em The Jetsons /em , Now 60 Years Old, Is Iconic. That's a Problem.

On the evening of Sunday, Sept. 23, 1962, millions of American families finished their dinners, turned on their televisions and were introduced to The Jetsons, a cartoon sitcom produced by the legendary team of Hanna-Barbera. Set in 2062, The Jetsons captured the technological optimism of the time and projected it into a space-age, gadget-fueled vision of the future, inviting its viewers to imagine the dazzling possibilities that the current wave of technological achievement could one day realize. In the end, The Jetsons was a rather tame, pedestrian sitcom about a family that reinforced traditional gender and family roles, knew little of the social issues of the time (it was, for example, unbearably white), and effectively glorified the consumerist, suburban lifestyle. But as a template for a technology-driven American future, it was no less than iconic. The Jetsons debuted five years after the Soviets had launched Sputnik, four years after the opening of the first commercial nuclear power plant in the U.S., and 16 months after President John F. Kennedy set a goal of putting a man on the moon by the decade's end. Fifteen years earlier, scientists at AT&T's Bell Labs invented the transistor, and soon after, miniature (by contemporary standards) transistor radios were found in many households.