by G. Jack Urso
From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.
This short
segment from The Wonderful World of Disney episode “Magic Highway U.S.A.,”
original airdate May 14, 1958, gives viewers a peak into what was projected to
be the future of transportation. In the immediate years following World War II,
the imagination of engineers and city planners went wild looking ahead and
projecting how technology might develop.
Given that we
went from the first airplane to jets and atomic bombs within a 40-year span,
the predictions took that calculus to anticipate future developments. Some were
way off base, such as the evolution from gasoline engines to gas turbines for
automobiles (very loud and not fuel efficient), but others, such as a proximity
alert system with a head's up display (here described as a radar system), rear-view cameras, and a data feed with road and weather
conditions, a little more spot-on. The glories of a nationwide highway,
only then just being built across America in the 1950s, are touted as
important to the future of commercial and personal transportation.
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| A collage of scenes from Magic Highway U.S.A. |
Baby Boomers
will recognize the voice of narrator Marvin Miller, who had a long acting
career and performed in many Hanna-Barbera and Filmation cartoons during the
1960s and later. Walt Disney, who hosted this episode, had an interest in promoting the planned communities of the
future, and developed the concept that culminated in EPCOT, the Experimental
Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, which Disney envisioned and was later brought
to life at Disney World in 1982.
Speaking of Hanna-Barbera, one can't help but notice similarities between the design of some of the buildings and vehicles in “Magic Highway U.S.A.,” and The Jetsons and wonder if the H-B animators drew some inspiration for the classic animated TV series from this episode.
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| The Jetsons. |
Aeolus 13 Umbra often explores how the past envisioned the future in numerous media reviews in the
Retro-Vision listing of articles under the Historical Essay tab on top this page, such as The Futurists: CBS News — McGraw Hill Educational Film (1967),
The Westinghouse Total Electric Home (1960), and Year 1999 A.D. (1967).
Technology has developed along many of the lines discussed in this segment, as
well as far beyond anything they could imagine. While the predictions range
from eerily prescient to wildly off base, these prophetic pieces give an
insight into the hopes and dreams of the era, which were far more
optimistic than how it actually turned out.
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