A Dark ‘Jetsons’ Fan Theory Makes Their World Much Bleaker
If Hanna-Barbera produced The Jetsons and The Flintstones today, they’d be packaged as different “eras” of the same franchise, possibly even titled like that Yellowstone business. Who wouldn’t want to tune in Tuesday nights for 2062 and Thursdays for 10,000 B.C.?
According to one theory, however, those aren’t the years they took place at all. In fact, they might share a lot more than a corporate universe.
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In 2014, one Redditor whose name has been lost to time shared a video on the “fan theories” subreddit. The contents of that video aren’t important; what is is that it got the Redditor thinking about time in the Jetsons universe. Like, why do they know about the Beatles? No one denies that “Something” slaps, but it would be like “Dixie” to them. Why do they have a maid and not just a system of automatic cleaning devices? For that matter, how do the Flintstones have a vacuum cleaner, albeit a mammoth-powered one? Why do they have a dino car, aside from it being sick as hell? How do they know enough about cars to think of that? Wait, why do they exist alongside dinosaurs at all? What timeline is this?!?!
That’s what this Redditor wanted to explain: The Jetsons and the Flintstones didn’t live in different timelines. They both exist in a near-future following a global extinction event that sent the rich fleeing for the skies while the rest of humanity was plunged back into the Stone Age. The residents of Orbit City may not even be aware of the population down below; in 1990’s Jetsons: The Movie, it’s explained that pernicious smog keeps society away from the Earth’s surface, but with everyone too far away to confirm it, that could be propaganda from the oligarchic overlords. When The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones in 1987, it’s not because Elroy invented a time machine — he just beamed them down.
This also explains, according to the Redditor, why we never see the ground in The Jetsons, “everything from schools, jobs and even vacations are always on large platforms or even off-planet,” while “it seems that every time (characters on The Flintstones) send up something like a ‘spacecraft’ or other flying object, it's never seen again,” maybe because “the ‘sky people’ are intercepting them and destroying them, just out of sight of the primitive people below,” or “maybe an invisible shield surrounds the upper civilization, keeping the lower civilization from asking too many questions.”
It doesn’t explain the dinosaurs, but you know some billionaire is out there right now trying to do a Jurassic Park that they definitely won’t be allowed to bring into the sky. They’re always misunderstanding movies.
