Kitchen, Dining, Appliances… playlist:
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A housewife in the “Futurama” GM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair dreams of her kitchen of the future. Some music had to be deleted from the midst of this film due to a bogus copyright claim.
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Futurama was an exhibit/ride at the 1939 New York World’s Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes that presented a possible model of the world 20 years into the future (1959–60). Sponsored by the General Motors Corporation, the installation was characterized by its automated highways and vast suburbs…
Overview
Compared to other “visions of the future,” Bel Geddes’ was rather achievable—the most advanced technology posited was the automated highway system, of which General Motors built a working prototype by 1960.
Futurama is widely held to have first introduced the general American public to the concept of a network of expressways connecting the nation. It provided a direct connection between the streamlined style which was popular in America between 1928 and 1938, and the concept of steady-flow which appeared in street and highway design in the same period…
The Futurama exhibition was subsequently presented as one of the 1939 New York World Fair’s main attractions, as it was the “number-one hit show”. It captured the fancy of the public and critics alike, with journalists competing to find adequate words to convey Bel Gedde’s “ingenuity”, “daring”, “showmanship” and “genius”. One neutral survey of 1000 departing fairgoers awarded the General Motors exhibit 39.4 points to only 8.5 points for second place Ford as the most interesting exhibit…
1964 version
The General Motors pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair included a ride that was also known as “Futurama”, or “Futurama II”…
