the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OCCASIONALLY LOOK UP 229
AND STILL, THE DREAM PERSISTS
If you’re looking for a logical expiration date on the American
flying-car fantasy, you might try 1996. That was the year when America
Online launched a series of televi sion commercials that, in a subtly sub-
versive way, heralded the real technology that made the notion of fl ying
cars seem so last century.
The fast-paced spots depicted a modern family embracing the fu-
ture by using computers, the Internet, cell phones, and other communica-
tions technologies to conduct their lives and careers. To score the ads, the
agency that created them, TBWA Chiat/Day New York, convinced AOL
to pay Hanna-Barbera $1 million for the rights to a song that, at one point
in American history, represented a very different view of the future, a
future where every home had a spaceport and fl ying cars folded neatly to
the size of a briefcase. The commercial’s sound track was the theme song
to The Jetsons, and it might well have served as ironic punctuation for a
century of dreaming.
But dreams die hard. Three years later, in 1999, writer Kristina
Stefanova of the Washington Times conducted random man-on- the-street
interviews and asked passersby what marvels they thought the future
might hold. After more than a century of fl ying-car experimentation,
during which even the few that actually got off the ground proved commercially
impractical, two of the six respondents focused on the intriguing
possibility of . . . fl ying cars.