"Just Imagine" Pictures Life and Love 50 Years From Today (1930)

The September 14, 1930 Syracuse Herald (Syracuse, NY) ran a piece about the people of 1980 who may stumble upon the 1930 film Just Imagine. At the time this article was published the film had not yet been released. The entire article appears below.

Hollywood, Sept. 13. - New Yorkers of 50 years hence may draw down from the dusty shelves where forgotten movies rest a quaint roll of celluloid dated 1930 and labeled "Just Imagine," and gather en masse to ascertain what prophetic powers, if any, were possessed by a certain trio of gay song-showmen of our day, the Messrs, DeSylva, Brown and Henderson.

Should this transpire, that future audience will see a screen musical comedy conception, by 1930 prophets, of what their life, customs and dress would be.

Just how good a picture "Just Imagine" will be remains to be seen, but at present it stands out as the most unusual movie idea in Hollywood, one that has not been done before, and that is saying much.

Two or three pictures, true, have looked into the future for their settings, but none on so large a scale as this. "Just Imagine" is laid in New York in 1980.

Secrecy has surrounded work on the picture, and sets built to scale in a vast hangar miles from Hollywood were used to depict "a metropolis where traffic proceeds on many levels, where boats dock at the feet of 230-story skyscrapers, and aerial traffic has supplanted the automobile.

Science has achieved the miracle of reviving a Brooklynite (El Brendel) struck by lightning in 1930. Television long since has ceased to be a novelty, and people have numbers instead of names.

There is a marriage tribunal which confers a desired maiden on the most worthy of her suitors, and this supplies the plot.

The hero (John Garrick), an ocean air-liner pilot, loves Maureen O'Sullivan, but a newspaper publisher (Kenneth Thomson), wins the tribunal's approval.

Garrick, appealing his case, has four months in which to prove his superiority to Thomson - but what can he do? The act that made Lindbergh an international hero in 1927 is just a routine job to him.

Then a scientist offers him opportunity to be the first to fly to Mar, to become the Lindbergh of 1980. Of [unreadable] hectic adventures on the strange planet, to which he is accompanied by Frank Albertson (his friend) and Brendel, the stowaway.

"Just Imagine," say its authors, is not intended, of course, as serious prophecy, but as entertainment.

See also:
Just Imagine (1930)
Instant Baby Machine (1930)
Movie Trends of the 21st Century (1982)

Future City: 20 | 21

The Skyscraper Museum, at 39 Battery Place in New York, has an exhibit opening at the end of the month that will certainly interest paleo-futurists.

New York Modern, which opens on October 24 and runs through March 2008, looks back at prophecies of the skyscraper city in the early 20th century when the first dreams of a fantastic vertical metropolis took shape. From the invention of the tall office building and high-rise hotels in the late 19th century, New York began to expand upward, and by 1900, the idea of unbridled growth and inevitably increasing congestion was lampooned in cartoons in the popular press and critiqued by prominent architects and urban reformers.

(Found via Suggested Donation)

See also:
The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
New London in the Future (1909)
Collier's Illustrated Future of 2001 (1901)
What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years (Ladies Home Journal, 1900)
The Predictions of a 14-Year-Old (Milwaukee Excelsior, 1901)

Transportation in 2000 A.D. (1966)

This interview from the 1966 radio documentary 2000 A.D. asks William Roman, chairman of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, about our transportation needs for the future. An excerpt appears below but you can hear the entire (5 minute) interview here.

I think we're going to find new types of transportation. I think the vertical rise aircraft is just about to come into its own, so that we'll be able to have airports which will be close in to the central parts of our cities. And these vertical rise aircraft will take very little space. They'll be able to take-off and carry people and I think they're going to prove to be answer to what some thought the helicopter would be able to produce for us in the past.

See also:
2000 A.D. Radio Documentary (1966)
Going Backward into 2000 (1966)
Commuter Helicopter (1947)
Disney's Magic Highway, U.S.A. (1958)
Farm to Market (1958)

New York in 1960 (1935)

This cover to the March, 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics purported to illustrate New York City in 1960. The image is featured in the book Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth-Century Future.

See also:
Amphibian Monorail (Popular Science, 1934)
Commuter Helicopter (1947)

To The Fair! (1965)

With the same type of optimism presented in 1939's All's Fair at the Fair this 1965 film of the World's Fair in New York gives the impression that people can come together and bask in the beauty of our ever-improving world. The sincerity of the narrator is incredible, "A suspended theater with a film on the joy of living!"

The second half of the film provides a great look at the General Motors Futurama II exhibit. This, along with the cheeky narrative told through the eyes of lost boy scouts and hormonal teenagers is pure paleo-future fun.

(The YouTube video above has both parts compiled into one film but if you'd like the source video you can find them at the Internet Archive in two parts here and here.)