On the evening of Sunday, September 23, 1962, millions of American families finished their dinners, turned on their televisions and were introduced to The Jetsons, a cartoon sitcom produced by the legendary team of Hanna-Barbera.
Set in 2062, The Jetsons captured the technological optimism of the time and projected it into a space-age, gadget-fueled vision of the future, inviting its viewers to imagine the dazzling possibilities that the current wave of technological achievement could one day realise. (Jetsons afficionados believe George Jetson was born on July 31, 2022, though it’s not clear that’s canon.)
In the end, The Jetsons was a rather tame, pedestrian sitcom about a family that reinforced traditional gender and family roles, knew little of the social issues of the time (it was, for example, unbearably white), and effectively glorified the consumerist, suburban lifestyle.
But as a template for a technology-driven American future, it was no less than iconic. It was also prophetic.
The Jetsons debuted five years after the Soviets had launched Sputnik, four years after the opening of the first commercial nuclear power plant in the US, and 16 months after president John F Kennedy set a goal of putting a man on the moon by the decade’s end.
Fifteen years earlier, scientists at AT&T’s Bell Labs invented the transistor, and soon after, miniature (by contemporary standards) transistor radios were found in many households.
That same year, the Levitt brothers broke ground on their first Levittown suburb in Nassau County, New York.
The team at Hanna-Barbera extrapolated from all of these trends and created a slick (albeit goofy at times) rendering of a future world. The world of The Jetsons seemingly occupied a middle layer between the Earth and outer space, with buildings and developments either high up on stilts or floating in air.
The architecture and interior design could be described as cartoon-Saarinen, inspired by the swooping curves of the architect’s designs for the terminals at Dulles and JFK airports and his fabled tulip tables and chairs.
Technophilic names — from the family dog, Astro, to Cosmic Cola and Molecular Motors — were omnipresent. Even the teenage heartthrob was named “Jet.”
(“Lectronimo,” the nuclear-powered robotic dog, was a bit of a head scratcher, though.) In this respect, the series was a full-throated embrace of the technologies upon which the new world would be built.
There is an optimism at the heart of The Jetsons. The nuclear fission borne from the Manhattan Project contained an astonishing power that ended the war with Japan and had since been transformed into a seemingly magical source of everyday fuel for the growing economy and new household capabilities.
Rockets had blasted Alan Shepard, followed by Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter, into space. Televisions were starting to broadcast in colour.
And Moore’s law, which held that the density of integrated circuits would double every two years, was beginning to manifest (even if it had yet to be articulated by Gordon Moore).
That idea — that technology would get smaller, faster, cheaper, and more powerful year after year — along with the breakthroughs in space technology and nuclear and atomic science, led to a techno-optimism that was part of the zeitgeist of the early 1960s.
It also followed two decades of rapidly rising home ownership and steady rises in the adoption of household appliances, like refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners — and of course personal automobiles.
Science was cool, technology was blossoming, and more and more Americans were dreaming of owning their own homes, replete with the latest gadgets.
The Jetsons took that dream and supercharged it, riding the wave of optimism to depict a future where technology catered to our every need, at the touch of a button or at the command of our voice. It was a fantastical vision that deeply appealed to our needs and desires for comfort and convenience.
Life on The Jetsons was anything but hard. Jetsons World was also clean, even antiseptic. In hindsight it’s easier to see what’s missing (besides people of colour). Nature, for example, was not entirely absent, but it only makes a few cameos (some occasional greenery popping up on a floating office complex; a “park” where Elroy, the young boy in the family, plays with Astro, appears in one episode).
It’s as if, in a future where technology reigns, we don’t need it anymore.
Food (it’s not clear where it comes from) is at best efficient and seemingly never enjoyed. (Of course, Judy, the teenage daughter, is on a diet.)
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