The Jetsons theme song
Color TV
I was born in 1956. Eisenhower was President, Elvis was about to be drafted, and televisions were small and in black and white. So my “cartoon watching” days were in the early 1960’s. Dad was working at a TV station (WLW-D in Dayton, he commuted from our Cincinnati home every day). We got our “color” TV in 1963, the first in the neighborhood.
I watched the old favorites: Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Popeye and Mickey Mouse. But a new form of cartoons came about, the serial comedy shows. Rather than just a five or ten minute adventure “hunting wabbits,” these cartoons were like the evening family shows, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and of course Leave it to Beaver. In 1960 a show about a family in the Stone Age, the Flinstones began, and in 1962, The Jetsons.
The Jetsons
The Jetsons was the story of a normal family in the year 2062. Father George worked in a “white collar” job at the Spacely Space Sprocketts. Jane, his wife, lived a middle class life, shopping and taking care of the home (with the help of various robots). Daughter Judy was in high school, and son Elroy was in elementary school.
The show set the tone for what the future would look like. The Jetsons lived in an apartment on stilts high in the clouds, and drove air cars from place to place. All the sidewalks were moving, and most of the time, in fact almost all of the time was spent “in the air”. The ground was still there, it was where homeless folks (called hobos back then) wandered, the stilt-like apartments had foundations, and birds stayed because the sky was too full.
We didn’t really know why the “middle class” moved up into the sky. But we did get a cartoon version of what the future should look like. Now, more than half way there, we are still waiting for our flying cars.
But there’s a lot of other cartoon “predictions” that are now matter of fact. While we don’t yet have “Rosie” the robot maid, we are well on the way with robot vacuum cleaners and digitally controlled homes. And maybe the Jetsons foreshadowed climate change, as they abandon the flooded or droughted earth to the homeless and move into the clouds.
Wrist Radios
But the most predictive show was Dick Tracy. This cartoon started as a comic strip about a detective who from 1946 on had a “wrist radio,” a watch that he could use to communicate to others on his team. In 1964 the cartoon series debuted a “wrist TV”. Well we got those. Apple Watch has all of those traits, and even folks older than me are wearing them. I’ve resisted that temptation; it’s just one more thing that I need reading glasses for.
But we are all carrying greater computing power in our pockets (and on our wrists) than any of us could access as late as twenty years ago. It’s hard to imagine that the Apollo moon rockets, or the Space Shuttles, had less computing power than we all carry with us everyday.
It Comes Around
What else has the “future wrought?” Well, what’s a “long distance” call, in our age where we expect absolute connection with each other at all times? And while today we have Uber Eats and Grub-Hub, back while I was watching the Jetsons we had milk and bread, ice cream and chips (Charlie Chips) delivered to the house several times a week.
Wires are gone. My TV’s aren’t even hooked to cable anymore; I’ve “cut” away to use a streaming service. It’s a bit of irony; I remember my television industry father talking about how the hundreds of cable channels would crowd out broadcast television. He worried that the “stations” would get chased out of business. Today those channels still exist, but cable service is getting relegated to a “pipeline” role. Programming has passed onto the “streamers,” Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and the like.
Connections
And what have we lost? When my father passed away a few years ago, I cleaned out his home office (I’m writing this essay on his executive desk, shoe-horned into my home office now). I found files of professional letters between the executives in his industry, congratulating each other on achievements, promotions, or anniversaries. Typed by their secretaries, dictated either live or on “Dictaphones,” these courteous notes on onion skin paper were markers of a more “proper” time.
Today, maybe it’s an email, or more likely a text. We’ve lost the “class” by saving the time and effort. And maybe we’ve lost those connections to each other as well.
So here we are in the “future”, 2020. We are more connected, and somehow more isolated. We are webbed into the world, but less present to each other. And we are certainly more vulnerable as our pipeline for information gets narrowed to what can fit into ten seconds, in our pocket, or on our wrists.
