Magic Highway USA (HQ)

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.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Transportation
• Highways
• Retro
• Paleo
• Futurism
• Cars
• Design
• Technology
• Tomorrowland
• Disney
• Animation
• 50's

[Surricks]

They seemed to think the world would be mostly depopulated, and that passenger trains would not exist.

[GreeboWorshipper]

@Surricks The lack of people is a product of the modern art style combined with the frugal nature of animation for television. I'd recommend looking at the other programs Disney produced for the Tomorrowland series of TV shows before deriving some sort of social statement.

Passenger trains aren't mentioned because this vision of the future focuses on highways. Airplanes, motorcycles, commuter trains.and a multitude of other methods of transportation also aren't shown.

[sw0rdf1sh2326]

Lol, underwater highway....anybody how much the Big Dig cost? Otherwise, not...too off-the-wall predictions.

(and then peak oil hit, and this world was thrown into chaos)

[GreeboWorshipper]

@sw0rdf1sh2326 Please learn to separate the era in which this was made with the actual predictions going on in the video. Most of this technology assumes the use of atomic power or as yet undiscovered energy sources...not fossil fuels.

[DonCorleone87]

I love watching these future concept vids..... I mean this was envisioned by Walt Disney and other brilliant minds in the 1950s and look how far we've come. We have highways, GPS, cruise control (setting driving speed), and in some luxury cars there are video screens projecting the rear of the car. Just shows you the imagination of human beings, I love it.

[bobmarleyt3]

I don't hate these vids, i love them for their novelty value, they were so optimistic back then

[tzone92]

I'm surprised they thought we would focus so much on the highways. Instead of improving travel and highways, we have improved telecommunications so as to be anywhere in the world at once, electronically.

[PhobotechNG]

Well...we do have highways with color coded signs, sort of. There IS Careflight for severe instances. Annnnd GPS navigation.

[krazislav]

Some of these are silly, but I wonder if anyone will watch this in five or seven hundred years and comment at the automated infrastructure autobuilder, because it's very similar in concept to what they use, just as we do on the automatic traffic information service. ;)

[Employerus]

Feels like Back to The Past & Away with the Future.

[johnspencefareal420]

@kruppenstein "Knowing the naive optimism of the era"

You don't

[zoo1619]

We have the means for that last car they showed at 7:07. Somebody made a disk that could do that a few weeks ago. If only oil companies cared more about the future...

[Jakezing]

@rockdontrun the funny thing is we actually are getting this stufff, just not so zeerust-tic

[pavcueto]

@rockdontrun You said "we need to stop listening to what animators and filmmakers say the future is going to be like", but really...

How many scientist are working now trying to get the things they saw in movies or TV shows? Just look how in Japan are working in robots, invisible cloaks like "Ghost in the Shell" (not so old). Maybe cellphones was made by people who liked the bond's devices, and just said "why don't make one like this for us"?

[gsc2011]

It is really amazing how accurate so many of their predictions for the future are. Ithe interstate network, air ambulance, radaptive cruise control, suburbs, etc. It only took 50 years but we finally got there!