Meet George Jetson

Brent called early this morning. I’m on the east coast, he’s 3-hours behind in Oregon. I had just gotten up after a restless night so my eyes were puffy, and my hair was standing on end. I wouldn’t have known unless he’d told me. We were looking at each other on our phones, something we almost never do.

It’s so rare that it still sort of thrills me that it’s possible to beam impressions of our living selves across the country or the world at any moment. This morning it reminded me of The Jetsons, the cartoon family with a dog named Astro and a robot maid named Rosie. George, the dad, walked Astro on a futuristic treadmill until Astro was running so fast that George lost his footing and flipped around and around on the machine’s conveyor belt. I thought that was hysterical when I was a kid. Jane, George’s wife, took care of the house and had a refrigerator who told her what she needed at the grocery store. Elroy, their son, zoomed around in his very own spaceship. Their daughter Judy looked very much like the waitress who got my order all wrong at Michael’s diner last night except that Ashley’s top-of-the-head ponytail was metallic lavender while Judy Jetson’s was white.

I’d forgotten about the Jetsons until this morning. When I googled the show to find out what Astro’s name was, I learned that The Jetsons were the first animated TV show to be broadcast in color. But I never saw it in color. We only had a black and white television when I was a kid. I hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz in color until I saw it in a big movie theater three years ago. Talk about a thrill! I also learned that the first season of the Jetsons aired during prime time on September 23^rd, 1962, a Sunday night 61 years ago yesterday. The show only lasted for one season due to poor ratings. It wasn’t until someone was smart enough to run it on Saturday mornings with all the other cartoons that the Jetsons became famous. That’s when I got hooked. Our giant box of a television was next to the bookshelf on the second-floor landing at our house – an 8-foot square space with four bedrooms and six kids living around it. There were stairs running down on one side and another set going up to the third floor on the opposite side. Saturday mornings, sick days, and Sunday nights with Ed Sullivan were the outside limits of our TV-watching time. We’d sit on the steps headed upstairs or lie side by side on the floor with our pillows and blankets to watch cartoons on Saturdays.

It’s funny what you learn when you google a cartoon character. George Jetson has his very own page on Wikipedia. I love his job description: Digital Index Operator at Spacely’s Space Sprockets. Reading that reminded me of my nephew Mike’s recent description of doing robotic surgeries at Cornell Hospital in New York City. His fingers and hands do precision operations on human bodies from afar. It’s pretty amazing, and along with all the texting we do, it makes me think our thumbs and fingers will evolve to something new in the future.

            I’m not sure where I’m going with this except to say that I discovered George Jetson was known for saying to his wife, “Jane, stop this crazy thing!” whenever their robot maid Rosie went bonkers or blew a fuse. The PR people for the show described it this way:

            Daily life [for the Jetsons] is leisurely, assisted by numerous labor-saving devices, which occasionally break down with humorous results. Despite this, everyone complains of exhausting hard labor and difficulties living with the remaining inconveniences.

            The Jetsons worked two hours a day, three days a week. Their goal was to work less, relax and recreate more. But they didn’t know how to fix things. That’s something to think about.