Magic Highways USA
on December 2, 2009 at 3:57 pmThis Disney film from 1958 perfectly captures the optimism of Monstru, before the Authority took over.
Seriously, if you read Monster Commute, you ought to see this. It’s so perfect, and helps explain why things turned out how they did in Monstru. (Stuck with steam technology, the massive highways began to decay.)
Via Robert Popper
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Highway escalators! Can’t wait for those.
I love this film.
Where’s my atomic powered Studebaker?!
Wow, we failed on all this amazing car tech. Where is our Firetruck/Police Car/Ambulance plane!?
I dunno, but I like it.
What an astounding combination of the feasible, the fulfilled and the farcical. All of that 1950s optimism… wow.
I remember a Warner Bros. cartoon on the house of the future. It had radish de-burpers!
They did such a nice job on the Monstru backstory. I can’t believe how well it fits.
Even the style of the artwork fits. It’s fabulous.
The office building with the parking spots right outside each office reminds me of an article I read by an engineering professor. He talked about how he had a class where each year they would pick and idea and work on the details of how to make it work. Apparently in the early 80s some students hit on the old SF idea of automated city wide delivery tunnels. They studied everything from conveyor belts to pneumatic tubes, looked for dead simple and reliable methods to address them (consider, it needed to be as automated as possible, with early 80s technology), and even worked out economic details regarding the cost of building and who might use it.
Unlike some of the ideas in the video they concluded that the only true obstacles were social/political rather than economic. They concluded that if someone had pushed hard enough in the 60s or early 70s and got one built in a major city then the technology would probably have spread. But by the late 70s you’d have government regulators saying, “So, how are you going to keep a wacko from sending someone a pipe bomb with this?” and require so many layers of risk prevention that it would probably not work and would definitely not be economically competitive. The old, “Risks we grew up with are minimized and new ones feared.” (blah, blah, er, I’ll stop before this gets even more wordier)