NEWS: Walt Disney's Time Capsule

CULTURE: Walt Disney's Time Capsule

The Walt Disney Company recently unearthed a time capsure that Walt Disney had written in 1956. The letter had been placed in a time capsule, sealed for fifty years. The letter was recently opened and it's contents published in Disney Newsreel. Some of its contents are strangely accurate, as Cory from BB said. I thought one item from the message was interesting enough to be highlighted.[PDF]

There's a certain reverence in Mr. Disney's words, whether he was anti-Semitic or not, a sexist fuck, or really a nice guy that bent his life toward the pursuit of general "escapist mechanisms." When I think of Disney's representation of the future through his "Tomorrowland," I think of Ray Bradbury's conception of science-fiction, that is that science-fiction is "sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together." Or that you take some element the is currently happening, and project it into the far flung future. That element, because of its hyperbolic condition as a thing existing many years from now, comments on it in the present. The Jetson's flying car, for instance, illustrates that in the future every individual will still have a car (as opposed to some sort of mass transit). This comments on the centered importance cars had in the 1950's, and have to this day.

Disney, surrounded by high hopes for technological innovation, the humility of the space race, and a world where modern globalization is creating a very important and very real human dialogue, saw a future without war—world peace was simply inevitable. And I think that despite the modern Disney Company's hegemonic claim to the world's myths, that sentiment, the sentiment of a peaceful and utopian future, both valued and hallowed, shouldn't be Walt Disney's sentiment about the world, but humanity's epitaph about Walt Disney.

[via BoingBoing]

cool...were there any dead cuban children involved though?

*sigh*
I love you Mr.Disney.

Cuban children were served at the luncheon.


As the appetizer.

How interesting it is to see what one thought 50 years ago. Also in what ways they were right or wrong in their perceptions of what it would be like in the time we are living in.

all transportation will be like space mountain one day and eventually we will forever live in a cryogenesis state of existence where our experiences are fed to us through computers. Therefore we will each live in a cyber heaven of sorts much like the Matrix films.This will greatly reduce crime ,poverty and resource consumption because we will never be moving and living in our own personal reality ;whatever it may be. Like a continuos dream never to awaken from.The external world shall become obsolete.

"See you in another life... where we are both cats."

Really? I thought it was the thinnest sentiment in the whole letter. It's the time capsule equivalent of saying that someone in this classroom could grow up to be the next president.

*double sigh*

I concur with Mineux. Also, I should have been a teenager in 1956. Someone screwed that up. And

is the best movie ever. EVER.

....maybe I was one if reincarnation is right, and nothing is impossible .....only possible....when it comes to the future and perhaps cryogenesis .....

I still think Lady and the Tramp is the most romantic movie ever made.

Horrible plagarism of the original manga aside, The Lion King is the best movie Disney has ever made.