Beyond ‘The Jetsons’: A New Vision of a Fantastic Future That Never Was

My fellow pro-growth Up Wingers,

Our stories about the future matter. As I write in my 2023 book, science fiction plays a crucial role in propelling technological progress and cultivating a society’s risk-taking ethos.

Yes, dystopian narratives have dominated screens and bookshelves for the past half-century of the Great Downshift. But a countervailing movement in recent years merits attention. The Martian celebrate scientific ingenuity, while For All Mankind imagines an alternative history where the postwar Space Race never ended, spurring earlier development of smartphones and fusion power.

Even bleaker fare can serve progress-oriented ends. Interstellar presents a cautionary tale of a society that has forsaken technological ambition, facing extinction after abandoning space exploration.

Yet optimistic narratives still remain frustratingly scarce. And that’s especially unfortunate given the changing tech landscape. As artificial intelligence, low-cost spaceflight, and biotechnology — not to mention a nuclear energy revival — herald what may be the most significant technological disruption since the Industrial Revolution, America and the West desperately need compelling visions of progress.

The current moment, when decisions about emerging technologies will shape decades to come, cries out for a renaissance in techno-optimistic storytelling. As such, I’m hoping The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a Marvel Cinematic Universe film scheduled for a July release, gives us a massive dose of Space Age Futurism and, to riff off social media, shows “what they took from us.” The teaser trailer released on Tuesday suggests I won’t be disappointed.

Marvel goes Googie

From the opening shot of the superhero team’s living area (see image below) in their skyscraper headquarters to their swept-wing rocket to an altered 1960s Manhattan skyline, we are shown a thoroughly Up Wing world. As with the The Jetsons — the 1962 cartoon that’s arguably the most influential futurist work of the twentieth century — Fantastic Four is infused with the real-world Googie aesthetic, a style that projected mid-century American optimism through Atomic and Space Age flourishes: stylized atoms, boomerangs, and parabolas.

Googie architecture emerged from 1930s Southern California’s car culture, where businesses needed eye-catching designs visible from highways. The style featured the dramatic curves and futuristic elements that by the 1950s perfectly captured the era’s fascination with space exploration and rapid tech advance. This aesthetic shaped iconic structures like the LAX Theme Building and early McDonald’s restaurants.

When people talk about a retro-futuristic vibe, they typically mean it has big Googie energy. “Googie is undeniably the super-aesthetic of 1950s and ’60s American retro-futurism — a time when America was flush with cash and ready to deliver the technological possibilities that had been promised during WWII,” explains retro-futurism historian Matt Novak.

And as architectural historian Alan Hess told Surface in 2022:

[Googie] didn’t only capture the future, but it brought it in a meaningful way to people. And you see this in interest in these futuristic ideas not only in architecture or car design, but in cartoons like The Jetsons and places like amusement parks—in advertisements, in magazines, and so forth, certainly in the movies as well. This interest, this intrigue, this appeal of living in the future just went all across the culture.

Downshift to dystopia

But by the start of the 1970s, Hess explains, the architectural culture had changed, telling Novak:

The interest in the future, the gee-whiz factor about plastics and nuclear power and space flight, travel to the moon, all of these things that had been new and exciting in the 1950s had become more mundane — we landed on the moon in 1969 and then it was over. And also at that time new ideas came in — specifically the ecology movement which began to say that we do have limits on how we can use our resources. And an interest in more lower-scale, residential, traditional, architecture came into fashion. You see this transition in tastes in popular culture I think most vividly in the change of the McDonald’s prototype. In 1953 the prototype was Googie all the way — it was bright, shiny, bold colors, big arches, very dynamic upswept roof, neon, etc. …”

Those “new ideas” that Hess mentions had an impact beyond architectural aesthetics. By promoting an ideology that viewed material abundance and human ambition as inherently self-destructive, America’s environmental movement helped engineer the Great Downshift in the pace of economic and tech progress. It birthed a regulatory regime, anchored by the National Environmental Policy Act and other early 1970s federal laws, that made building infrastructure fiendishly difficult. Nuclear power plants, transport systems, and other large projects became mired in endless delays and spiraling costs.

These Down Wing thinkers also fostered a broader cultural pessimism about tech progress, replacing the earlier Atomic and Space Age optimism with a risk-averse, scarcity-driven view that favored small-scale and local development over ambitious technological systems.

This double-punch — regulatory sclerosis combined with cultural technophobia — helped transform America from a country that dreamed of flying cars to one that struggles to build a subway station. For a country at technology’s frontier, where growth requires innovation, the cost has been immense: the loss of a dazzling future that never was. Supervillains couldn’t have done more damage.

Dreams deferred, revived

The original Jetsons, which first aired in September 1962, ran for just a single, 24-episode season. Yet it permanently lodged itself in the American imagination. Though Marvel’s Fantastic Four by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee preceded the show by ten months, that comic’s cosmic adventurers never quite captured the public’s vision of tomorrow as thoroughly as the Jetson family’s flying cars and robot maids. The new FF film is the third major attempt at a successful cinematic version.

Yet as modern technology finally catches up with yesterday’s dreams — from AI assistants to flying taxis — our culture could use a fresh vehicle for retro-futurism. The new Fantastic Four film might do the trick. Rather than merely mining nostalgia, it could remind audiences how their grandparents once imagined the future, now that some of those imaginings are becoming reality. A dash of Space Age idealism that’s more than just a genre or aesthetic might be just what 2025 America needs.