On Sept. 23, 1962, "The Jetsons" first debuted on ABC to bring a vision of family life in the future to TV screens around the world.
The Jetsons are a family who live in a fictional place called Orbit City with their dog Astro. George Jetson, the dad in the family, works for a company called Spacely Space Sprockets and commutes to work in a vehicle that looks like a flying saucer.
The story is set in the year 2062, with plenty of futuristic and high-tech gadgets — like a robotic housekeeper Rosie. The show was a tremendous success and has defined the way people imagine the future for decades.
Why it mattered
When the "The Jetsons" debuted in 1962, human spaceflight was just a year old (Yuri Gagarin's historic flight launched in 1961), but the future never seemed closer to the generation of kids (and let's face it, adults, too) who tuned into to see the hapless George Jetson, his wife Jane, kids Judy and Elroy, dog Astro and Rosie navigate daily life on Earth and in space. They were sort of like "The Flintstones" in space.
Created by Hanna-Barbera, the original version of this animated series originally debuted in a primetime slot throughout the 1962-1963 season, but ultimately ended up as a Saturday morning cartoon staple (which is where Space.com Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik found it in the 1980s). "The Jetsons" actually ranks No. 3 on our list of the best sci-fi shows of the 1960s and its impact was such that a comic book adaptation of the series is currently in the collection of the Smithsonian American History Museum..
"The broad economic growth and prosperity of the post World War II era had allowed many middle-class Americans to purchase luxury goods and participate in leisure activities beyond what seemed possible in the difficult 1930s and 40s," Smithsonian curators wrote of the Jetsons' history. "Advertisers marketed new and more inexpensive consumer goods as modern, sleek, and forward-looking, while the NASA space program and race to land a man on the moon captured the world’s attention. The Jetsons premiered amidst this techno-utopianism and seemed to capture the national mood."
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