Sunday 23 September 1962, at half past six in the afternoon, the first of 24 episodes of a cartoon series entitled The Jetsons, and today everyone agrees that it wasn’t just a cartoon.
It was the (rather precise) representation of the collective imagination of the space age that was beginning. The celebration of a certain American futurism. Yes sure, they were cartoons signed by historic couple Hanna & Barbera, in the style of the very famous Ancestors. But the protagonists, a typical American family, had at their disposal all the paraphernalia that scientists had been talking about for some years: flying cars, personal jetpacks, rotating sidewalks and robot waiters. The inspiration also came from a book, also released in 1962, which imagined the world in 1975 with ultrasonic dishwashers and instant translators.
The first episode, the one that aired on September 23, it was called “Rosey the Robot” and a researcher with Smithsonian Magazine he reconstructed and examined it with the aim of determining what the idea of the future of the gods was Jetsons. A few things are striking: the first is that we imagined a future in which we would do everything by pushing buttons (think of touch on smartphones and you will see that they were not very far); then, seen that pressing buttons was the only activity to do everything, the protagonist does finger exercises with a trainer who appears on the TV screen (does it remind you of the gymnastics scenes at home during the lockdown? To me, yes).
There is no doubt that how certain science fiction novels and certain films have marked our idea of the future, the same happened with some cartoons.
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