So we learned last week that the word panorama originally referred to the Imax 360 of the 19th century, and only subsequently did the suffix -orama get applied as an indicator of great scale and awesomeness. Keep this in mind as I tell you about the 1939 World's Fair's Futurama - the awesomest thing to be called Futurama until that other Futurama.
The Futurama was, first of all, the grand-daddy of the Disney-style dark ride: a narrated trip in moving seats through a vivid diorama (there's that suffix again), in this case depicting the world in twenty years, as envisioned by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. The principal feature of this world is the existence of an interstate highway system - build us these roads, GM told taxpayers, and we'll sell you the cars to drive on them. The thing is that although GM's argument worked, we didn't follow their instructions very well. Bel Geddes designed a utopic highway system that was carefully calibrated for ideal traffic flow - the rural elevated highways depicted in the early parts of the ride have seven lanes, with two transition lanes on a lower level, bringing drivers safely from 25 to 50 to a cruising speed of 100 mph(!).
But of course, the system we actually built was not so idyllic. Dan Howland of The Journal of Ride Theory sums it up in one of my favorite quotes on the topic: "If we lived in the Futurama, we'd be home by now."
I highly recommend this film of the Futurama itself: http://www.archive.org/details/ToNewHor1940 Highlights include the dirigible hanger in the airport (floating in a pool of water, so it can easily rotate to suit the wind direction!), and the odd reference to the Gloria Patri at the end. If you watch it, please talk to me about it - we didn't talk about it at all in class, so it is not out of my system.
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