Disneyland - 4.26 - Magic Highway U.S.A.

Walt Disney began hosting his own television show for ABC in 1954 in an unusual contract: Disney provided ABC with a weekly hour-long television program in exchange for funding for the construction of Disneyland. As a result, the television show was also originally named Disneyland. The anthology series has since gone through a number of name changes over the years: Walt Disney Presents, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, The Wonderful World of Disney, Disney's Wonderful World, Walt Disney, The Disney Sunday Movie, and The Magical World of Disney. The series spanned an incredible 54 years—13 seasons of which were hosted by Walt Disney, himself.

The theme of this is the significance of the American highway, featuring the history of motoring, which explains that to drive the first cars was quite an adventure in itself, due to awful roads (which back then were not much more than rutted wagon paths) and the scarcity of fuel supplies and spare parts, not to mention the lack of useful maps and signposts, resulting in short drives turning into day-long affairs.

Aired on Wednesday, May 14th, 1958 on ABC at 7:30pm
Aired on Wednesday, July 30th, 1958 on ABC at 7:30pm
Aired on Sunday, July 29th, 1962 on NBC at 7:30pm (under the heading of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color)

• Category

  Film & Animation

[fmhyt]

Just watched this. Brings back memories. The HD is really nice but I am puzzled why the opening is clipped off and there are the 2 vertical whitish "border lines" not in any of your other Disney uploads. It kind of mars the presentation.

[Disneytv4me]

Kind sir, I find it amusing that you should have such high expectations of quality for my videos! I'll take it as a compliment. This particular video was transferred from a VHS tape. It was scanned in 480i and later upscaled to 1080p. However, because the source material was of less-than-perfect quality, the HD transfer is likewise less than ideal.

[korgulon]

The past sure was optimistic about the future. Wish they were here to see how badly it turned out.

[Disneytv4me]

Walt Disney was the eternal optimist. People view the world with far too much pessimism these days.

[Nick Oberly]

I love how in iron man they copied this with tony's dad.

[ebirdmi]

Did anyone else notice how similar the future portion of this is to the videos of the future currently used at the end of Spaceship Earth?

[jinpayne]

Yeah, the Howard Stark/Walt Disney comparisons were interesting except that Iron Man 2 more took the Epcot video Walt made than this one

[Sean Greene]

everything was predicted in that film but quite a bit was believe it or not.

[Sean Greene]

Well it seem Walt got a few things right GPS and possibly drive less cars as GOOGLE wants to make them by 2018 and even the road technology.

Yes it may all look to futuristic but you know what it seems he got some of these other things right of how our world revolves around technology even in Back To The Future Part II you can spot some things that have already been predicted already believe me or not take your time watching it and I guarantee it hey that's already here but yes not

[fmhyt]

Hi. Thanks for the reply and explanation. I enjoyed watching many of your Disney HD offerings. They are superior in quality to most of the other Disney related clips, etc. that are posted. They brought back fond memories of when I was a kid. I just noticed the "defects" present in this video that were not present in your other videos - and was curious if it was just a bad upload or something, or a bad copy from your original source material, etc..

[imagineerboi]

35:06 BEST IDEA EVER. Am I right guys?

[SuperStarhawk]

I'm sad that this world of tomorrow never happened, why we live in a dirty used future instead of a zeerust utopia will forever be a mystery, but alot of the things predicted in this video is a reality in some way or another.

[Rafael Lopez]

I find this video enterainting yet educational.