So I am an avid watcher of Tubi, the last remaining ethical streaming service.
Lately it has been recommending me sitcoms of the 1960s, and so far I’ve really been finding myself surprisingly enjoying this look into the past. Gilligan’s island, The Jetsons, and bewitched.
I was watching The Jetsons today before work just to have Some Noise playing whilst I ingested my ramen noodles before work. Given that this is a sitcom about the future and how American society as pictured in the 1960s would adapt if the Space Age Promises of Tomorrow held true.
Not that kind of got me thinking, the Jetsons is very much in the ballpark of flintstones, it’s a modern family, in a time period that people of the 1960s would not consider modern. Now Flintstones doesn’t really need to be updated, because it’s set in a fictionalized stone age. You would not have to do much to update it if you wanted to do a modern take on that setting.
But what about the Jetsons? Now let’s say you were put in charge of making this reboot happen? How would you do it?
Would you be overly self aware and make jokes about a lot of future predictions that didn’t come true? Would you try to make it a sitcom version of Star Trek, like lower decks, but featuring a family instead of the D Squad?
Or maybe do something a bit more serious?
I want to hear from you, this is a message board for movies and TV shows, so let’s Flex those creative muscles, how would you make a new movie or TV show about the Jetsons?
Instead of answering your question, I’m going to share a fan theory that I found quite amusing: The Jetsons and The Flintstones actually happen contemporaneously. When nuclear war caused civilization as we know it to collapse, wealthy individuals moved to space, while everyone else was left to scrape by as they could in the irradiated leavings of our old society.
The Jetsons are decendants of those wealthy people that made it out. Society is relatively the same, just in space with robots. Their technology has progressed in a reasonable fashion from the 1960s tech they took off Earth with them. The Flintstones are decendants of the people left behind. That’s why all their “stone age” technology is so reminiscent of everyday 1960s tech. As they attempted to rebuild, they took inspiration from the pre-nuke past. The radiation caused genetic mutations, leading some animals to express dinosaur-like traits.