Consider Hanna-Barbera.
In The Jetsons all the houses are built atop impossibly tall poles, like off-brand Space Needles. Their residents can engage in FTL jaunts in personalized flying saucers anytime they want. The Jetsons have a robot maid.
Yet George Jetson also has a reassuringly mundane job doing some kind of management with Spacely Sprockets, a company that makes―you guessed it―sprockets. Just as Fred Flintstone was a construction worker who happened to use dinosaurs and mastodons as equipment. What Hanna-Barbera was doing, in essence, was to take a very mid-20th-century kind of prosperity and project it as far into both the future and the past as it could plausibly go.
Of course from the point of view of the actual (to them) future this seems very quaint. Many markers of the 20th century economy―things like department stores and trains full of business computers―have disappeared with nothing much to replace them. The future has been depopulated of its onetime dreams.
1 comment:
The Flintstones really were pretty funny what with the obvious references to I Love Lucy's lifestyle, only with dinosaurs. The Jetsons never made quite the same impression I guess because it seemed even more unreal. Maybe it was the fact that the Flintstones were grounded and their appliances reflected that while the Jetsons were living on a different level as you mentioned.
It occurs to me you can see the show was accurate in that today there is a class of people who don't share the earth with us just as you might wonder whether George, Jane and the kids can see poor and homeless people from their space needle balcony.
I can't help but think of all the media angst about Hollywood stars losing their homes to the wildfires when you know they don't have just one home. Then there's the population of Altadena left with nothing - maybe there'll be some apartment buildings in the future that none of them will be able to afford.
"The future has been depopulated of its onetime dreams" is a very astute observation.
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