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The Jetsons are really Mukokusekinote  and are totally Japanese in ancestry, yet have forgotten their culture.
Think about it. There's no African Americans anywhere to be seen. With that said, the Jetsons may as well be genetically modified Japanese, despite Elroy being blonde, Judy having white hair and George and Jane being redheads. Astro could be an altered Akita Inu, due to his similar appearance to them.
  • What's even more racially confusing is George Jetson's nose. While the rest of the family members have small noses, George's is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb.
  • A possible theme involved is genetics and artificial engineering. The Jetsons all have different hair colors not found in their ancestry and quite possibly Astro could be an Akita Inu that wasn't born naturally and as a result, manufactured by an unknown company.

The series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which the surface has been ravaged.

Think about it for a moment: they have flying cars and sentient robots, but their computers are way outdated, their culture is more primitive, and the Internet is missing.

The truth is that the world the Jetsons live in is a world where the planet was doomed in some way. Now they, and all the other people there, live in these buildings in the sky to protect themselves from the mutants. They don't know how their technology works; they live in a Scavenger World and just try to make the technology of their ancestors run as best they can. The AIs that they use are mixed with their own primitive attempts at computers, creating the odd robots and computers that exist in the series.

Further proof: In one episode, a criminal says he'll be happier going to prison, which is located on the surface.

  • They do show a brief glimpse of the surface in the movie, and it is a polluted mess.
  • About the computers/Internet thing: you DO realize this series was created in the early 1960's, right?
    • It's the future of Fallout.
      • Alternatively, it's the future of Fallout: New Vegas if the Courier sides with Mr. House. He mentions that he has plans to colonize space if the Courier inquires about what he is going to do after he conquers the Mojave.
      • No, it's the future of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
      • No, The Jetsons is right before Fallout
    • This is a Watsonian explanation, we don't need the real life context.
    • You're all wrong. Global warming has flooded the surface.
      • Again, we've seen glimpses of the surface. Even the parts that aren't underwater look gloomy.
      • Source for the glimpses of the surface?
        • A glimpse of the surface is shown at the start of the episode "The Flying Suit"
        • Many shots of the surface appear in S1E21 "Private Property". Like in The Flying Suit, the surface is mostly grass and bushes. It even gives the exact height of a building, comparable to the height of Spacely Sprockets, Inc., as 2,200.5 feet.
        • Many episodes in the first season show the surface. In S1E23 "TV or Not TV", we also see Mr. Spacely's cabin in the wooded mountains.
  • The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones has them go back to the past, and George says: "That's grass. I read about it in ancient history". They've never seen grass!
  • In some episodes, you see the surface and it's fine. Seems like the movie (where it was polluted) and the show (where it's not) are different continuities.
    • Consider that the two may not be mutually exclusive. It's entirely plausible that there are places on the surface that are unharmed and kept as nature preserves, while other places are uninhabitable wasteland.

Addition to the above theory: the apocalyptic event was a botched Cuban Missile Crisis.
It would fit with the context of when the show first aired for it to be World War III: this was during the Cold War, 1962-3. When did the Cuban Missile Crisis occur: 1963. The Jetsons may be what might have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned the Cold War hot. The reason we've only seen white-bred Americans is because their ancestors were the only ones in a wealthy-enough class to escape. The sky cities are a secret project by the government to deal with the worst-cased scenario.

How did it happen? Who knows. But we might want to start checking the background of old Flintstones cartoons for big metal poles.
  • Jossed in the Made-for-TV Movie The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones. The Flintstones canonically exist in the Jetsons' past.
    • Or alternatively, the people in the Flintstones are actually descendants of people from the Jetsons' future who escaped their decaying world by travelling back in time. All the talking dinosaurs were created through bioengineering to serve them.
      • This could also explain why the Flintstones' technology is basically a "stone age" version of modern technology (okay, 1960s), rather than actual Stone Age tech. There's been some kind of apocalypse after the events shown in The Jetsons (perhaps a meteor strike or nuclear war), and they're just trying to rebuild up to the level they once knew.
    • Or alternatively, Elroy screwed up, and what he thought was a time machine is actually a transporter which got them to the planet's surface.
    • Alternatively, they take place back in the past, but not in the Stone Age. See the above: The Flintstones could be set on the Earth before it became nigh-uninhabitable.
  • If this is the case (and Elroy's time machine really did just send them to the ground), then maybe their planet is really a Feral World in Warhammer 40,000? The Jetsons' magic sky castles can be the home of the nobility who govern the planet, while the primitive surface communities are Space Marine recruitment areas. Think about it, if Bam Bam isn't going to be prime Astartes material when he grows up, then i don't know who is. This also adds the possibility that Gazoo is a xeno hiding from the Imperium and decided he might as well screw with the primitives.
  • The Flitstones are future Amish!
  • But...how does that explain the presence of prehistoric/extinct creatures (mammoths, saber-toothed cats, dinosaurs, dodos, etc) on The Flintstones? No one ever seems to take that into consideration with these "Flintstones takes place After The End" theories.
    • They're all Jurassic Park-style clones that escaped from their zoos/servitude during whatever apocalypse wiped out the Jetsons' society, and went out on their own.

