When people talk about rides at the World’s Fair, they usually think about the big ones.
The first Ferris Wheel. It’s a small world. The Carousel of Progress.
Well, pretty much all of the Disney ones from 1964. Yet one ride that is often overlooked
but equally impressive was the General Motors attraction for the 1939 World’s Fair. Its name was Futurama.
To help us get a glimpse into the future of this unfinished world of ours, there has been created for the New York World's Fair
a thought-provoking exhibit of the developments ahead of us.
For the ‘39 fair in New York City, General Motors turned to designer Norman Bel Geddes to create an
attraction. Its aim was to give guests a look at what the future of transportation might be
like in the year 1960. And boy, did he deliver. Spanning over a third of a mile and occupying over
35,000 square feet, Futurama used scale models to depict the future of America.
Designers created the scenes with 50,000 vehicles, 10,000 of which would be moving,
over 500,000 buildings, and over 1,000,000 trees. Guests would sit in armchairs that
were connected to a 140-ton conveyor system that was referred to as a “carry-go-round.”
It was essentially an omnimover before omnimovers even existed. Those chairs would
whisk them off from scene to scene while a narrator would describe what they were seeing.
See, GM noted that the nest of roadways in America at the time were a mess.
And that at the rate people were buying cars, 1960 would see over 38 million automobiles on the road.
They argued that by that point, the country would need “nation-wide express highways.”
So Futurama pitched just that.
It proposed the idea of massive 14-lane
interstate highways where drivers could travel at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 100 miles per hour.
They could even transition from one highway to the next with the use of
gradually curved on and off-ramps so that they wouldn’t have to slow down too much.
It also made a couple of other transportation predictions that were true such as helicopter pads on skyscrapers in cities.
Today this almost feels silly to talk about. From afar, they just look like highways.
If you’re watching this video, odds are you grew up with highways and intersections and
on/off ramps. It’s all so common today that it’s absolutely mundane. But back in 1939 this was a
really novel concept. The US interstate system was still decades away. So for most of the guests on
Futurama, they were looking at the future. Now to be fair, the ride also made a few
predictions that were off the mark. It suggested that highways of the 1960s would be illuminated
via glowing tubes that would be installed in the curbs along the side of the road.
It also suggested that all these cars would be automatically spaced out at
a safe distance through radio signals. The ride gave guests a look
at these highways in action across various rural and urban settings. There weren’t really
any suburban scenes, because the suburbs as a concept in America didn’t pick up steam until
after World War 2. At that point, the economy was booming and more families owned
cars. On top of that, the roadways were improved enough that regular commuting into the city was possible.
Now, this is where the ride gets really cool and then, in my opinion,
amazing. Towards the end of the tour, it begins to focus on transportation in major cities.
The second to last scene shows guests a city intersection in which the roadways
run on the ground level while pedestrians move above it on an elevated walkway.
In the final scene, guests would see a much larger scale version of this intersection,
as if the journey through the air was coming to a close and they were landing. Then, they’d step off the ride and
outside into a full-scale recreation of that very same intersection. The buildings on the corners,
the elevated walkways, the cars below, it was all there.
That’s awesome! When’s the last time a ride at Disney or Universal ever did that? Put you in
the space you saw as a little scale model on the ride just minutes ago? That’s a whole new level of
immersion and for an attraction that was trying to sell people on the future, what better way than by
actually physically putting them in that future? Futurama was impressive and it was the product
of over 500 artists, designers, and model makers who built the ride over the course
of 8 months. The attraction was so massive that it took a maintenance crew of 30 people,
working every night, to keep it in tip-top shape. It was initially said to have a budget of
$2.5 million, but by the end of the fair GM execs estimated that the actual budget was between
$9 and $11 million. Adjusted for inflation today, that’d be in the ballpark of $185 million dollars.
It was the fair’s largest exhibit, and it was by far the most popular one too.
Queue waits often exceeded two and a half hours long, and by the end of the first season of the
fair, over 5.1 million guests had experienced Futurama. For the following season, GM added 6,000
more moving vehicles to the models and included new lounges in the building and air-conditioning to the entire structure.
On top of that, in 1940 the designer, Geddes, published a nearly 300-page book titled Magic
Motorways. It acted as a companion to the ride, explaining all of the transportation
concepts presented on the ride in detail. With such a smash hit on their hands,
GM was understandably hesitant to tear it all down when the fair was over. Early ideas included
shipping the entire exhibit to Detroit to be set up permanently near their company headquarters.
They also considered finding space in midtown Manhattan, near Rockefeller Center,
to house the attraction. Unfortunately, neither plan actually came to fruition.
Beyond the financial considerations of moving an attraction so large, there was the question of how
long the popularity of it would last. So with time having run out, Futurama was demolished with the
rest of the World’s Fair after it ended in 1940. But that wasn’t the end of Futurama.
Capitalizing on the ride’s success, GM created a new Futurama attraction for the 1964-65 World’s
Fair, which was also in New York City. Similar to the original, the new Futurama also depicted
visions of the future through scale models. This time around it was less about transportation and,
instead, focused more on how we would generally live in the future.
Its scenes showed us cities of the future, people living and working in space, people living and
working underwater, and even new technology that would allow us to build farms in the desert. Wait ...
Nevermind!
It was popular, but it was also far from being the hit of the fair the way the original was.
Besides being a 25-year-old concept at that point, they were forced to operate in the shadow of Walt Disney and his four attractions.
Those four, unlike Futurama, were the hits of the season. And of course,
Futurama's legacy wouldn't be complete without mentioning that
60 years after it debuted, Futurama’s name served as inspiration for
the name of the 1999 Matt Groening cartoon. So yeah, Futurama wasn’t the world's
first Ferris Wheel, or the Carousel of Progress or it's a small world. But it was still an impressive
feat of design and it was an impressive feat of design that, in more than one way, managed to predict the future. That’s pretty cool.
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