The World of Tomorrow
Director:
Lance Bird & Tom Johnson
Year: 1984
Rating: 6.0
A melancholy look backwards at the New York World's Fair of 1939 narrated
by Jason Robards. It was a remarkable accomplishment in the middle of the
Great Depression as a group of wealthy businessmen got together in hopes
that it would be a boost to morale and the economy in those dire times. They
started planning it in 1935 and it was ready for opening on April 30th, 1939.
The space it took up in Flushing, Queens was huge (1,200 acres) and
had been an ash dump that they first had to clean up. The head of the effort
Grover Whalen then went around the world and to corporations to have them
commit to building a Pavilion to showcase their country or products.
The theme was the future - not just in the products displayed but in
the architecture that was very modernistic, art deco looking - the stuff
of sci-fi films and comic books. Same with the products - the cars, the trains,
the robots, the kitchens full of appliances, a gigantic model of a city of
the future, cars that moved on tracks for safety, small cars that used little
gas and the introduction of television. It wasn't all science and innovation
though - there was also loads of entertainment for everyone. A rides park
(that went to Coney Island after the Fair), entertainers, big bands you could
dance to, Bill Bojangles Robinson to watch, Einstein to listen to, a show
right out of Esther Williams with swarms of diving girls, other shows with
girls barely covering their breasts with see-through pasties. There was everything
to see at the World's Fair. For a 35 cent entry fee. This documentary collected
an incredible amount of video - some official, some from home movies and
it looks amazing. The 1964 World's Fair was held on the same site.
There is also a display of the air force fighting machines. Two winged planes
barely different from WWI. Everything modernized for the future except our
military. And this is what was overshadowing the Fair. It was so optimistic
about the future but it ran into the present - Germany invading Europe, Japan
- all beginning in 1939 and going beyond the end of the Fair in 1940. Optimism
took a big punch in the face. Though it was actually WWII that took America
out of the Depression and not the Consumerism that the Fair advocated. Could
we even put on something like this today I wonder? Not the covid - just the
optimism, the finances, the dreams of a better future, of grand architecture,
of products that people can see other than the latest I-phone. I doubt it.
