What ‘The Jetsons’ predicted right – and wrong – about the future
nypost.com
nypost.com
I'm not sure which they're referring to, but they had x-ray machines and endoscopes in the 60s, too.
> Now, savvy audiences would demand to know what the world looks like beyond the Jetsons’ space-age home.
There's the implication that this is some sort of new cynicism, but the surface-utopia-with-something-nasty-behind-it was already a common sci-fi trope long before the Jetsons. People didn't really go there with the Jetsons because it was a _sitcom for children_, not because it wouldn't have occurred to a cynical adult viewer.
It's part of the golden era of high concept situational comedy: The Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, The Adams Family, Car 54, Where Are You?, Flipper, Gilligan's Island, The Munsters, My Mother the Car, My Favorite Martian and the Flintstones.
It's a strategy like the western was (Bonanza, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Rawhide), to make decent consistent content easier to produce. See also detective shows.
What's much more interesting to me, take SE01E01, Jane goes to get a maid and there's 2 auditions beforehand. The first is a British maid the second is a French, so then what's Rosie? The mammy stereotype. Maybe it's too obvious to mention but I would have assumed many to find that objectionable these days.
Once something gets novelly abstracted, it looks like you can punch down all you want and nobody notices.
What? Have you ever watched The Jetsons? Rosie is a stereotype but it's the Jewish New Yorker, not the mammy. She's sarcastic and constantly insults everyone above her station, including her owners and their bosses.
If you need an average Joe character for your content and aren't interested in making a statement with the character or expending a lot of effort rolling your own just to be different you just use the Jewish New-Yorker. Easy, done, on to the next thing.
In the context of comedy, to be specific, she seemed to be a composite of the Maxwell car and Rochester from the Jack Benny Show mixed with the 1950s sitcom Beulah. The sarcastic Yiddish Brooklynite is a generalized trait that got put on a bunch of characters (Ethel Mertz, the honeymooners, bugs bunny, Frank Nelson, the mother-in-law etc)
Maybe there's a definitive interview in some trade magazine somewhere. It's not as immediately direct as "The Flintstones is The Honeymooners"
What's notably absent there is "Jewish" because that actually has nothing to do with this character (although it's often included).
The character is sarcastic, antagonizing, nosy, noisy, and arrogant. They want to be first but they're always last. Petty, self-important, unable to keep a secret and just a bit insufferable, they invite themselves over, make hasty and absurd judgments, and take center stage.
A lot of classic characters are a stone's throw away from that. Take Millie Helper from the Dick Van Dyke show, the 1949-56 Goldbergs, Rhoda, even Maude from Harold where Maude is a brilliant hack of the character, Ethyl Mertz, Gladys Kravitz, Max Bialystock or Gilbert Gottfried who made his career playing this character. Rodney Dangerfield mostly assumed this character for his standup.
They all rotate around some character gravity well with a couple things knocked around and provide a similar character dynamic for the story. You can see it in say Danny Devito's character in Twins, Edgar Bergen's dummies from Vaudeville, and borrowed selectively by the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.
Married with Children is another brilliant execution because the archetype is draped over multiple characters in various configurations.
You can find earlier versions of the characters in Vaudeville acts like Smith and Dale or Gilbert Gottfried's predecessor Jimmy Durante which is arguably where the cultural mannerisms got linked in. You can see it in some of the characters of Out of the Inkwell cartoons by Fleischer and Fleischer (creator of Betty Boop)
Call it whatever you want but it's not strictly Jewish and there's plenty of Jewish comedians that do not do that character such as Jon Stewart, Peter Sellers, Seth Rogan, Jack Black, Louis CK or Sascha Baron Cohen and any character can fit that archetype such as the parrot in Aladdin or Bugs Bunny.
It's adjacent but distinct.
Anyways I wasn't conflating the two
The problem isn’t that you’re “conflating the two”, in fact the offense comes from how you’re dividing them. You’re taking a word that literally means Jewish, and as a noun is almost always pejorative, and using it to mean “jew-y but not necessarily jew-ish”. I don’t know why you think that’s better, but it isn’t!
