there is a meme circulating online this weekend—and which has been hanging around for the last few months, long enough to have got the snoops treatment Well, tomorrow, July 31, 2022, is the birthday of future cartoon man George Jetson. Like on the day of his actual birth, after which this animated sad sack will be exposed for the first time to the world that will treat him so cruelly, leaving him endlessly spinning on a futuristic treadmill straight to hell. The surface appeal of said meme is obvious: it’s a textbook update (and quite a literal one, given the show’s use of them) of the old “Where are the flying cars?” question, an approach to the discrepancy between the future imagined by the authors of speculative fiction and the reality in which we live.
But it’s also a question that should hypothetically have a real answer, which is the sort of thing that tickles the most pedantic (and therefore largest and most important) parts of our brains. However, the problem with answering such a question is that The Jetsons it’s not like terminator either Return to the future, where we get nice and easy readings of the dates (from the past) of various futuristic events. Instead, it’s a goofy cartoon that he generally went out of his way to obscure when his very weird vision of the future (where walking on the floor has been left behind, but not the jokes about women who love to shop for shoes), actually took place.
So let’s think about this too much: Will George Jetson really be born tomorrow?
Let’s dispense with the date, first: as far as we know, there is no canon evidence that George Jetson’s birthday is July 31. Or any date; we can’t find anything on the actual show that ever commits to a birthday for this poor horrible man. There don’t seem to be any episodes during it, it never seems to have been mentioned as a plot point in any of the show’s three seasons (either the first, from 1962, or the two ’80s revival seasons), and the only source ever cited because it’s an easy to edit Fandom wiki. (Meanwhile, Wikipedia has blocked edits on George’s page to combat the hordes of George Jetson’s birthday supporters currently storming its doors). So that part is debunked/definitely debunked.
The 2022 portion, meanwhile, has at least a little bitsquint and trace, a hint of canonicity. Like our own colleagues in gizmodo noted a few years ago—in addressing the equally important question of whether George and Jane’s seven-year age gap revealed uncomfortable truths about their relationship—there is text suggesting that George Jetson is, in fact, 40 years old. “Test pilot”, George comments that he has 110 years to live).
However, the shrug is to place the show itself in time. Hanna-Barbera never gave a definitive answer about the year. The Jetsons installed though I was frequently described as taking place a century in the future. Many people have interpreted this to mean that the series specifically takes place in 2062, 100 years after the original debut, which would, in fact, mean that George himself would appear on the planet as a COVID baby sometime in the next few months.
But. But! Consider this: in 2017 The Jetsons and WWE: Robo-Wrestlemania! (in which WWE Superstars and Vince McMahon must travel back in time to defeat a revived Big Show after he uses an army of Wrestlebots to take over Orbit City), we are explicitly told that Big Show “has been frozen in ice for 100 years. ”—while George, Jane, Judy and their son Elroy doesn’t seem to have aged a day.
Sure, we have evidence above that the Jetsons live longer (did you know these motherfuckers only work two hours a week?), but there’s nothing to suggest that their children aren’t aging at a rate approaching a rate regular. The only conclusion we can draw is that The Jetsons It has been running a Marvel Comics-style sliding timeclimb all this timeand that the series forever takes place in 100 years. It means that George Jetson could not have been born tomorrow, because George Jetson’s birthday will always be 60 years in the future from any given present. Aand thus, in Xeno Paradox fashion, we realize that George Jetson Will never really born. The poor bastard can never be pulled out of this madness, because he never got on it in the first place.
(We can also conclude that it is very rare that WWE has done a Jetsons movie on 20-damn-17.)
So what have we learned? For one thing, you should never trust anything on the internet that makes you laugh, or feel anything, really. because you probably haven’t cited your sources correctly. On the other, you can totally kill an hour of a productive day thinking too much about The Jetsons In Internet. And really, what could be a more glorious future than that?