How Disney Sort Of Predicted The Future Of Motoring in 1954
Marvel at a time when the car was king, and we its master
by Imthishan Giado
There was once a time where cartoons from the House of the Mouse were more than just a way to keep your kids from biting each other in the ear, but informative and filled with wide-eyed ’50s influenced visions of the future. Magic Highway USA was Walt Disney’s bold attempt to envision a different world of cars and nearly 60 years later, it’s still riveting and wondrous to behold. Click through to see it in its entirety.
Truth be told, Magic Highway USA has always been sort of a holy grail for me. Dubai’s TV station were prone to playing episodes of the Wonderful World of Disney in the 80s, and I only once saw this short, but I never forgot. Occasionally, it would show up on Disney but the Mouse lawyers were remarkably quick to take it down.
Why was I so obsessed with it? For one thing, it’s utterly gorgeous to behold, done in an bizarre animation style that mixes flat cut out Art-deco art with cycling backgrounds. Think of it as a precursor to the trippy acid-drip films of the ’60s that were to come, but it’s certainly not cutesy.
Here’s the other thing – it was genuinely visionary. All the way back in 1954, Disney animators dreamed of automated cars able to travel on the highway, radar cruise control, in car navigation with traffic updates – and as the picture above proves, even rear-viewing cameras! Of course, many of their more fanciful ideas would never come to pass, including a nuclear(!) powered tunneling machine to “instantly” make new roads, or cars that would arrive directly into our living rooms. Clearly, it was a simpler time, when man’s boldest dream was to push to the stars, where America was big enough to be the world all by itself. And when the car was the only way to traverse it, in all its wide-screen glory.
For your viewing pleasure, I present: Magic Highway USA.
