Animated Architecture: The Fun Pad

It was a retro-future spin (pun intended) on a traditional amusement pier and was inspired in just about everything but name.  The Fun Pad just seemed too generic for a Jetsons-era entertainment complex.  It was one of the destinations of Judy Jetson and Jet Screamer in The Jetsons episode, "A Date with Jet Screamer."

An amusement park is a near perfect subject for a space age-Googie makeover.  Rollercoasters, ferris wheels, and spinning rides are easily adapted to "space age designs that depict motion," one of the fundamental components of Googie design as cited in Wikipedia.  Hanna Barbera background artists Art Lozzi, Bob Abrams and Lee Branscome effectively brought those concepts to a successful realization.  I especially like the the very practical lower level parking decks.

The Fun Pad had a real life counterpart of sorts.  Astro Land, located on New York's famed Coney Island, was advertised as the nation's first "space age" amusement park when it opened in 1962.  The Jetsons, coincidentally, debuted on television that very same year.

The Architecture of Las Venus

Las Venus represented an over-the-top interpretation of Las Vegas when it appeared on an episode of The Jetsons in 1962. The show featured three different casino-hotel resorts:

The Supersonic Sands.

The Flamoongo.

And the Las Venus Venus (whose headline act was Dean Martian.)

Though retaining some of the Googie characteristics of other Jetsons architecture, the Las Venus resorts were more in the nature of programmatic design, with the buildings taking on the forms of oversize gambling props such as poker chips, dice and a roulette wheel. The Supersonic Sands and the Flamoongo were send-ups of actual Las Vegas establishments: the Sands and the Flamingo.

Building the World of the Jetsons

There is little in mid-20th century popular culture that epitomizes happy retro-futurism more than the original twenty-four episodes of television series The Jetsons. One of the defining characteristics that creators Hanna-Barbera infused in the show was an architectural style heavily influenced by the Googie designs of countless commercial buildings and establishments that were popular throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.

According to Wikipedia, "Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon. Googie was also characterized by space-age designs that depict motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and the ubiquitous artist's-palette motif. These stylistic conventions reflected American society's emphasis on futuristic designs and fascination with Space Age themes." Two of the most prominent surviving examples of Googie are the Seattle Space Needle and the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. The designs of those two structures in particular inspired much of the background architecture found in The Jetsons.

As an ongoing feature here at Boom Pop!, we are going to showcase many of the clever and fun retro-future designs found in those original episodes of The Jetsons that aired during the 1962-1963 television season. First up, two buildings representing the business side of television itself.

Asteroid TV Productions appeared in the episode "Elroy's TV Show."

The home of station KLMN was featured in the episode "Elroy's Pal."

Both structures have a base drawn very directly from the aforementioned Theme Building. The sign for KLMN is distinctly reminiscent of Googie-style signs used frequently by shopping centers, motels, restaurants and bowling alleys.