Film Review Friday: Jellystone! (2021)
by Emily Nagle
[usr 4.5]
Meet the newest reboot series: C.H. Greenblatt’s Jellystone! on HBO Max.
Set in the town of Jellystone, this show features the classic Hanna-Barbera characters including Yogi Bear, Boo-Boo Bear, and Huckleberry Hound as they get into wacky situations. This show is the first to feature Hanna-Barbera characters in 30 years, since 1991’s Yo Yogi!.
Even though it’s bringing back beloved characters, Jellystone isn’t really driven by nostalgia. Instead, it’s a reboot of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, completely reinventing them for a new generation. Yogi, Cindy, and Boo-Boo Bear are now doctors and a nurse at the Jellystone Hospital. Some of the characters have been made female when they were originally male, most notably Jabberjaw the shark and Augie Doggie. I imagine they made these changes to balance out the predominantly male cast (this is something the 2018 Muppet Babies reboot did as well by introducing Summer Penguin, a completely new female character, to the group of toddlers), but these changes are actually used to set up the stories for each episode. Jabberjaw takes advantage of Magilla Gorilla getting amnesia to become assistant manager of the store, with one of her primary motivations for this idea being receiving attention from every male citizen of Jellystone.
What initially drew me to this series was the art style. Jellystone! is Greenblatt’s third series after Cartoon Network’s Chowder and Nickelodeon’s Harvey Beaks, both of which are great shows with funny episodes. It’s refreshing to see these cartoon characters that have been around for more than half a century get a new look to them. They look like they’d fit right in as background characters from Greenblatt’s other shows, which I like.
Even though they look similar to those other shows, the animation style is slightly different – there’s more tweening and other aspects of computer animation compared to the hand-drawn style of Harvey Beaks and Chowder. It’s subtle, like how a character’s hair or ears would move when they turn their head. This difference definitely wasn’t a bad thing, because the characters are still super fun to look at, but it was interesting to see something slightly different from Greenblatt.
In addition to giving the colorful cast of characters a new look, the humor also differs slightly from past Hanna-Barbera productions. The stories and dialogue are more reminiscent of C.H. Greenblatt’s past projects, which featured some crazy situations stemming from relatively small problems. Yogi Bear can’t decide what to eat for lunch at work, so Cindy Bear installs a nuclear stomach into his body…but then he’s perpetually hungry and ends up eating the entire town and everyone in it. In another episode, Cindy Bear is so busy that she forgets to do her reading for book club. What does she do to buy herself more time? She ends up turning everyone in Jellystone into gelatin. As someone who loved watching Chowder back in the early 2000s, I love seeing Greenblatt’s chaotic sense of humor again.
Jellystone! is a creative spin on the Hanna-Barbera franchise. I love that Greenblatt chose to do something different with it, instead of trying to make it look the same as it always has, or keeping all the characters the way they were before. It’s fresh and super fun, and has already been confirmed for a season 2! I recommend this show to anybody who’s familiar with characters like Yogi Bear, enjoyed Chowder and/or Harvey Beaks, or just likes wacky animated shows.
