Where’s the 3-D TV?
Why aren’t there life-sized robots catering to our household needs?
Where are the bubble cars flying high above the road traffic?
Why can’t we see the person we’re talking to on the phone?
Why can’t we press a button to change the color of a room?
What happened to the machine that cooks food and presents it on a perfectly set table?
If you grew up in the ’60s, you probably watched the “The Jetsons,” a cartoon series about a middle-class family of the future where video phones, flying cars and robots were part of everyday life. And you probably thought, “I wonder if that’s what it will really be like in the future.”
Well, the future is now. You might be surprised to find out just how many of the Jetson family’s household gadgets and appliances have became reality and how many are on the way. Quite a few.
“The Jetsons were like a real family with real family problems that they dealt with in the computer age,” said Janet Waldo, who was the voice of the Jetsons’ teenage daughter, Judy, and provided commentary for the DVD of the complete first season of the show.
“Families related to it, and it was a part of family life. … There were movies and other shows about the future, but they were so far out,” said Waldo, who lives in California. “They were about things you just didn’t think of every day.”
By the end of the first and only season of the prime-time version of the show (1962-1963), it was being seen in 5,578,000 homes nationwide. It debuted on Sept. 23, 1962; new episodes were made in 1984 and 1987, and it lives on in reruns today.
“We built quite a fan base,” said Iwao Takamoto, an animator responsible for the design of the Jetsons’ space-aged landscape. He said many of the ideas for the future came from the imaginations of those working on the show, but they also would look at magazines such as Popular Mechanics for ideas.
“You’d take one thing from here and embellish it with something you might see somewhere else. And for the entertainment and human value, you might bring another thing into it,” Takamoto said.
“We considered these things to be far out, and some of these things we thought we’d never see (in reality),” added Takamoto, 80. “But there’s been such an acceleration of so many things, particularly in the last decade, that a lot of things came to fruition.”
When the cartoon first aired in 1962 the nation was fascinated with space travel, which fueled interest in the Jetsons’ out-of-this-world lifestyle, recalled Sander Schwartz, president of Warner Bros. Animation. Warner Bros. now owns Hanna-Barbera, which produced “The Jetsons.”
“I was 8, and I watched it and loved it,” Schwartz said. “I thought we would have a lot of the conveniences on the show that were depicted there for the first time, like the telephones with video screens, video conferencing on computers and the microwave.”
Schwartz and Waldo both said the microwave is the Jetsons’ “foodarackacycle,” on which you pressed a button for specific foods and they would quickly be cooked.
“There was nothing like that when we did The Jetsons,”‘ said Waldo.
“There’s an aircraft engineer (Paul Moller) who’s working on a car that flies,” Schwartz added. “You think about it, that’s exactly what they had in The Jetsons.”‘
Schwartz said that LG, the Korean electronics company, has developed a refrigerator that can scan the bar codes of groceries that go inside and then indicate when that product is no longer there.
“It gives you a shopping list that tells you to buy milk,” Schwartz explained. “A few years down the road, you’ll be able to hook into the local market and push a button and get a shopping list. In The Jetsons,’ the refrigerator ordered the food.”
“Every day I’m amazed to see how things unfolded from the predictions that were in “The Jetsons,”‘ Waldo said. “I remember we had the talking watches, which were so unique. And now we have them. And the miniature TV sets in watches and computers and telephones. We did all that in “The Jetsons,’ and it’s just now happening.” She recalled, referring to the Jetsons’ video phone, “Jane was always saying, “I can’t talk on the phone, I haven’t fixed my hair.’
“I remember when we were doing the show, I was so impressed with the seeing-eye vacuum cleaner and thought how great it would be to have one going around without anyone pushing it, and we have those now,” Waldo said. “We had homework tapes that they have today. Instead of books, we (the kids in the cartoon) had tapes we could study for school.”
Kellie Patrick, a spokeswoman for Dallas-based Neiman-Marcus department store, which has featured some Jetsons-like gadgets among the “fantasy gifts” in its Christmas catalog, says the show might have influenced a lot of the things we are seeing today.
Life-sized “His & Her Robots” with the “Her” bearing quite a resemblance to the Jetsons’ “Rosie the Robot,” and a one-of-a-kind “Skycar” prototype reminiscent of the cartoon’s atomic-powered bubble cars were both featured as fantasy gifts.
“It’s pure speculation, but the inventors could have been influenced by “The Jetsons,”‘ said the 37-year-old Patrick, who said he grew up watching the show. “Who’s to say there’s not some lingering memory that sparked an interest in science and engineering that allowed a child to become a great inventor?”
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“It’s my feeling that some of the kids who grew up watching “The Jetsons’ and loving “The Jetsons’ came up with some of the ideas,” Waldo added. “The thoughts were put into their heads as children.”
Suzanne Kantra, senior technology editor of Popular Science, said many of the Jetsonesque gadgets are still in the prototype stage. “I think a lot of people take what they see on television or in movies and books as a source of inspiration for people creating new gadgets,” she said.
“When you’re looking at prototypes, these are things that are going to be refined and tested. The final product may not be what you see, but the essence will be the same. It’ll depend on what is manufacturable and what is affordable.”
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There appears to be plenty of time for Hanna-Barbera’s vision of 21st century America to come true. “The Jetsons” lived in the year 2062. So we have another 56 years to get it right.
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