Sixty years ago the animated series The Jetsons finished its first and only season before being cancelled. Just 24 episodes were broadcast between September 1962 and March 1963. Despite this, the cartoon has achieved huge influence in popular culture, with countless reruns, a reboot in the mid-1980s (51 episodes over two seasons) and a feature-length movie in 1990.
The Jetsons was created by the Hanna-Barbara animation studio in Los Angeles as a futuristic version of the studio’s hit series The Flintstones, the first cartoon series to gain a prime-time slot.
But whereas The Flintstones was set in a distant, mythical stone age thousands of years in the past, The Jetsons was set in a very near future — in 2062.
Like The Flintstones, the show was aimed mostly at children and played with ideas about the future for laughs. It’s not a serious work of futurology. Even so, it’s still an interesting cultural artefact, helping us appreciate our present and our expectations of the future.
The first episode was broadcast just a few weeks after US President John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Moon speech,” promising, “to go to the Moon in this decade and do things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”