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]

Omnisciece will have drawn closer to finite sense and perceptions, for our entertainment as our livelihood—yours, I should say, who will read this in your 21st Century.

If our fondest hopes prevail, the world of 2006, Anno Domini, will have outlawed war and this old earth will be in such a flowering of civilization as the family of man has never seen. And that will have a profound effect upon the subject matter of the world's play time and escapist mechanisms.

In the basic human elements however, the showmen of your new day I am sure will still recognize and understand the entertainment makers of our vanished time.
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]

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