Cogswell is a descendant of Mr. Slate.
They look exactly alike. In an episode of The Flintstones where Gazoo sends the gang to the Jetsons-like future, they meet a descendant of Fred's boss Mr. Slate who almost dresses like Cogswell.
  • This becomes especially obvious if you watch The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, which features both characters with the similarity between the two never noted.
    • Or Cogswell IS Mr. Slate.
    • Or Mr. Slate is a descendant of Cogswell (see the post-apocalyptic world WMG above)

Mr. Spacely is a descendant of Mr. Peebles
Similar to Cogswell and Mr. Slate, Mr. Spacely and Mr. Peebles happen to look almost exactly alike except for hair color. They're even the same stature.

George and Jane had a Shotgun Wedding.
For anyone who can do math, George and Jane may or may not have had Judy when they were teenagers. In this case, it would be logical to assume that they were forced to drop out of high school and get married. It would explain a lot. George is stuck in a worthless job because he can't get any other job due to not having a high school diploma. Jane never learned to drive because being pregnant at sixteen didn't give her a chance to gets her license. And Judy spends most of her screen time lusting after boys — clearly she inherited her parents' sexual genes.
  • Unlikely, either way. While H-B didn't go for a family aesthetic exactly (not at first, anyway), they weren't exactly adult oriented either, prime-time airing or not. For this reason, the above would clash with who they were as animation producers, and what kind of shows they usually turned out. The whole age difference between Jane and Judy was likely an accidental oversight on H-B's part.
    • We get to see the courtship and they were indeed dating young, exactly how much time passed between the events Jane mentions and the wedding is unknown.
    • Also, teenage pregnancy hardly prevents someone from getting their driver's license afterwards.

The show takes place in an Alternate History where the Civil Rights movement led to the mass extermination of non-white people.
Notice how there are absolutely no non-white characters in a supposedly futuristic setting (albeit one which currently would be in the past. Also, notice how the only vaguely black character is both a robot and a domestic servant. One could infer that the U.S. government of this timeline responded to the Civil Rights movement by creating huge, skyrise cities and flying cars, transporting all "acceptable" people into them, nuking the surface, and living on in their advanced utopian society served by robots based on their ideal version of other ethnicities.
  • How in the hell is Rosie "vaguely black?" She doesn't look, act or talk like any black person who's ever been seen, heard or told of by third parties anywhere on this planet.
    • She's partly based on the maid from Fibber McGee and Molly, who was ironically played by a white man.
      • I think you're referring to Birdie on The Great Gildersleeve, a spin-off of Fibber McGee and Molly. In any case, The Other Wiki says she's based of Hazel from the series of the same name.
  • Who says they need mass-extermination? You get the same results just by leaving everyone on the ground alive.
  • This troper always thought Rosie was a stereotypical jewbot. Maybe it takes place in a world where the Nazis won WWII and jewish people were turned into robots. and those robots were turned into slaves.
This troper actually came across a dark-skinned character in one episode involving awards so this is less likely.

Judy and Elroy are adopted.
Both parents are redheads, and they have children with blond and white hair?
  • Perhaps Judy or Jane has experimented with hair dye. (It doesn't seem like something a man or young boy would be into.)
    • Jane might dye her hair, or Judy does and Elroy's adopted. Or Jane's got some explaining to do. No matter how you look at it, the point still stands that two naturally redheaded parents cannot have a blond haired child.
    • Maybe Judy and Elroy are mutants. It would fit with the post-apocalyptic earth plot. Radioactive material in the atmosphere created genetic mutations among kids of Judy and Elroy's generation.
    • Or they're test-tube babies. Technology is a recurrent theme in the show, so it would fit for George and Jane to search for assisted reproductive technology in case of one or both of them were sterile. Alternatively, none of them is sterile, but they resorted to genetic manipulation to choose the hair color of their children.

The family and other characters are related to The Flintstones.
Think about it.

The Jetsons' future is the same future Space Ghost takes place in
  • Ok, who here remembers the series Space Stars? Well one of the segments is "Astro and the Space Mutts" where Astro teams up with two other dogs named Cosmo and Dipper, led by their human leader Space Ace as Galactic Police Officers. Anyway there are times Space Ace and Astro interacted with the other "Space Stars" especially Space Ghosts' sidekick Jan. Therefore it's concluded that the Jetsons and Space Ghost... and the Herculoids co-exist as well.ah

Jane lied about being 33.
Maybe she's actually the same age as George and is insecure about her age.

The show is set in the same world as Elysium
The setting of Elysium is a world where the entire Earth has become a barren and toxic slum while the superrich all live in a fancy space station that serves their every need. If technology in Elysium has improved to the point that space colonies are feasible, then maybe homes tall enough to reach the clouds also exist. While the ultra-wealthy live in space, the upper middle class, or the closest thing to it in this world, live in cloud cities to escape the pollution and the plebes.

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