Where, exactly, is Spaceman Jax?

Is Spaceman Jax like Star Wars – set in a galaxy far, far away?

Over sixty years have passed since Spaceman Jax and the Galactic Adventures first premiered on TV (and then later, comics) and with each year that passes it’s always interesting to see how close we’ve come to Jax’s world in terms of science and technology. Spaceman Jax is set in Star Year 6354 ¾, of course, so if their measurement of a year is the same as ours we still have a long way to go before we catch up. However, depending on which galaxy Spaceman Jax calls home, we may be a long way away in more ways than one.

With more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe, it’s more than likely that Jax is causing trouble in some other galaxy altogether. Neither the show nor the comics ever mention the Earth, and no planet is shown with our distinctive arrangement of continents. And with the exception of the fan club pins, no reference is ever made to any of the planets in our solar system or any stellar body humans have observed. However, with somewhere between 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, it is still possible that Spaceman Jax is zooming around somewhere in our own backyard. For fans who think Spaceman Jax might be a future ancestor of one of us humans (heck, I’ve got a couple of family members who exhibit his particular brand of ‘spacey’), there are some theories that could offer support.

Considering that the show was created during the atomic age of the early 1960s, with fears of the destructive power of the H-bomb running high, it’s possible that in the show’s timeline the Earth was destroyed – just as Spaceman Jax’s home planet Tiberion 3 had been destroyed in a tug-of-war over its precious resources. In that case, perhaps the Earth’s absence in storylines is simply because after four thousand years, the rest of the galaxy has simply forgotten this piece of history.

Another theory explaining where the Earth is in the Spaceman Jax galaxy is that is there all along, just going under another name. Tarloc, the show’s greedy industrialist bad guy, uses the profits from his Tarloc Industries to buy up planets to exploit their resources. Each planet that he buys, he renames after himself (Tarloc XVIII or Tarloc XIX, for example. It sounds a little self-centered, but it’s pretty darn cost-effective. So perhaps the Earth was swallowed up in his galactic land grab, and by 6354 ¾ we’re now known as Tarloc XXVII.

Of course, every time I float these theories I get an inbox full of mail reminding me that it was only a cartoon, after all, and that I’m over-thinking it. (Can’t you just hear Jay Bernard, voice of Spaceman Jax, shouting that in a Shatner-esque way?) But where’s the fun in life if you don’t let yourself get carried away from time to time and take a few silly things very seriously?