His Boy Elroy

BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. We’re marking the season of New Year’s resolutions with an hour on the history of American thinking about the future. We’re going to rejoin our story in the early 1960s in the midst of an efflorescence of futuristic thinking, ushered in by postwar affluence and the brand new American space program. Smack dab in the middle of all of that, The Jetsons debuted on ABC TV. The basic premise of this prime time cartoon show was the trials and tribulations of an all-American middle class family 100 years into the future, in 2062.

But some time in the half-century since The Jetsons debuted, Americans started using this parody of middle class life as a measuring stick for our own very real present and futures. We decided to reach out to one of The Jetsons’ biggest fans to understand why.

MATT NOVAK: My name is Matt Novak. I am editor of the “Paleofuture” blog on Gizmodo. And I am absolutely fascinated with The Jetsons.

[THEME MUSIC]: Meet George Jetson.

MATT NOVAK: It’s a cartoon that debuted in 1962—so over a half-century ago—and yet we’re still using it as a reference for futurism today. You can literally do a Google News search every single day and see people using The Jetsons in various forms.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Tired of waiting for a flying car? How to finally go all Jetsons with a—

FEMALE SPEAKER: It’s all part of the trend that seems like something out of The Jetsons.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Jetsons, right? Remember that cartoon?

FEMALE SPEAKER: It kind of reminds me of The Jetsons.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s like The Jetsons.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s like The Jetsons.

MALE SPEAKER: …sort of bring the smart home, that Jetsons future, down to an affordable level.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s The Jetsons.

MATT NOVAK: When people think of The Jetsons, they think of robots.

ROSIE ROBOT: I should have all the answers for you in about 10 minutes.

JANE: This our new maid, Rosie. Am I ever—

MATT NOVAK: They think of flying cars.

GEORGE: Boy, this spaceway traffic gets worse every night.

MATT NOVAK: They think of push buttons.

JANE: Hard day at the button, dear?

GEORGE: Oh, brutal, brutal. I had to push the button on and off five times. That spaceway is a slave driver—

MATT NOVAK: A lot of us work in consoles where we’re pushing buttons all day. In that respect, The Jetsons really is a Rorschach test. It is a way to understand the world as either a great predictor of the world that we live in today, or conversely, a great betrayal.

So one of the fascinating aspects of the original 1962, ‘63 version of The Jetsons is just how conservative it is. We live in a world of flying cars and jet packs, and yet, there is no social change. There are no people of color in The Jetsons. Jane, the mother, doesn’t work outside of the home. Everything that you would imagine to change in this vision of the future is all technological. It’s arguably all on the surface.

There was sort of this aspirational attitude about the entire series, that maintenance of the social status quo, and maintenance of the nuclear family, and husband, wife in their place, and each fulfilling very specific roles according to early 1960s TV culture.

GEORGE: I don’t get it. When we first got married, you could punch out a breakfast like mother used to make. Now you’re all thumbs.

MATT NOVAK: When people romanticize The Jetsons, they’re romanticizing the past as much as they are the future. The middle class that The Jetsons represents is one that we were sold on in the 1950s. And you have to remember that The Jetsons is a parody show of ’50s futurism. We were sold this idea of the three-hour workday. George Jetson works a three-hour workday, three days a week. There’s a bit in the original Jetsons where George complains about—

GEORGE: Those three-hour workdays are killing me.

MATT NOVAK: Yeah, these three-hour workdays are killing me. That’s very clearly a joke, but this wasn’t some radical idea of that in the future automation would give us shorter workweeks, and that we’d still maintain this amazing standard of living. These were government studies. To have a short workweek was taken as a given.

In the 1950s, some sociologists were truly concerned that this would mean people would have no sense of purpose in their lives. There’s even an episode where Jane Jetson gets incredibly depressed.

JANE: I feel so, so tired lately. Sometimes I think I’ll go out of my mind.

GEORGE: Hmm.

MATT NOVAK: You see this play out again and again in The Jetsons where the family of the future would have all of this recreation time. And when you look back at the 1960s and how often the middle class actually did take more vacation time than today. That was just the natural progression of things. Of course we’d take more vacation time. Now one of the things The Jetsons didn’t tell us about was, at every level of the American workforce today, people are on call because of these supposedly liberating devices like the smartphone.

There’s almost this mantra of, where is my jetpack? Where is my flying car? And you can draw a direct link to this TV show, The Jetsons, that people were watching as kids on constant repeat.

MALE SPEAKER: Where are out jetpacks? We were promised jetpacks. When do I get my jetpack?

MALE SPEAKER: Where’s my flying car?

FEMALE SPEAKER: Let’s do it.

MATT NOVAK: I think it’s warped, sort of, our understanding of futurism in general, because it was so fixated on technological promises and totally devoid of any social change or anything that would certainly unfold in the next three decades.

BRIAN: Matt Novak is editor of the “Paleofuture” blog at Gizmodo. We’ll post a link on our own site to his reviews of every single Jetsons episode of the 1960s.