This was an excerpt from a 1958 Disneyland TV show entitled Magic Highway USA.

Beyond the obvious “haha, that was funny because it never happened” critique, it’s a pretty fascinating window into how our midcentury misconceptions have shaped the world we currently live in.

After the Second World War and the advent of nuclear energy, our commonly held conception of the future became predicated on three things: unlimited energy, the birth of the interstate highway system, and the re-emergence of the garden city (which Jane Jacobs would rail against in The Death and Life of Great American Cities).

This video typifies all three. Cars go forever. Roads emit radiant heat to dry rain. Trains become train-trucks. Cities are massively dispersed, clusters of consolidated high-rises, tubular highways, and massive in-door shopping centers.

As we now know, this particular vision of the future reached its point of conclusion with our inability to make nuclear power a viable industry, and our failure to subjugate the developing world to our domestic oil needs.

But while this wood-paneled, analog vision may be long dead and refuted, its consequences are not. Consider shopping malls, Los Angeles, Drive Thrus, urban sprawl in places like Atlanta and Dallas. The aspirations to that particular future that never arrived.

It makes you stop for a second and wonder what it is we’re imagining the future to look like today.