Retrofuture.comHere’s a video I put together of various news clips and other archival space age footage with music by Deodata (Also Sprach Zarathustra) and David Bowie (Starman). Scenes include a GM Futurama in late 1950s, the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair, the Whirlpool Space Kitchen, “1999,” a corporate vision of the future made by Ford-Philco in 1970, a (insert plug here) Space Food Sticks commercial, the Braniff Airlines’ “Air Strip” TV ads, and lots more.
Here’s a video of the second GM Futurama from 1965/65 World’s Fair in Flushing, New York. There’s some truly frightening visions of the future here, none more so than a rainforest-steamrolling machine that instantly paves roads with laser beams. This “journey into the future” is one we luckily never made.
This is an original Retrofuture article from 1999. What GM wouldn’t give for some good publicity today.
These days the name “Futurama” is associated with a cartoon series created by Matt (“The Simpsons”) Groening. Few realize its name is borrowed from a wildly-popular ride at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
That Futurama–the original Futurama–was an unforgettable trip into the brave new world of 1960. Yes, fabulous 1960…who can forget the thrill of exiting off a highway at 50 miles per hour?
Back in 1939, hundreds of thousands were mesmerized by Futurama’s elaborate vision. What drew them in? Gleaming skyscrapers, massive superhighways and promises of greater mobility.
Spectators were exhilarated by the imaginary presentation staged by General Motors. Gliding along in comfortable easy chairs wired for sound, they looked down on the spectacular 35,000 square-foot diorama and learned how giant highway intersections would permit those rapid right and left turns. “Strange? Fantastic? Unbelievable?” asked the narrator, “Remember, this is the world of 1960!”
The calming tones of the narrator were filled with assurance. Doubt was not option in Futurama. “The World of Tomorrow” promised only better days ahead. Futurama followed this script to perfection. Visitors were promised that “abundant sunshine, fresh air, fine green parkways” would blend together seamlessly with dazzling skyscrapers and seven-lane highways. Thanks to the monumental scale of the presentation, even the most-outlandish claim seemed believable.
At the end of the ride, when the awestruck visitors were deposited in a GM showroom and left to contemplate the meaning of it all, they were handed a souvenir button that read: “I have seen the future.” Few disagreed.
I wasn’t there (although, ironically enough, I was born in 1960). My father, who was there, remembers the trip through Futurama as one of the highlights of his childhood.
The real 1960, of course, looked almost nothing like the car-based utopia of Futurama. But that hardly mattered–twenty years later, the ride was already sealed in the public’s imagination. “A modern masterpiece of illusion” writes Joseph P. Corn who authored “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Vision of the American Future,” adding “no futuristic film or exhibit (has) ever been so convincing.”
Futurama was also a spectacularly-effective piece of propaganda for GM. In staging the event, GM hoped fairgoers (read: potential car buyers) would be lured into an idealized fantasy world–not the world of 1939 with its traffic accidents and stop-and-go congestion but a world free of inconvenience and hassles.
“Speed is the cry of our era,” declared the ride’s designer Norman Bel Geddes. And Futurama reflected this belief. Everything about Futurama was streamlined–the curved towers of steel and glass, the futuristic teardrop-shaped automobiles, even the “Highways and Horizons” pavilion that housed the ride.
Bel Geddes’ brilliantly-executed vision struck a popular chord with audiences. With World War II rumbling ominously in the distance, most Americans were willing to suspend disbelief and buy into exhibit’s rosy outlook.
“All eyes to the future,” announced the narrator of Futurama. Colossal highways raced by monumental cityscapes, lush green farmlands rolled through the open countryside. Bel Geddes based his seductive vision on the ideas of architect Le Corbusier and other European modernists from the late 1930s.
Many concepts were amusingly off the mark: floating airports which adjusted in water to shift to the changing wind conditions; highways with curved sides which allowed vehicles to travel at different speeds (four lanes at 50 m.p.h, two lanes at 75 m.p.h, and two lanes at 100 m.p.h.).
In retrospect a few errors in judgment seem so obvious (no mention being made of pollution or the consequences of unchecked progress) but over the years, Futurama’s legend continues to grow. Its reputation, in no small measure, is based on the considerable theatrical flair Bel Geddes brought to the project. Bel Geddes sincerely believed that through cooperative efforts and good planning people could lead better lives.
