“An excerpt from the 1958 Disneyland TV Show episode entitled Magic Highway USA. In this last part of the show, an exploration into possible future Transportation technologies is made. It’s hard to believe how little we’ve accomplished on this front since 1958, and how limited the scope for imagining such future technologies has become. Witness an artifact from a time where the future was greeted with optimism. Note the striking animation style here, achieved with fairly limited animation and spectacular layouts.”
That was the video caption from YouTube. The video is thought provoking (perhaps even disturbing) from a variety of perspectives. It’s far more unbelievable now than it was in 1958. The futuristic portion of the video starts at 39:00. Thanks to Dan Segal for sharing the link.
Fascinating! Too bad only the rear backup camera ever came to fruition from this film. I had a great laugh watching it. The “punch cards” for programmed driving was humorous.
Overall. I think they must have hijacked a Jetson’s episode, or Hanna-Barbara Cartoons watched this film as inspiration. I saw many Jetson’s cues in this!!! LOL!
Mark, I think this came out a couple of years before the Jetsons. We all thought this was possible back then. Unfortunately, there are people in this world that would destroy the many marvels illustrated in this film as fast as we built them. None of this will ever become fact…what a shame.
Magic Highway USA seems to build on Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Broadacre City, a quite deliberately pro-sprawl “vast suburban landscape, seemingly scattered across an entire continent” if in manageable modules:
http://arkinetblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/revisiting-utopias-broadacre-city-by-frank-lloyd-wright/
The future is in public transit anyway. Urbanization can be slowed with more remote work, but not turned back. There simply isn’t enough urban real estate to handle the traffic and parking if everyone drove a private auto to work every day. I won’t say the private auto is going away, but its role in the future will be different.