The French just banned some employees from responding to work emails after work hours. A city in Sweden is trying out a 30-hour work week in earnest. But while the prospect of working less and enjoying more leisure time used to be the great futuristic promise of midcentury America, today it’s little more than a punchline.
North Korea’s space agency is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a new logo. And the Wall Street Journal fittingly describes its design in retro-futuristic terms: a "Jetsons-era throwback that captures the optimism of the Space Age."
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The restaurant inside an L.A. architectural icon has closed. Sadly, wannabe George Jetsons will no longer be able to pick up a cocktail at Encounter — the now-former restaurant inside LAX’s Theme Building.
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Welcome to the future! a Samsung rep proclaimed during the company’s new product presentation in Berlin yesterday. Yes, something out of sci-fi! he beamed. The rep was wearing the new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, proudly showing it off for the journalists in the room and the tech geeks watching along at home. The future has arrived… again, I suppose.
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On Wednesday there’s an enormous animation art auction in L.A. that includes some gorgeous pop culture history. It will include original animation cels from Fleischer Studios, concept art from Disney legend Mary Blair, and an original production drawing from Winsor McCay’s classic 1914 film Gertie the Dinosaur. There’s even some 1970s and 1980s Jetsons art that should pique the interest of any retrofuture fan. But there’s one thing noticeably absent among the Jetsons pieces: any production cels from the 1962-63 iteration of the show
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Kanye West is making the rounds again claiming that he’s the creative director for a live-action Jetsons movie that’s currently (sort-of, kind-of, not really) in development. Beyond the fact that "creative director" isn’t actually the title for a job on any movie — but something you’d find at an advertising agency — consider this retrofuture blogger skeptical that a Jetsons movie will ever see the light of day.
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It’s already 2013, and we are still pretty far away from flying cars, which were predicted decades ago. Then again, maybe we aren’t. Check out these clever photographs, featuring Jetsons-like hovering cars.
French photographer Renaud Marion captured these photos and tweaked them to make the cars look like they’re floating off the ground. This series of photos are called Air Drive and they’re inspired by how he imagined flying cars would have looked when he was a child.
I hope to see flying cars on the road (sky?) one day, but then again, I can already imagine the accidents – never mind the insurance premiums.
[via Fubiz]
Yesterday, The Jetsons celebrated its 50th birthday. It may seem like we’re living in the future these days, but, half a century after the show’s original 24 episode run, we still don’t have a lot of that juicy future-tech. Here are a couple of the most glaring absences.
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