If you are over 55 and grew up watching the original Star Trek series with Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock and William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk then you also had The Jetsons and Dick Tracy in your TV and comic strip repertoire. In all of these genres there were incredible gadgets that made life ridiculously amazing and enabled our young impressionable minds to travel to the outer galaxies of our imagination. But somewhere along the line the children of that generation grew up and developed technologically advanced gadgets that have become so much a part of our daily lives now that I sometimes have trouble reconciling reality with science fiction. Yes, you can be proud to be part of a generation that transitioned form the manual typewriter to the tablet, or from a FOB watch to the smart watch because it has been a hell of a jump!
Let’s start with the oldest one, the original Dick Tracy comic strip, first launched in 1938. The intrepid detective who always had us on the verge of our seats with cliffhangers had a two-way wrist communicator that was introduced in 1946, several decades ahead of his time. Some little boy never forgot this and eventually developed the smart watch that many of us wear today. Dick Tracy would have solved a lot more crimes if he had one!
Star Trek fuelled many of our childhoods with outer space adventures and encounters with aliens, but let’s look at the original Star Trek series released in 1966. Onboard the Starship Enterprise was a holodeck, basically a room where a crew member could enter and program a scene, era, character, and storyline of their choice. Beginning to sound familiar? It should because we now virtual reality glasses and headsets that transport you to another dimension without ever leaving your room!
Remember the little Star Trek communicators pinned to the uniforms of the crew when they teleported down to another planet or another ship? We don’t have them pinned to our clothes but we do have the air pots and other wireless earphones that keep us in touch with the world, and they are even small than the Star Trek issues! Along the same lines, you will remember their visual communicators either on small screens on their desk or that beamed to the giant screens on the flight deck. We have have laptops, tablets and large wall monitors that do the exact same thing and got us all through the pandemic years! Lastly the Star Trek crew, especially the medical team led by Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, had something called the tricorder that scanned, recorded, and performed data analysis. We all carry one nowadays, but we just call it an iPhone or Android.
Then came The Jetsons, with George, Jane, Judy, Elroy, their dog Astro and the very efficient and grumpily sarcastic robot housekeeper Rosie. Created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, this space age family went about the normal family life in a futuristic world where they used flying vehicles instead of cars, had a super fast elevator to get to and from their space ships, and a floating diner. All you have to do is call up some episodes on YouTube for a trip down memory lane! The Jetson supersonic elevator already exists in our present day in the form of the voice-activated smart elevators, developed primarily to eliminate the spread of germs. When I entered one for the first time I was at a complete loss and to be perfectly honest, scared. We may not have Rosie robots to replace human housekeepers and cleaning crews yet, but we do have smaller house robots already such as the Roomba vacuum cleaners!
Yes, you most certainly can and should shake your head in wonder because the science stopped being fiction somewhere along the line. It just goes to prove that you should never give up on your ideas, dreams, and creativity.
FrogDiva Thoughts 