September 23, 2007
The Jetsons Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST The homepage of this website reports that today is the anniversary of the first broadcast of The Jetsons (in 1962), a TV cartoon of the early ’60s. I can only dimly recall the show, although I remember that I didn’t much like it, which in retrospect surprises me, because it appeared just around the time I fell in love with science fiction. Maybe I disliked it because it wasn’t really sci-fi; as it happens, very little real sci fi is comedy, maybe because science fiction at least pretends to be interested in how things will be different, whereas comedy has a tendency to assume, even to insist, that things are always pretty much the same. That comic proposition—that nothing important really changes—is of course a more dubious proposition for the historically-minded. Then again, because science fiction prides itself on its serious interest in how things would be different doesn’t mean that the genre often gets the future right, or doesn’t unthinkingly project a present uglier than its authors recognize into a future that might in some respects be much better. Interestingly enough, the most impressive science fiction story on that very theme, William Gibson’s wonderful “The Gernsback Continuum” is to the best of my knowledge the only science fiction story American Heritage ever published, in its quarterly magazine Invention & Technology. The Jetsons was something else, in part an inversion and in part a repetition of The Flintstones (both shows were done by the same company, Hanna-Barbera). One of the core jokes both shows shared was indeed that nothing that matters about human nature really alters; the Flintstones were a paleolithic version of The Honeymooners, the Jetsons a sci-fi version of The Donna Reed Show. One thing that occurs to me now is that by the logic of Hanna-Barbera, in the old days typical Americans were blue-collar, whereas in the future they would be white-collar. That was an interesting speculation for 1962, true in part, I suppose. A friend reminds me that the Jetsons was in some ways prophetic, in others decidedly not: You could read a newspaper off a screen, but you listened to music on a phonograph or a tape recorder, so the Jetsons foresaw the Internet but not the CD. Wikipedia adds that the Jetsons used folding money, not credit cards, and vacuum tubes rather than integrated circuits. I cannot recall whether the show either quietly mocked or unthinkingly recapitulated the logic of comedy when it suggested that nothing much really changes. I write this while taking a break from reading a short and impressive novella, Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution, which features an 89-year-old Sherlock Holmes surviving into 1944. I was told the punchline in advance, which has not yet spoiled the story for me. The very black joke of the punning title of The Final Solution seems to be that the future may hold truly dreadful and quite unimaginable surprises. It is as far from the anti-historical sensibility of The Jetsons as you can possibly get.
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