WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD THIS WILL BE [529]

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.

THROW OUT THE HARDWARE [371]

Considering how often I have written here about the virtues of home media, and owning copies of films, music and TV and radio shows, I should have had much to say about the abrupt removal of shows and films from the HBO Max streaming service, plus the cancellation of upcoming projects. The reason I had not done so, apart from HBO Max not being available in the UK, was because I had already covered similar ground back in 2018 [link], when Netflix took down the 1978 film version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” - this led me to buy a Blu-ray copy, which has a higher-quality picture than the variable bit-rate of online streaming often delivers.

What has changed since then is that online streaming has slowly become the norm. HBO Max, Discovery+, Apple TV+, Paramount + and Peacock are among the services that launched since 2018, and Tesco and Sainsbury’s are among the supermarkets that have stopped selling DVDs.

Worse for me, films I have watched at the cinema have not yet become available on a physical home video release in the UK, namely Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch”, originally released in October 2021, and the Daniels’ “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, from April 2022. I have been so used to a 13-16 week between a cinema and home video release that I am seriously considering buying the German issue of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” over having to buy a download of it from Amazon Prime, which is subjected to digital rights management avoided by having a physical copy to use as you wish. Meanwhile, I could watch “The French Dispatch” by subscribing to Disney+, but I have already once chosen to buy a box set of a Disney TV show over subscribing to Disney+ - that show was “Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers”.

I have no answer to these problems, except that if physical home video is to become a niche pursuit, available for purchase through specialist stores or online, that having the ability to buy a physical release must become as easy as possible. The Warner Archive Collection has been a North American success I wish they would replicate in the UK, being an operation that produces DVD and Blu-ray copies of films on demand. If it means they need to have the money upfront before making a DVD of, for example, the 1931 pre-Hollywood Code release of “The Maltese Falcon”, it guarantees the availability of films for which there is less viability in producing a wider commercial release.

Likewise, it has been customary for other distributors to licence TV shows and films to release themselves. In the UK, I have Network Distributing Ltd to thank for releasing brilliant sitcoms like “Whoops Apocalypse” and “Hot Metal” on DVD, shows that broadcaster ITV, who own the rights, have not released themselves, like they did with “Inspector Morse” or “A Touch of Frost”. 

“The Strange World of Gurney Slade”, a surreal 1961 sitcom starring Anthony Newley that plays with reality in ways next seen in “The Prisoner”, was released by Network in 2011, which I bought on the back of knowing it was a major influence on David Bowie, before realising he could only have seen it at age 12 on its original airing, or on its single repeat run in 1963. TV used to be ephemeral until the advent of home video, but the shift to online streaming puts all the power back in the hands of rights holder to display or withdraw content as they wish – you can no longer grab a copy out of the air in the way that a VHS or DVD recorder provided to you.

If I return to this subject in another four years from now, I can only expect that the situation will have become worse – “home video” as a concept may be dead by then, and even The Criterion Collection may be online-only. Keep your DVDs.

MADE TO MAKE YOUR MOUTH WATER [307]

I recently added YouTube Premium to my list of subscriptions. Google has been testing a cheaper version of this package in some European and Scandinavian countries, foregoing music streaming and offline downloads for its major appeal: watching videos without advertising. Predicting this will be a success that will later be extended to the UK, I decided to take the month’s free trial, knowing that, at £11.99 per month until further notice, it will become my most expensive subscription, more than Netflix, “The New York Times” and Microsoft Office 365.

What I had not expected was how calm I would feel. I no felt tense when an advertisement appeared between a cut, or in the middle of a sentence, and I no longer needed a trigger finger ready to skip past ads. Subscribing proved to be a release.

 

Television streaming services offer similar upgrades as carrots to the user. ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial television channel, allows viewers to pay £3.99 per month to remove ads from its online service – Channel 4 charges a similar amount. Services offering content at a premium in the US, like HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock, will offer a cheaper service if you are prepared to accept advertising, while Tubi makes it as clear as possible why you can access them for free.

 

But for me, the placing of the ads was what mattered more than their presence. In the UK, rules governing the number of minutes for ad spots per hour, and the number of ad breaks per hour, are extended to online streaming services, but because YouTube is still mostly thought of as social media to some extent, only the content of ads played on it are governed, not their frequency. With YouTube coming from a country that abolished all limits on television advertising, except around children’s programming, in 1984, interruptions as frequent as I experienced is more likely to be tolerated in the US than in the UK and Europe, perhaps explaining why the cheaper Premium trial is happening in this part of the world.

 

This may be where the problem I had with the placement of advertising, and the relief I feel upon its removal, remains as my problem: as much as I view it as a kind of public access television, YouTube is not offered as this, despite the professional nature of much of the content uploaded by people who make their living by it. They will reap the benefits of ads that were not skipped by viewers, ads that cannot be skipped, and by YouTube extending “mid-roll” advertising to any video longer than eight minutes. I know money has to be made, as proved by the proliferation of sponsorships within the videos themselves, regardless of any ads outside of them, I just wished the following passage from Ofcom’s code on advertising placement could be taken into account, especially when I make another video for them: “Television broadcasters must ensure that the integrity of the programme is not prejudiced, having regard to the nature and duration of the programme, and where natural breaks occur.”