There’s a TV commercial going around now which uses the well-known theme songs from both “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons.”
I forget what it’s for, but every time I see it I wonder how much they had to pay to use those two classic pieces of Americana.
I’ll bet it wasn’t cheap.
The truth is, if you want to get very rich, just write a 30-to-45-second theme for a television show that goes on forever.
The guy who wrote “The Tonight Show” theme became a multi-millionaire and you may not know the name Danny Elfman, but you’ve heard his work.
He wrote the theme to “The Simpsons.”
But mostly when I hear “Meet George Jetson” I think about how wrong that classic cartoon was.
Wrong? Yes. Look at it this way. The Jetsons debuted in 1962. It was a vision of the future. We live in 2018. So, basically, we are that future.
How did they do?
Exactly the opposite. In The Jetsons computers are the size of buildings. We carry around in our pockets more sophisticated technology than was used to get to the moon seven years after The Jetsons appeared.
It’s a reminder of a classic misconception, that science fiction writers/film makers are very intuitive about predicting things which happen later.
Sure there are some almost scary hits.
In Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon,” published in 1865, three space travelers depart from Florida, reach the moon, return and splash down in the ocean.
That’s pretty much what happened 104 years later.
But a prominent, and good, science fiction writer named Harlan Ellison took an opposite view in a well-publicized essay using the same historic event.
Ellison noted as a little boy growing up in the 1930s, he saw science fiction writers were obsessed with two things, going to the moon and television.
Ellison researched the literature of the time and concluded that no one ever put the two together, someone went to the moon while everyone else watched on television. Which is exactly what happened.
Even more interesting, prediction-wise, is a famous science fiction movie which came out one year before the actual moon landing.
Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” had the-misfortune to pick a time in the future so close to its era—2001 was only 33 years away—that billions of people would still be around to see it.
By the time we reached 2001 the final manned (peopled?) moon landing would be 29 years in the past.
Now it’s 46 years in the past. It’s history like the last year without the designated hitter in baseball, which was the same year, 1972.
And, all this time later, we still haven’t met George Jetson.
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