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Pop Culture

The future is here. Internet sleuths believe George Jetson was probably born in July 2022.

Get ready for flying cars.

george jetson birthday, the jetsons, george jetson age

Hanna-Barbera's "The Jetsons" debuted in 1962.

When people talk about visions of the future, “The Jetsons” is often the go-to reference. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon ran for one season of 24 episodes in 1962 and 1963 as a follow-up to “The Flintstones,” a show about people living in a prehistoric age.

“The Jetsons” was later rebooted for another 51 episodes from 1985 to 1987, as IMDB tells us.

“The Jetsons” depicts a future world where we have talking robot maids, flying cars and bathrooms equipped with automatic toothbrushes. What’s interesting is that the future is neither dystopian nor utopian.

“The Jetsons” is based on the idea that even though humanity has evolved technologically, George Jetson still has to deal with the same family and career troubles that any other sit-com dad had in the ‘60s.

In the world of "The Jetsons," the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.


“We still speak about the future in Jetsons terms,” Jared Bahir Browsh, author of the 2021 book “Hanna-Barbera: A History,” told The New York Post. “A show that originally ran for one season had such an impact on the way we see our culture and our lives.”

A Twitter user by the name of Brendan Kergin went viral recently for pointing out that George Jetson was probably born on Sunday, July 31, 2022. The announcement of the birth of the most famous man of the future felt to many like a defining milestone in human history. Have we finally reached the future? Have we begun our march toward true progress as a species?

In Kergin’s original tweet, “The Jetsons” page on Wikipedia claimed he was born on July 31, 2022. Since then, the page has been changed to 2022, with no specific date given.

According to Snopes, the show debuted in 1962 and was set 100 years in the future. In an episode that ran in the first year, George claims to be 40 years old, putting the year of his birth firmly in 2022.

On a deeper level, that means that, as a species, we have 40 years to get our quality of life up to Jetsons’ standards.


For those who are fretting that humanity has veered off course and is far from hitting the cartoon’s timeline, there is hope. Just think about how far technology has come in the past 40 years.

But a lot of people still want to know why we don't have flying cars yet.

If George Jetson was just born, then his grandfather, Montague Jetson, is in our midst.

That also means that George's boss, Mr. Spacely, is probably a pre-teen right now.

One Twitter user found something interesting in the show's timeline regarding the birth of the Jetsons' daughter, Judy.

A few people thought the Jetsons' world makes total sense given today's developments.

We’ve come close to re-creating a lot of technology that appeared in “The Jetsons.” We may not have sassy talking robot maids, but we do have Roombas that automatically keep the house tidy. We also have video calls, flat-screen TVs, and TV watches.

In the end, "The Jetsons" may serve as a warning to be careful about how we envision our future because we might just get it.

“[“The Jetsons”] speaks to this idea that as human beings we’ll always have something to complain about,” Danny Graydon, author of “The Jetsons: The Official Guide to the Cartoon Classic,” told The New York Post. “One of the problems with utopia, if you create a perfect world, that world might be quite boring.”

The gaze of the approving Boomer.

Over the past few years, Baby Boomers (1946 to 1964) have been getting a lot of grief from the generations that came after them, Gen X (1965 to 1980), Millenials (1981 to 1996), and now, Gen Z (1997 to 2012). Their grievances include environmental destruction, wealth hoarding, political polarization, and being judgemental when they don’t understand how hard it is for younger people to make it in America these days.

Every Baby Boomer is different, so it's wrong to paint them all with a broad brush. But it’s undeniable that each generation shares common values, and some are bound to come into conflict.

However, life in 2023 isn’t without its annoyances. Many that came about after the technological revolution put a phone in everyone’s hands and brought a whole new host of problems. Add the younger generations' hands-on approach to child rearing and penchant for outrage, and a lot of moden life has become insufferanble.

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