I think there’s an underlying point where we’re passing each other by that there’s a real difference between something like “a character derived from the Yiddish theater” or even “an archetypal Yiddish character” and “The Yiddish Brooklynite”. The first two are drawing a connection between a character, a culture, and a theatrical condition. The second, your usage, is just labeling an archetype Yiddish in preference to labeling it Jewish.
To try and be as clear as I can: I’m not sayin that these archetypes don’t exist (although I think you’re over-broad, as in your very confident mischaracterization of Rosie and subsequent goalpost-move), or are bad, or shouldn’t be used or talked about or whatever. What I’m saying, as a Jew (and perhaps speaking to another!) is please don’t use the word Yiddish to describe a person or group. You can just say Jewish! It’s fine! No one will think that you mean Jon Stewart and Larry David are playing the same character! Or even just Brooklynite, if you’re being honest with yourself about the character having nothing to do with Jewishness.
As far as Rosie goes, take it up with the scholarship. For example
https://mpcaaca.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Burrell-Race-...
> You apparently know the origin is from Yiddish Theater. That's clearly what I was referring to.
The problem, again, is that you weren't referring to it. You were labeling a character "Yiddish". This may seem to you like hair-splitting, but I assure you it's not. In English usage, the word Yiddish does not refer to a person. Full stop. The Yiddish Theater is so-called because it's the Yiddish-Language Theater, not because it's extra jew-ey.
But look, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this isn't your coinage. Do you have a reference establishing "The Yiddish Brooklynite" as a common or accepted usage in the way you're deploying it? Maybe a book or article that uses the term to describe Bugs Bunny? Please post, I'm perfectly happy to be the schlimazel here.
> As far as Rosie goes, take it up with the scholarship. For example
Sure, fine. Considering she's a combo maid and maternal figure in a midcentury sitcom you can probably read aspects of Rosie that way. But again you're missing the point, which isn't that you were necessarily wrong. It's that your response to being challenged wasn't to engage with what the other poster was saying, or to argue your point, or even, as here, to type "jetsons mammy" into google scholar and link the first article that comes up. It was to dismiss the comment and continue bloviating in a different direction. This was also in substance the character of your response to me. It's an approach to discussion calibrated to earn points on HN, but not one, in my experience, that shows the interest or capacity to hear something from a different perspective.
What's the preferred term for that?
And it's clear that the Jetson family sees Rosie as a person and a member of the family. In a later episode (admittedly made in the 80s and not the 60s), George is looking for a Mother's Day present for Rosie, and he speaks so fondly of her that his boss, Cosmo Spacely, believes Rosie to be a woman with whom George is having an affair.
You have to search really hard to find racism in the depiction of Rosie in The Jetsons.
But I agree, "seek and you shall find" applies with ascribing whatever "racism" means today and that shit is unhealthy by any definition.
Those words don't make sense together. Souther bell refers to a young woman of high society reminiscent of the old south. I think you just mean "mammy", but as others have pointed out the robot has a Brooklyn accent.
[*Edit] it’s disheartening to see people downvote this. I’m simply encouraging someone to engage with the South and experience the people and culture first hand. There’s so much blind hate here now for people from and in the South, it sucks.
I'm not and don't, so... yeah, it's totally unremarkable.
It's actually a really high standard
Fwiw it’s “belle” (as in the french for beautiful). I don’t think the south was highly famed for its bell manufacturers.
I was going to say, the Jetsons doesn't seem predictive at all given how little diversity the show has, the rampant stereotyping (generally rampant in comedy), and how little the concepts/rituals of daily life were different from life at that time.
And in one episode, George's button-pushing finger is sore. Long before we talked about carpal tunnel syndrome.
https://www.snopes.com/articles/352023/was-george-jetson-bor...
In early 1936, in Germany there was the first public video telephone service, Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen [1]
I think there were experiments in Russia and France about videophones in the 1960', and indeed in US in 1964 there was the ATT picture phone [0]
And in the 1960' if you had access to a copper leased line you could send data at 2Mbits/sec, that what was in Telecoms trunks between digital PBX. And repeaters were made without any ICs, on pure twisted copper lines, without any transformers, only with a few transistors, capacitors, inductance and resistances!
I taught about those lines and their equipment, early in 1980 in France. It was boring old stuff at the time, I was much more interested by microprocessors!
