The Jetsons, Influencing the Future and Family

Trevor Sikes
Ready Camera One
5/7/11
The Jetsons

The Jetsons, Influencing the Future and the Family.

When I was child, I loved waking up, turning on the television and watching cartoons.  One of my favorite shows was The Jetsons.  This show was a TV cartoon sitcom that originally aired in 1962 through 1963 and then re-aired in 1987 through 1989 with some changes.  The show was produced by Hanna-Barbera, who produced many other famous cartoons such as Scooby Doo and the counterpart show to the Jetsons, The Flintstones (a family that lived in the Stone Age).  Throughout the late 60’s, the 70’s, and the 80’s you could find reruns of the original shows on television on Saturday morning.   Today all these shows appear on Boomerang, a T.V station that is dedicated to showing classic popular cartoons.

The Jetsons was a half-hour family sitcom projecting the “modern” American family (modern by 60’s standards), culture and lifestyle into another time period.  The Jetsons lived in a “utopian future” filled with elaborate robotic contraptions, aliens, holograms, and quirky inventions.  The show suggests different ideas about the views of family and their social roles. The Jetsons also portrays a vision of the future for the people of the 60’s and what was thought that it would be like.  Even though today we still don’t have flying cars, the show imprinted on many Americans an idea of what the future should or might be like. Even today many people still think the future will have flying cars and space travel.  The main focus of my essay will be to analysis the different family members and their social roles that the show suggested and also how their pictured future has affected our culture and our views of the future.

The Jetson family itself portrays a middle class family living in the early 2060’s.  George Jetson the leading male character and the father is around the age of 40. He is a loving family man, who always seems to make the wrong decisions, creating the plot for many episodes. He works “full-time,” 9 hours a week, at Spacely’s Sprockets as a computer engineer.  He is underappreciated at work even though the company couldn’t function without him. He is married to Jane and together they have two children, Elroy and Judy. George is the protagonist of the show.  Jane Jetson is George’s wife and the mother of their two children.  In the show she is a stay at home mom. Jane is obsessed with fashion and new gadgetry. She is also a dutiful wife who always tries to make life as pleasant as possible for her family.   Judy is the Jetson’s teenage daughter.  She is sixteen and the oldest child in the Jetson family. She is considered your stereotypical teenage girl whose primary interests include: clothes, going out, boys and revealing secrets to her digital diary, etc.  The youngest child is Elroy Jetson and he is about 6 or 7 years old. He is highly intelligent and an expert in all space sciences. Elroy attends Little Dipper School where he studies space history, astrophysics, star geometry and math. He is a mild mannered, very smart, and a good child.  In the show he is the one that tends to fix most of the issues caused by his father.  The next character in the Jetson household is Rosie, the robotic housekeeper. She’s an outdated model but the Jetsons love her and would never trade her for a newer model as seen in one of the episodes. Rosie does all the household chores and some of the parenting. She has strong authority and occasionally hands out solid advice to the family, which helps the family grow.  Rosie, even though she is a robot, is depicted to be very human with emotions and feelings.  Finally there is Astro, who is the family dog and George’s best friend.  He is very similar to Scooby Doo (being able to speak English).  From my readings and my understanding of the show I find that his character is significance to the conventional middle class family of the 60’s.  He is also a major character in George’s story lines.

When looking at The Jetson’s, the show is demonstrating the stereotype of male and female roles in a family as well as society at the time, even though much of the audience the show is aimed at doesn’t really realize it.  For example, let’s look at the leading females Jane and Judy.  Jane is a stay at home mom that takes care of the kids all day, goes to the beauty salon and shops.  In the show many of her friends are also stay at home moms.  It appears that the stereotype that the show is suggesting is that women should stay at home, watch their children, take care of the house, and to spend lots of money on clothes, gadgets and at the beauty salon.   When the show was written in the 60’s this stereotype might have been acceptable, but by today’s standards it is considered outdated and chauvinistic.  Then there is the teenager daughter, Judy.  She is interested in boys, going out with friends and having fun.  All of the boys that she “dates” are boys that her dad despises or are some kind of rocker. I think it is also important to point out that both the women in this show are very skinny.  These characters helped to influence young girls that this was the way a woman should look and think in order to be happy and be popular.  The characters also change a little bit in their physical appearance when the show re-aired in the 80’s to fit some different stereotypes associated with time period.  (Jane’s and Judy’s lips in the 1980s version are a lot fuller, and they have a slightly richer complexion)

Looking at the men in the Jetsons, we see that they are for the most part scrawny or fat, not really in shape, and are not that great looking (each “main” character has some physical flaw) George is really skinny, his boss is very short and fat) with the exception of some of the cartoon advertisement posters and “dreamy hunks” that the girls can’t resist.  I don’t know if this was intentional but if it was, one might assume that the show was influencing the idea that it is okay not to be in shape, and that beautiful women will still like you or that the average male is not a muscle bound athlete.

