By Robert Farago
August 1, 2008
It's hard to believe that General Motors was once the world's largest company. It's even harder to believe GM was once the world's most profitable company. If there's one factor connecting the GM money factory of old with today's sinking ship, it's a sense of a boundless (senseless?) optimism married to a mien of manifest destiny. One wonders if GM could produce something as… seamless as this PR piece today. Sadly, yes. [Any resemblance between this film and a hypnotic smoking cessation video are entirely obvious.]
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POWERED
August 1st, 2008 at 11:02 am
TTAC readers wondering how GM topped 1939’s ‘Wonder World of 1960′ at the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 can view the second Futurama here.
http://www.krustofski.com/images/gmfuturama3.png
http://66.196.80.202/babelfish/translate_url_content?.intl=us&lp=it_en&trurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.fabiofeminofantascience.org%2fRETROFUTURE%2fRETROFUTURE2.html
http://66.196.80.202/babelfish/translate_url_content?.intl=us&lp=it_en&trurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.fabiofeminofantascience.org%2fRETROFUTURE%2fRETROFUTURE3.html
If the above two translated links don’t work, you can see the Italian versions here:
http://www.fabiofeminofantascience.org/RETROFUTURE/RETROFUTURE2.html
http://www.fabiofeminofantascience.org/RETROFUTURE/RETROFUTURE3.html
August 1st, 2008 at 11:03 am
Yes, it is quaint to see now. And we can snicker at the naiveté of anyone who would have believed this type of corporate propaganda, but at least the guys who put this together had a vision and the drive to impose it on the world.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:15 am
Funny that the narrator sounds strangely German…it could almost be a Naziworldorama propaganda film.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:16 am
I’m looking forward to those 100 mph highways of the future. I’m marking 1960 on my calendar, can’t wait.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:19 am
The rise and fall of America. The bottom falling out is being delayed only thru the use of debt by government, corporations, and even individuals.
Delayed, but it will come.
August 1st, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Indeed, there’s a creepy uber alles feeling to the tone of this video. You get the impression that it would all turn nasty if you didn’t get the religion.
Believing in the arrogant phrase “What’s good for GM is good for America” is the biggest single national error ever made. Bigger even than the German invasion of Poland.
August 1st, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Wow, complete with creepy organ music. Yikes!
August 1st, 2008 at 2:56 pm
It’s hard to believe that General Motors was once the world’s largest company.
Not when you look at what they build today versus what they built back when this creepy video was made.
While the video is, as mentioned, creepy by today’s standards, at least they dared to dream back then. Where’s today’s Futuramas, besides as reruns on the Cartoon Network?
August 1st, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Easy promises - the expectations were too low really. Could those people have ever imagined a handheld computer like the Nokia N810 or a satellite TV receiver, or an MP3 player or a portable DVD player?
Cars aren’t that different. Same needs as back then and we have exceeded those expectations and then some - even with the cheapest cars. What now - new power sources? Not likely b/c the power structure of American (and global business) doesn’t like to be replaced.
Wonder who will take the big three’s place? Will the imports just sell more cars or will small independents (like Tesla or Phoenix Motor Cars) take their place?
August 1st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
You are getting sleepy, very sleepy. Your eyes lids are becoming heavy. Your breathing is slowing. You are tired, very tired.
Wow, the first two minutes of that are a visual treat. People in hats standing in endless lines followed by an extremely long, torturously slow pan that looked like it was shot out of an airplane window at 30,000 feet. THE FUTURE IS GONNA BE GREAT!
August 1st, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Having spent a lot of time around Cleveland, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh in the 1980s, I cannot hear the phrase “Thriving steel town” without flinching.
These 1890s-technology steel mills were already inefficient and outdated by 1960, but they had the enormous advantage of not having been bombed to smithereens in the 1940s. That advantage wouldn’t save them.
When the Japanese (and later Koreans and Chinese) rebuilt their industries they leapfrogged the American Rust Belt technology.
August 1st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
You mean GM was selling vaporware back then too??? VBG!
August 1st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Wait - where are the prisons, junkyards, sewage plants, and garbage dumps???
Just teasing!!!
August 1st, 2008 at 8:28 pm
i cannot thank you enough, robert, for finding this film strip and making it available. i must have seen dozens of similar clips as a young child growing up in flint michigan during the 1950s.
believe it or not, at one point in my life, this was the kind of utopian world i was expecting to inhabit as an adult. no wonder i often feel so betrayed by our current reality.
August 1st, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Believe it or not, I was actually there. I was only three, but I do have dim memories of being taken through that World’s Fair by my parents.
August 2nd, 2008 at 4:11 am
Such arrogance…and naivety. No doubt, the realities of 2008 were inconceivable to both those who created this film and its intended audience.
When competition from Japan was introduced, this dream began unraveling….and quickly turned into a nightmare! Arrogance is one of the reasons that domestic cars lagged so far behind Japanese even after 25 or 30 years.
The only reason GM didn’t falter a lot sooner is because of the “Buy American” consumer who considered choosing a color and body style as “comparison shopping”. Now the majority of these people are either too old to drive or dead. Toss in a gas crisis and, even for the few that remain, all bets (loyalties) are off!
It would be interesting to see what would happen if GM and Ford were given a fresh start. No repressive labor unions to constantly battle, no embarrassing past to overcome, no critical financial woes…I wonder what sort of vehicles they’d actually be capable of building???
August 2nd, 2008 at 8:07 am
My father once met Henry Ford–can’t remember whether it was II or III, but whoever would have been running the company in about 1954–at a press function of some sort, and he asked Ford what he thought of the possibilities for this interesting “new” German car, the VW Bug.
Ford looked at my father as though he was a bad smell and said, “Ridiculous. We’ll throw ‘em back into the ocean.”
August 2nd, 2008 at 8:20 am
The “The END” screen for this flick was:
—
Without
END
General Motors
—
Was GM allready paranoid about its mortality in 1939?
;)