The Future According To The Jetsons (and why it's bad!)

Sources/References

• Kanye West Tried To Make The Jetsons Movie, No Really (Giant Freaking Robot - 2024)

  • Despite the headline, this never got any further than “preliminary” and a “brainstorming” session

• What The Jetsons got right, and very wrong, about the future of work (TheConversation - 2023)

• What ‘The Jetsons’ predicted right — and wrong — about the future (New York Post - 2022)

• We never see the ground in The Jetsons because it's very likely a hellhole for the under-class (Reddit - 2019)

• Here's what's on the ground in 'The Jetsons' (MeTV - 2017)

• Googie: Architecture of the Space Age (Smithsonian Magazine - 2012)

  • The 1962-63 version of The Jetsons was so dripping with Googie that you could argue Hanna-Barbera didn’t really exaggerate the style — they copied it. Googie at its most flamboyant and cartoonish is almost beyond parody. And it’s pretty clear that the artists behind The Jetsons were inspired by the style that surrounded them in Southern California.

• The Atomium (atomium.be)

• The Atomium (misfits architecture - 2018)

• Closer Than We Think (The Complete Collection) (paleofuture.com)

• The Art of Arthur Radebaugh (Never Was Mag - 2021)

• Why Are There No Black People On The Jetsons? (Gizmodo - 2013)

  • Scan any crowd shot in the first season of “The Jetsons” and you’d be hard pressed to find any non-white faces. Were the animators at Hanna-Barbera in the 1960s all racists? That seems highly unlikely.

    But the show was expressly written as a postwar family living the American Dream — an American Dream that just so happened to be thrust into the mid-21st century. Who then was the American Dream meant for? The uncomfortable truth is that black people were systematically excluded from the postwar institutions that allowed many other white families (like our fictional Jetsons) to achieve that American Dream. And not just in the Jim Crow South.

• Historical Marital Status Tables (United States Census - 2023)

  • Median age at first marriage: 1890 to present (as used in the video)

• The Telephonoscope (1879) (Public Domain Review - 2015)

• Everything You Need to Know About Birds and Planes (Audubon - 2015)

  • Most strikes occur closer to the ground.

    More than 70 percent of collisions between commercial aircraft and birds take place less than 500 feet above the ground, and more than 90 percent take place less than 3,500 feet above the ground. Those numbers are even higher for non-commercial aircraft. The record height for a bird strike in the United States is 31,300 feet.

• Two Huge (Fowl) Reasons Flying Cars Are Nonsense (A Lark), One Of Them Bird Based (Forbes - 2017)

• Fine, let's think too damn hard about whether George Jetson will actually be born tomorrow (AV Club - 2022)

• Was George Jetson Born in 2022? (Snopes - 2021)

• Happy Birthday, George Jetson? The internet thinks he was born on July 31, 2022 (NPR - 2022)

• Back to the Future: The 60th Anniversary of “The Jetsons” (Cartoon Research - 2022)

• Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride? (Gizmodo - 2019)

• 50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters (Smithsonian Magazine - 2012)

• A Cast Of Friends - Bill Hanna (archive.org - 1996)

• Gilligan’s Island: The disturbing themes I noticed while binge watching the classic sitcom during the pandemic (Milwaukee Independent - 2022)

• Race and the Small Screen (Washington Edu - 2020)

• Mammy (TV Tropes)

• From mammy to Ma: Hollywood’s favourite racist stereotype (BBC - 2019)