Something funny is that in 1989 there were ISDN experiments in France and business customers (in Rennes) were surprised that it was possible to send data at 2MBits/sec on copper links.
Indeed this was not possible on customers/subscribers phone lines because of transformers and PCM modulation (for the lucky ones), which limited bandwidth from ~300-3400 Hertz.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#AT&T...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#Clos...
New videophones came out every few years in the 80's and 90's and failed, time and again. I saw them in Popular Mechanics, I saw them in Omni Magazine, I saw them in the bargain bin at Circuit City, still overpriced.
Why would you buy this thing? What's the point of spending all the extra money on seeing the other person? Chicken and egg, most people don't have one. Won't you have to do your makeup before making a phone call?
It didn't occur to many of us that your phone would be your only computer and that it would have two to six cameras so it would be a videophone by default and especially it was hard to believe the phone companies would ever let such functionality be accessed with an ordinary phone number.
On its own, the videophone could never have succeeded. It had to be in a convergence device.
It also never occurred to me that people would like a videophone so they can hold it at waist level and shout at it in a doctor's waiting room instead of holding it up to their ear, despite the unflattering angle of neck fat tucked loosely under a chin. </bitter>
But still, imagine living in a fully AI run world where you depend on automation for even basic needs and it can all just decide you don't exist one day, because everything around you is not only fully sentient, but also sometimes kind of an asshole.
Also UNIBLAB was scary. I really like the design now but geez that towering three-eyed monster was creepy when I was a kid.
We could have had this too if it wasn't for 40+ years of trickle-down economics :-(
where is my robotic companion, where is my dinner in pill form, where is my hydrogen fueled automobile, where is my nuclear-powered levitating home, where is my cure for this disease
"What the man of the future will look like? He will have small, atrophied arms because machines will do everything for him. He will have small, atrophied legs because machines will transport him everywhere. He will have small torso due to having atrophied digestive system because his diet will consist exclusively of nutrient pills. He will, however, have a large head because his brain will enlarge due to him constantly thinking... thinking how to earn more of those damned pills!"
Man, the future used to be so bright! They don't make it like they used to any more...
It’s sad the window industry decided to treat windows like a regular disposable appliance with a 10-20 year life. But that’s how it goes.
A higher end window from Marvin like their ultimate line. But even then I'm not sure. The spring based systems with proprietary parts will make it hard in the future when those parts aren't available anymore.
It's hard to beat a rope, pulley, and weight for longevity.
What about a butterfly hinge?
The efficiency thing is always interesting to me. The way I see it, quality weather stripping (integrated if possible) and storm windows should get you pretty close to a modern windows. I figure you'll never make back the savings with new windows VS old windows that have been updated to be more efficient. Especially since the majority of your energy bill is not due to heat/AC leaving through your windows.
That's the problem with a lot of housing today - so many corners have been cut and things have been so optimized that we are left with badly constructed dwellings where everything will have to be replaced within 20 years. Old houses are great because they were completely overbuilt and used materials that we can't really get today like old growth wood which will last hundreds of years if maintained. Of course, a lot of these homes are full of bad things too like leaded paint and asbestos, but we can abate all that if needed.
But yeah, you look at old windows and it's crazy how they built these things to last. Mortis and tennon joints in the rails and stiles, muntins that are joined, etc. With a little TLC they are pretty easy to restore and make good as new and as efficient as a modern window.
I knew the windows were thin/cheap, but watching the replacement of the broken panel in the single pane window showed exactly how cheap they were/are.
But seriously, I’m glad someone likes the job. The glazing is fun for me. Scraping a hundred years of paint off of molding with every possible radius… not so much.
Also if the old window has lead paint layers, I don’t like to scrape on my property.
With the advantage of more years, WALL-E got this prediction better: atrophied arms, legs and torso, but large from obesity.
https://gravity.co/ - expensive and takes some training to fly
> where is my robotic companion,
https://www.bostondynamics.com
> where is my dinner in pill form,
It's not really a pill though.
> where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2022/
But only if you live near a refueling station in CA.
> where is my nuclear-powered levitating home,
OK, that one we're no where close to yet.
> where is my cure for this disease
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/index.htm...