A look at the 1960's era futuristic cartoon, The Jetsons, from the view of creators Hanna Barbera.
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
This is where I first saw the idea of a flying car, The Jetsons. In the lives of Generation X kids, like me, during grade school years, The Jetsons was a funny cartoon watched either in the morning, before going to school, or afternoons when school was over. Created in 1962-63, just before the birth of Generation X, The Jetsons was a comic look at what the "far off 21st century" might be like. Even as a kid, it seemed pretty ridiculous. Funny thing is, mingled in with the crazy flying cars and sky houses, this early 60's cartoon actually predicted several of the real technologies of today's 2019 world better than all the more serious novels and movies of that era. Video phone calls/teleconferencing, treadmills, personal computers, action sports (sort of), moving sidewalks,video watches, minimalist furniture, big screen TV's, video court appearances, AR fashion shopping (really, here it is), the internet (sort of), cell phone-like communication, and some often used medical technologies, all of these showed up in The Jetsons in the early 1960's. Crazy.
As a middle aged man of 53 now, I've seen an incredible amount of technological "progress" happen in my life. It amazes me how different our world is from the future predictions of the relatively low technology era of my childhood. As I mentioned in the earlier chapters, we don't all have flying cars many predicted, we're not making interstellar space trips, we don't have armies of human-like android robots, and there has been no global nuclear apocalypse.
Most of the main themes of the 20th century sci-fi novelists and movie makers have not actually happened. We never got many of the high technologies predicted, yet we got many technologies, just as powerful, that were not predicted. We have smart phones, tablets and laptops and now average individuals can communicate with about half the people on the planet, individually, or collectively. We have the internet, wifi, and online platforms and social media, so average people can publish text, photos, and video that can be seen, potentially, by a couple of billion people. We have GPS that can find locations everywhere, and direct us to them. Then we have a whole slew of other technologies at work in our current world, in addition to communications. We all know that, though we take nearly all of them for granted these days.
But the visionary writers and movie makers did get a couple of major themes right. One major theme that runs through the dystopian futuristic novels and movies of the 20th century is the idea of an all powerful, authoritarian government, with surveillance cameras and systems for watching the public's every move. That idea of all-encompassing surveillance, came true, as we all know, there are now video cameras all over our urban environment. Our cell phones, tablets, laptops, have microphones, digital photo and video cameras, which can be hacked, potentially. Our smart phones and our cars have GPS tracking, and cars also have microphones and cameras in many cases. There are also computers in cars that track where you go, how fast you drive, whether you use your turn signals, and other data. If that's not enough, a lot of people are now actually buying "bugs," voice enabled devices, like Amazon's Alexa or Google's version, and even putting video cameras in their houses, opening their private conversations up to potential collection, surveillance, and data mining.
If that's not enough, we fill online platforms, sharing personal photos, comments, stories, on social media, and in blogs, and other online sites and apps. In addition to all of that, most of us are probably wearing or carrying items embedded with RFID tags, usually that we don't realize. These tags are the things that set off anti-theft systems at the doors of stores. They can also ad to the digital data trail we leave behind as we go through our days in today's digital world. With nearly everything we do, and everywhere we go, we leave a whole bunch of digital tracks, which ad to our metadata files. George Orwell warned us in his classic novel, 1984, that "Big Brother is watching." He's right, in today's world, all kinds of people, including Big Brother-type organizations, are watching.
Not only is Big Bother watching, at Universal Studios, in Studio City, California, a Big Minion is watching. See him? Photo by Steve Emig.
Many people are freaked out by this, as I was many years ago. The reflex action against all this crazy surveillance technology is to "go off the grid." But even if you go out in the woods somewhere, to get away from it all, you might get your photo taken by somebody's trail cam, looking for deer, coyotes, poachers, or a sasquatch. If you dodge the trail cams, you might wander under someone's drone flying overhead. If you manage to miss the drones, there are still dozens, perhaps hundreds, of satellites in space, some of which have cameras that can tell if you need to shave, or get a manicure, from up in space. "The grid," is almost everywhere these days.
Big Brother is watching... but so is little sister, and she's got faster thumbs
Cell phone cameras in action, as a member of the street performing crew, The Damn Team, flips over four audience members. The Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hollywood & Highland, Hollywood, California, late 2019. Photo by Steve Emig.
The other main technology that dystopian future novels, movies, and TV shows got right is "video phone calls. I first saw this myself in The Jetsons, as a grade school kid, watching the re-runs in the early 1970's, like most of Generation X. In The Jetsons, a little video screen would pop up from George's desk, or Jane's kitchen counter, and they would have video conferences with others. If Jane Jetson was still in her bathrobe in the morning, a sort of shield would come up, and make her appear made up and dressed, as she talked to her friends. It was something like a filter on Snapchat.
The "video phone calls" also happened on the big screen on the bridge of the original Star Trek TV show, and small video calls happen in Blade Runner, and some other movies and shows. So many of the 20th century movies and TV shows, predicted the idea of Skype or Facetime, decades ahead of its invention.
If you go through all these movies that I linked above, and all the similar TV shows and movies, you could find little things, little devices and pieces of technology that we do have in today's world. But by and large, all of these futuristic predictions from novels and movies got most of the future wrong. The "futuristic" cities, the flying cars everywhere, the hordes of human-like androids, and everyone wearing the same clothes, those things just didn't happen. That's not the world we live in today.
In Blade Runner, made way back in 1982, set in Los Angeles in November 2019, the big problem was escaped replicants going on a killing spree. In real life Los Angeles in November, 2019, the L.A. Times just took a poll of residents to see what the biggest problem in L.A. is. The answer? 95% of people in today's L.A. said homelessness is the biggest problem in 2019 Los Angeles. H.G. Wells, George Orwell, and other visionary writers didn't see that one coming.
Hollywood, California, the land where dreams, and nightmares, can come true. Homeless man passed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, near the corner of Hollywood boulevard and Highland, the top tourist spot in Hollywood today. The paradox of our modern world in transition. December 2019. Photo by Steve Emig.
Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed the wording in any of these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020. I didn't even fix the typos that I originally missed. "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we have seen 3 1/2 years of chaos. You can check out more of my thoughts on my Substack:
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