There are many hidden stereotypes and messages in the show; I never really realized this until I was older.  During my research one question that I frequently ran into was where are the minorities in the Jetsons?  One problem it seems within the future is that there are no black people or for that matter any other type of ethic group. The  lovable story of George Jetson, Jane his wife; his boy Elroy; and daughter Judy, unfolds in a world without the witty touch of different cultural groups.   In one of the article, it is expressed that minorities in the Jetsons were represented by robots.  In the Jetsons, the robots generally had the low paying jobs, and demeaning tasks.  All the robots also had a kind of sass to them, much like many African American characters during earlier TV programs and films.  All the Robots, in the show seem have some kind of human trait about the feelings or emotions.   One could say the world the Jetsons lived in was unhip, uncool, and boring.  It would be a world without rap music, Chinese food, and the many other amazing things different cultures bring into this world. It is a place where robots play almost all sports instead of colored people and the occasional white guy.  It is also a world of advanced technology, flying cars, zero pollution and apparently without war and chaos. Crime seems to be a thing almost in the past and murder doesn’t ever happen.  Many people who watched The Jetsons saw a white world that works efficiently; has advanced technology and a people who have mastered artificial intelligence. No longer are lower class people necessary for performing simple tasks around the house or janitorial work; Rosie the Robot is more thn capable of said chore.

How correct was “The Jetsons” painted image of the future that many people still use when talking about the future?  How much futuristic technology or, futuristic by early ’60s standards has actually come true in the past half-century? According to LIFE Magazine, we would be quite surprised. “We don’t have maid androids like Rosie, but we do have Roomba vacuums. We don’t all use jetpacks or flying cars, but they exist into today’s world”. One such convenience The Jetsons used was the video phone. In 1962 this seemed quite futuristic. Of course, videoconferencing technology is readily available in today’s world, with business, education, the general public mastering its everyday use.  In the show the future was all about push buttons which could improve our lives and create new efficiency. Meals came at the push of a button. Music came at the push of a button. Cars came at the push of a button.  Your whole house moved at the push of a button.  Almost anything came from a push of a button.  Technology that would make life simple and easy all at a push of a button.

The Jetsons shows us that things could get even worse for us in the future or at least that they wouldn’t get much better!  For example one of George complaints in many of his episodes is about getting sore fingers from pushing buttons.  This seems funny, but considering how much easier he had it compared to those of us stuck in the 20th century!  Today, computers are in every business and in many homes. And while they do make our lives a little bit easier minus when they have issues, it seems the same issues applies in the future as shown by the Jetson’s computers and gadgets.

The Jetsons have played a huge roll in today’s technology; many of today’s gadgets I dare say have been influenced by this show in some way or another.  But many people don’t know the 60’s also had an influence on the Jetsons’ architecture.  When the show first aired, the World Fair had just come to an end, and Seattle’s Space needle was just finished.  It is this building that influenced much of the housing in the Jetsons. Even thought robots like Rosie don’t yet act like our maids in today’s world, they do exist in the laboratory; and we do have robots that build our cars and make increasing inroads in our daily lives.  The Jetsons magical food preparation device, the Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle, has almost come true in this age of microwavable instant meals. Holograms do exist into today’s world but are not really out in the public marketplace yet. The pictures phones are available at your nearest cell phone or computer store.  Will we be walking the family dog on treadmills in the future?  We already do.  Many dog therapies involve the use of treadmills and many dog owners use the treadmill to walk their dogs instead of putting them on a lease for a walk around the block.

Thinking about it, the Hanna-Barbera image of the future was pretty amazing and far-fetched at the time but look how close they truly were to what we do have available to us today.  Sadly those jet-powered flying machines that people in 2060 use to get around town in have not yet materialized yet, but we still have 50 years to come up with something.

The Jetsons have played a huge roll on American culture.   As a Cultural Studies major, I have been to many parts of the world and I dare say the Jetsons may even have influenced the world when it comes to thoughts about the future and what it will be like.  People all over the world see the future with flying cars and space travel.   The question is will we all have flying automobiles by 2062? More than likely not. Will we all be living in buildings similar to the Space needle in the future, again more than likely not.  But it is fun to think about what the next generations will think of when it comes to the future.  The show has also displayed an image of what a family should be like and which roles they should play, however, I feel that the generations of young viewers doesn’t really take it that seriously.  Kids watch the Jetsons to see what the future is suppose to be like, not to see which role they play or what they should do. Most adults today do not even consider the show anything but a children’s cartoon that they watched when they were young.  I do feel that the gender roles and social roles in the Jetsons have affected its young viewers to some extent. We all understood the concept of a living with a father and mother, having a stay at home mom and wished that our mom could be like that, and having a cool family pet.  But I think it has impacted our culture much more on the technology front. It made us want to have instant food, picture phones, robotic maids and especially flying vehicles.  It has excited the imagination of generations of young scientists and inventors to make the technology in the cartoons a reality in our world.