Futurama ride at 1939 World's Fair celebrated

Wired's Chris Baker has a great little story about the original Futurama, the grandfather of dark rides, which premiered at the 1939 World's Fair. It was a football-field-sized diorama of a city of tomorrow, through which armchairs rode on tracks, playing synchronized soundtracks piped up from hundreds of turntables in the basement. I've been fascinated by the Futurama since I read about it in the old Journal of Ride Theory.


"Detailed miniatures are always compelling," says Dan Howland, editor of the Journal of Ride Theory. "It doesn't matter whether they are doll houses or model trains or it's Legoland, something about them just sucks you in. The 1939 Futurama had two other factors that compounded the fascination: first, a promise of personal car ownership (and after the Great Depression that sounded pretty good), and second, a grand vision of the future. Up until the Futurama, manufacturers had exhibited at fairs to show how they made their products, and then the Futurama came along and said, Here is how the future will feel. The 1939 audience wasn't used to having a company selling optimism, and it made their hearts sing."

GM's ride presented a utopia forged by urban planning. Sophisticated highways ran through rural farmland and eventually moved into carefully ordered futuristic cities. "You have to understand that the audience had never even considered a future like this," says Howland. "There wasn't an interstate freeway system in 1939. Not many people owned a car. They staggered out of the fair like a cargo cult and built an imperfect version of this incredible vision."

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See also: Journal of Ride Theory amazing zine is now an amazing book