With so many visions of the future in narrative fiction having proved to be incorrect, mostly because they were written to comment on the present at the time of their creation, it does not mean that I should subsequently be nostalgic for visions of the future that, for all the longing and hope they generate, did not come to pass.
That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing “The Jetsons” again. As of February 2026, the HBO Max streaming service is weeks away from launching in the UK and, while its US version has a spotty record of maintaining access to animated shows, regardless of how recent they are – so much for the Internet being permanent, I suppose – this may not be true elsewhere in the world.
More than Hanna-Barbera Productions flipping its successful show “The Flintstones” from the Stone Age to the Space Age, “The Jetsons” is about a family living in a utopian society one hundred years in the future, where people live above the clouds, work only a couple of hours a week, and need only exercise their fingers.
However, because it was first broadcast in 1962, the family is still a two-plus-two unit – father George, mother Jane, children Judy and Elroy, with pet (talking) dog Astro, and their robot maid Rosey. This makes it a standard family sitcom, but one where the family is the only familiar feature.
Whereas “The Flintsones” is more like the “present day”, but with a Stone Age sheen – any device can be opened to find to being worked by an animal, saying “it’s a living!” – “The Jetsons” will have a little more ingenuity to its jokes, like George being caught in a traffic jam of flying cars, until a message appears to fly to a different place, but all the others do so as well, or a robot having a malfunctioning voice that requires it to knock itself to work properly, like a human would do to an old TV. The future has arrived, but it isn’t perfect.
Everything from buildings to cars in “The Jetsons” are in the space-age Googie style, prevalent from the end of the Second World War, but the show appeared just as ostentatious fins and rocket motifs started to disappear from American cars, replaced by cleaner Modernist lines. Predictions of flat TV screens, videophones and flying cars were also tempered by then-current understanding of how technology worked: a device that could 3D-print your dinner was programmed by inserting the right punched card into a slot, instead of selecting from a screen.
It is interesting to compare “The Jetsons” with “Futurama”, a similarly future-based animated show that has been revived more than once over the years. “Futurama” has a more cynical, ironic edge, and its world is more identifiably our own – one in which you can imagine yourself living, despite being set a thousand years into the future – than the utopia of “The Jetsons”, without sliding into dystopia. This familiarity has meant “Futurama” hasn’t needed to retrofit its idea of the future as the decades have progressed – rather than just being the style of the show, the buildings in “The Jetsons” are on poles to lift them above the pollution on the ground, an addition made with “Jetsons: The Movie” in 1990.
It appears I am not the only one done with “The Jetsons”, as talks were reported in October 2025 for a live-action version of the show, starring Jim Carrey and with Colin Trevorrow directing. With no-one having any comment on this report, least of all Warner Bros. as the owner of the property, we have nothing to go on about what the vision of the future in this version, apart from Trevorrow’s extensive background in science fiction films, from “Star Wars” to “Jurassic World”. So long as it looks forward, and not down, I’ll be happy.
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