons late in its run. Probably for the best.
Initially intended to come out in 2020 (though for reasons you can probably gather yourself, that ended up not happening), Jellystone finally debuted on July 29, 2021 after a few delays, through the sleazy streaming service HBO Max .
Which finally leads me into my thoughts on Jellystone. And I'll preface this by saying that this review is going to be very lengthy and in-depth, and I naturally will spend a big chunk of it comparing this re-incarnation of these beloved cartoon characters to their original source material.
And now, without further ado....
....HEAVENS TO MURGATROYD, is this revival TERRIBLE! Just.... so.... much.... wrong.
Before I say ANYTHING else, let me just state for the record that I know, for a FACT, that C. H. Greenblatt and co. Can do SO much better than this.
Not surprisingly, the many wonderful toons from the Hanna-Barbera library have been "revamped" for a modern-day audience. Many characters that were originally male are now inexplicably female, characters have been given new personalities, and they now interact with all the advanced technology we have today.
And I really thought this show was going to be better than this due to Greenblatt's (mostly) excellent track record, and well, it's Hanna-Barbera.... sort of.
But unfortunately, Greenblatt's natural talents do not come through here.
I'd say, after thinking it over, that there are four key areas where Jellystone fails, and the original cartoons succeed. So let's pick this apart, shall we?
______________________________________________________________ NUMBER ONE: VISUALS
Now, it goes without saying that the original Hanna-Barbera cartoons had.... far from the best animation, even for the time. Those cartoons were made on a tight budget, so of course, things had to be sacrificed.
Animation was frequently re-used, characters changed colors (sometimes even within the same shot), and the lines didn't always sync with their mouths. Yet somehow, many of these cartoons still managed to look good.
Jellystone, on the other hand, makes the aforementioned limited animation of the originals look like a Miyazaki flick, with its depressingly stiff animation and ugly character designs.
I'm almost positive that Jellystone is animated with Flash. It looks so cold, so sterile, so dead, so lifeless. Stiff. Choppy. The characters move like robots.
Now, that on its own is one thing. But it's also coupled with the characters looking absolutely hideous.
Visually speaking, Jellystone is an ugly, Picasso-esque nightmare. All of the characters look really crude, amateurish and incredibly flat. It's a harsh contrast to the original cartoons which although had limited animation, characters were still seen from multiple-angles: front, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, behind.
On the other hand, characters in Jellystone are almost ALWAYS seen at a 3/4 angle, sometimes very rarely from the front (THANKFULLY rarely, might I add, because like lots of other recent cartoons, the characters in front view are hideous). It's like Peppa Pig.
The limited but charming style of the originals has been reduced to a flat, hard-to-look-at, synthetic and ugly one, much like the Teen Titans Go! And PPG 2016 which also had severe art downgrades from their original incarnations.
And boy, is it a sad sight.
____________________________________________________________________________ NUMBER TWO: CHARACTERS
As I mentioned earlier, many characters' personalities have been changed to relate more to a modern audience.
Now, some of these changes aren't that bad (Snagglepuss hasn't changed much, nor has Captain Caveman, Wally Gator, or Huckleberry Hound), but the majority of these characters have been significantly watered down from their original counterparts.
Remember Yogi Bear? The slow-witted, yet loveable bear who always cooked up wonderfully zany schemes to get his hands on those picnic baskets? Or his funny deadpan sidekick Boo Boo, who often also served as the voice of reason during their hilarious misadventures?
Now, Yogi's just braindead and obnoxious, joining the camp of "fat and stupid because LOL" characters such as Gumball's dad, Zombie Simpsons Homer, and modern Patrick Star.
Meanwhile, Boo Boo is just a rambling joke machine. And no longer do Yogi and Boo Boo go after picnic baskets; now they just live together in some apartment building. Awful.
Also, were the gender changes really necessary? Like, I get that there were more male characters than females in the originals, but it's not like there WEREN'T female characters.
Jabberjaw and Brain are now annoying valley girls and it's every bit as as terrible as it sounds.
No offense to Augie Doggie's new voice actress (it feels so weird to even type that), but her new voice really grates on the ears. Just because she's a kid doesn't mean you have to make her sound as irritating as possible. Same goes for Yakky Doodle. Just, ugh
Magilla Gorilla has been dumbed down to a nerdy loser, and Mildew Wolf is a walking stereotype.
Oh, and for some reason, Peter Potamus is now a hardcore weeb that owns a dakimakura (which he believes to be real).
____________________________________________________________________________ NUMBER THREE: HUMOR
Jellystone rivals Cartoon Network's MAD and the aforementioned Teen Titans Go! As one of the most painfully unfunny cartoons ever made.
Greenblatt's first cartoon Chowder delivered with its absurdist humor and genius fourth-wall breaks, while his second show Harvey Beaks wasn't really comedy-driven like most of its ilk (and the sparse jokes it did offer were hit-or-miss).
Jellystone, on the other hand, shares Breadwinners and Sanjay and Craig's obnoxiously low-brow style of humor.
Immature toilet and fart jokes run rampant, and they are all awful and incredibly distracting.
All of the genius humor of the original Hanna Barbera cartoons has been thrown out the window for sophomoric, juvenile humor that surely nobody over the age of 10 will find funny.
Even the jokes that aren't related to butts and flatulence are incredibly lame and groan-inducing. The simplest and most basic form of humor there is.
Even when the rare good joke DOES sneak by (and believe it or not, there actually are a few of them), it just isn't worth it amongst the sea of potty humor and flat jokes.
____________________________________________________________________________
NUMBER FOUR: PLOTS
And the muddy icing on this mudcake of a mess would definitely have to be the plotlines. The plots of these episodes are, for the most part, unbelievably dumb.
Let me just describe some of these plots to you and tell me they're not stupid....
Yogi Bear eats everybody in town and Boo Boo and Cindy have to travel inside him and get everyone out.
Yogi gets jealous of Boo Boo's cool new boots and the two buy increasingly big boots to outdo each other.
Yogi thinks he's a cat after taking a DNA test and crashes with Top Cat and co. To stupidly unfunny results.
Yogi passes Shag Rug as his kid to get into a [[Main/SuckECheeses Suck-E-Cheese]] with the Cattanooga Cats as animatronics. These characters have like, zero chemistry.
The Top Cats sell expired fish sticks to the populace of Jellystone that turn them all into fish-heads. Definitely a worst episode contender - pure, unadulterated stupidity with no rhyme or reason whatsoever.
Augie Doggie learns about corporate culture and her mind grows to the size of a giant that zaps laser beams which turn everybody into businessmen/women.
After a freak accident, Yakky Doodle gets trapped in a watermelon and Augie Doggie treats it like her baby. Easily one of the creepiest, most unsettling episodes of any cartoon I've ever seen.
The original shows had stories that were fun and made sense for their characters.
Most of Jellystone's stories are either incredibly stupid, make no sense, change plots midway through, have abrupt/forced conclusions, or sometimes even all of those in the same episode.
But thankfully, despite all of these problems, nobody has to watch this waste of a revival if they don't wish to.
____________________________________________________________________________
At the end of the day, I highly recommend the ORIGINAL Hanna-Barbera cartoons. They may be old, some of them may be a bit dated, and the animation may not be the greatest, but all that is worth it thanks to the library of fun and wonderful characters, and brilliant comedy.
Go ahead and enjoy the originals, then MAYBE give Jellystone a shot if you're curious, only to experience what is called the mind-numbing power of difference.