So Tomorrowland wasn’t supposed to be a Disneyland-only thing? You have to wonder whether the Imagineers really did think we’d achieve this kind of transportation utopia, or were fully aware that they were projecting a full-on fiction.
The film seems to blur the line between futurism and science fiction (futurism being an honest attempt to predict). Technology that never arrived aside, one of the the most amazing aspects of this is the fact that it takes no account of the population explosion. These cars have the road as much to themselves in the projected future as they did when the film was made in the 1950s.
Thanks Jeremy
Music: The Clash :: Police & Thieves
What’s amazing is how much they got right.
Cantelevered highway: I70 in Glenwood Canyon.
Decentralization of cities: Sprawl
Synchronized scanning map: GPS
Highly specialized pleasure vehicles: RVs.
Truck-trains: common in Australia
Centralized control: common for conventional railways.
Neatly stacked truck-train units: Shipping Containers
The biggest thing they got wrong, aside from the lack of population congestion, was that they assumed we would be using “futuristic energy sources”. The fact that we’ve stayed on fundamentally 19th century energy sources has sharply limited our progress. This is a favorite topic of mine, as energy is a huge influence on science fiction worlds, and science fiction writers can be awfully inconsistent on the matter.
The gross squandering of resources on the Korean and Vietnam wars also wasted a lot of the potential that film imagines.
They got a lot of the societal pressures surprisingly right – environmental (beauty) preservation, multitasking while driving, availability of data.
It’s an interesting video. Thanks
-Jim