In 1964, General Motors created an updated Futurama for the follow-up New York World’s Fair. But this time riders were less impressed. They had already seen the future of 1960 and it hadn’t looked anything like the past.
Given the popularity of the recently released Star Trek film and how it’s given a new lease of life to Gene Roddenberry’s franchise, it may signal a revival of optimistic visions of the future is finally upon us. It’s about time.
Roddenberry’s egalitarian utopia was set in the 22nd century but its aspirations were firmly rooted in the issues of its time. Every week, the protagonists altruistically battled the forces of militarism, sexism, racism and every other “ism” network executives would allow at the time.
The series debuted in 1966, an auspicious year for another “ism”: optimism. Popular culture scaled increasingly-bold peaks that year. The Scott Paper company began selling disposable paper dresses for a dollar. The Beatles’ psychedelic “Tomorrow Never Knows” introduced new sounds.Masters and Johnson released “Human Sexual Response,” shattering sexual myths of the past.
The race to the Moon was accelerating in 1966. Feats in space fed a public anxious for change and hungry for fantasy. The sensory overload of the newly-emerging Information Age created a syndrome that Alvin Toffler later dubbed “Future Shock.”
Stanley Kubrick was filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1966. The movie anticipated the discovery of extra-terrestrial life and artificial intelligence. It could happen by 2001…why not?
Art was imitating life in the future. For the first time, photographs were sent back to Earth from the lunar surface by both the Russian and American space programs. The latter’s Surveyor 1, launched on May 30, 1966, employed a TV camera that scanned the surface and transmitted the images of the lunar surface back to Earth.
The panoramas created by the combined images created fascinating fractal collages that were truly otherworldly.
Forty years later the shock and awe of 1966 might seem quaint. That’s the way it ought to be. If we’re going to progress beyond the drawing board of those creaky space age dreams (as depicted so amusingly on the cover of this week’s New Yorker) it will take more successful re-imaginings of the future along the lines of Star Trek.
May they live long and prosper.
Remember 1999? All of those millennial dreams about the bridge to…wherever? That McLuhan-esque fantasy of a peaceful interconnected global village?
It all seemed so imminent in 1999. The economy was booming. The Dow rose daily as the bubble grew bigger. Irrational exuberance was the order of the day.
Proclamations that would seem foolhardy and even dangerously naive were made with great regularity. A lot of hot air about the end of history. No convulsive worldwide conflagrations remained it was argued. Western liberal ideas had triumphed. The phrase pax Americana was uttered unironically in 1999.
Economists promised markets would expand forever so we engorged ourselves. Slaking the thirst of consumers was the job of the select corporate elite. The coming out parties in 1999 were IPO-only. Electronica pulsed as overnight millionaries popped Dom Perignon.
The Y2K crisis loomed but what did it amount to? A piffle, nothing, nada. No cataclysmic electric grid wipeout. In the final analysis, it was a jobs program for geeks.
And speaking of geeks, they ruled in 1999. The gadget-crazy culture we now live in was well on its way to establishing itself. The revenge of the nerds was already nearly complete when Jeff Bezos, the guru of e-commerce, was named Time’s Person of the Year.
Everything was going zoom-zoom in 1999. Especially design. The new VW Bug was all swoopy, as was the futuristic architecture of Frank Gehry.
More than ever, we were wired up. You could buy dog food on the Internet. How great was that? The call centers in India, the plastic factories in China–all were humming along to the tune of “Living the Vida Loca.”
It was a great, big beautiful tomorrow straight out of a Disney animatronic future. Think about the money to be made on real estate (a no brainer). SUVs were safe and sporty. And, hey, why not dig up the backroads of America and build some more malls?
Looking back, virtual had begun to replace reality, just as debt had replaced credit. The signs of change were already evident. A millenium-eve terrorist attack at LAX airport was just barely thwarted. And soon enough the party would be over. The bubble burst in “two thousand zero zero,” the year of the hanging chad, just as Prince had predicted.
With the benefit of history it’s obvious: we were overly optimistic. Still, the feeling was implausibly hopeful at 11:59 PM and 59 seconds on December 31, 1999. Before champagne corks popped and the fizz went flat, back when the future of duct tape and color-coded alerts was blissfully unknown, it was a good year to be alive.
Please share your memories of that annus mirabilis 1999 by leaving a comment.
