Product: Model of the Future of Urban Development: To New Horizons (1940) (2010)
Rating: 4.0
Fascinating and Dated
This film documents a utopian vision of the future that was a beacon of hope to Depression weary America. You have to love something that reminds you constantly, "This is the world of 1960!" Orchard trees under individual glass domes, tremendous highway systems with cars going 100 miles per hour and spaced by radio control. This was a future that might have come true to some degree had a World War not turned things upside down. As much at fault as the war, however, was the unwillingness of a nation to level existing infrastructure to remap, rethink, redo entire cities from scratch. Also there were the two game changers of an emerging Soviet threat and the power of the atomic bomb. A form of highway system WAS built and it DID increase traffic flow. Indeed, it satisfied the prognostication that living in small towns one could still savor the advantages of the big cities. However they were not radio controlled and not contoured. They had to sadly do double duty as emergency air landing strips and had to be primitive fail-safe technology to keep strategic strikes from turning the highways into parking lots.For anyone who ever grew up looking with longing at the doughnut-shaped space stations of Chesley Bonestell's paintings or dreamed of flying cars for the masses, hoped to retire to the Lunar Colony Alpha or jet along in a transport tube, this is the future that came just before, a future driven not by the atom or the space race but rather the extension of electricity and safe, effective transportation to the masses. Before Disney reminded us "It's a Small World After All", we had "To New Horizons" telling us that geography no longer limited the ambitions of mankind. In some ways, perhaps, we are marching ever forward into those new horizons, and perhaps that's the way it should be.