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.

GIVE THEM MOON AND CLOUDLESS SKIES [479]

from "The Simpsons" episode "Barthood", a parody of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

It isn’t unusual to want Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson to grow up OK when you have been watching them on television for most of your own life. You hope that our real world, both reflected and created by the show, will ultimately be as kind to them as you want it to be for ourselves.

With “The Simpsons” having now run for an astonishing thirty-five years, three years away from eclipsing “Last of the Summer Wine” to become the world’s longest-running sitcom, its status quo means that, while I was younger than Lisa when I first saw the show, I am now older than both her parents. We have grown up with these characters, but they can only grow through lessons learned, fleshing out their backstory.

I fell out of watching “The Simpsons” for some time, returning upon subscribing to Disney+ to find a show that, while not having folded over itself by pandering to its audience’s nostalgia, has become playful with its own history: it began its thirty-sixth season with a “series finale” that stopped questions on how the show would eventually end, having previously broadcast a fake clip show of leaked episodes purportedly too outlandish even for later-period “The Simpsons”, and a “Treehouse of Horror” story created a “Westworld”-like theme park of the moments adopted as internet memes.

The 2022 episode “When Nelson Met Lisa” was when I realised that my favourite episodes of “The Simpsons” depict an imagined future for its characters, seeing what their experiences have made them, regardless of it being a parody of “When Harry Met Sally”. Lisa has been shown to have a crush on Nelson Muntz before, but a series of scenes across the years builds this into a mature, happy and hopeful ending, one you hope will be canonised.

By necessity, the future depicted in “The Simpsons” can’t be set in stone, because that could get in the way of a good story, but there have been elements built up on each other, then knocked down and rebuilt: Bart could become a deadbeat divorced dad, living in a Springfield Elementary converted to makeshift apartments; Lisa is successful, but marries Milhouse; and Maggie, the eternal silent wildcard, becomes the biggest noise in pop music, and the most constant depiction of her future. Thankfully, Bart and Lisa’s future has been depicted more hopefully, with Bart becoming a BMX stunt champion, artist and a repair shop owner, while Lisa will attend Harvard and have the world as her oyster. 

Then again, Bart could also become a Supreme Court judge after missing “The Itchy & Scratchy Movie”, and Lisa could become President of the United States, having inherited “quite a budget crunch from President Trump”, although the episode “Bart to the Future”, broadcast in 2000, would not have known which Trump presidency it would be. 

Predicting the future can be futile, despite the number of times situations and jokes in “The Simpsons” replayed themselves in real life, from predicting the discovery of the Higgs boson to Disney buying 20^thCentury Fox, but imagining the future should be encouraged, except for preparing for when “The Simpsons” eventually ends – I don’t think anyone is truly prepared for that. Perhaps it could then be rebooted with an older Bart, Lisa and Maggie – it happened with "The Flintstones" and “The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show”.

GOODNESS GRACIOUS, GREAT BALLS OF FIRE [233]

“Nine hundred years after the Great Nuke. The world man created, he destroyed. Out of the darkness and ignorance of the radioactive rubble emerged a new order... and the world was woggos." (in old speak that means - Crazy!)”

Sometimes, these films just end up finding you. What is the plot of “America 3000”? “In 2890, 900 years after a nuclear apocalypse, warriors Korvis and Gruss stage raids to free men enslaved by the powerful women now ruling Earth.” How lovely does that sound, especially for a film released in the same year, 1986, as the original novel of “The Handmaid’s Tale”?

There is the extra layer of slime in knowing this film was released by Cannon. They had already employed the writer and director of “America 3000,” David Engelbach, to write the script of “Death Wish II” – he later co-wrote the story for the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling debacle “Over the Top.” It is quite possible that Cannon were making “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” at this point too, so “America 3000” may have received some of its budget, as Cannon tried to juggle its various B-movie productions.

Once I actually started watching the film, it appears that “post-apocalyptic” means something that resembles a mix of a medieval village, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” and “The Flintstones” – the music, formed of your typical 1986 rock guitar and keyboards, sticks the film firmly into the past.

It should be made clear that Korvus and Gruss are that bit more intelligent than the enslaved men in “America 3000” because they found, as teenagers, a Ladybird-type book of ABCs, and a top hat. This appears to have been enough to elevate them away from the “machos,” or slaves, and the “toys,” who had their tongues cut out. It looks like a futuristic equivalent of Nadsat or Newspeak was attempted, but not explained, so you will find yourself listening to characters while thinking you missed something earlier, the last time your attention wandered.

I wish I could tell you why the world in the film is the way it is: we know about the “Mericans” and the “Commies,” a “Prezzydent” that will come back to lead them, and the “Great Nuke,” but why a feudal society, based on superiority of gender, with little other knowledge of what the previous world was like, has come about is completely beyond me. You hope this is a pocket of weirdness in the desert (possibly Arizona, but actually filmed in Israel), with life carrying on as normal elsewhere. It is not clear why the women, led by a “tiara” named Frisco, have full hair and make-up styling, other than as “war paint.” 

It is not clear why a ten-minute sequence of brutal conflict is resolved by Korvis and Frisco making kissing in front of everyone else, as everyone discovers this is what they should have been doing all along – I refuse to believe all the women and all the men are straight. It is also not clear why there is a sasquatch-like thing called Aargh the Awful, playing with an air raid siren, and holding a boombox. Finally, for me, it is not clear how a nuclear bunker would survive intact after nine hundred years, with the electricity working, and how the D-sized batteries that must have been in the boombox Korvis found had not leaked in that time.

“America 3000” is a typical example of a cheap film made by Cannon in the 1980s. The bizarre antics on screen did detract from realising the picture was released in 1.33:1 Academy ratio – presumably, all the anamorphic widescreen lenses Cannon owned were being used by “Superman IV.” The actor playing Korvis, Chuck Wagner, thankfully still has a career in musical theatre, in “Beauty and the Beast” and “Les Misérables.” For a futuristic film, “America 3000” is really only of historical interest, but it is online, if you really want to find it.