Thirty20Eight #336 (Season 8 Finale!) Progressland at the 1964 World's Fair!

All the appliances are improved today. Take a refrigerator. Why, I remember when... When the man of the house had to work twice as many hours to earn one as he does now. And today we have a better product. You took the words right... my mouth, dear. And I'm thrilled with my new dishwasher. Home entertainment for our family is centered in one area. We can even change our lighting to match the mood of the music.

Welcome to The 3028, a show about theme park history and pop culture listery. I am Matt Parrish. And I am Kevin Quigley. The... Kevin Quigley in all caps. Per usual. Kevin, my voice is back on this show. I'm excited. Yeah, I re-listened to the Pluto show and I was like, oh no. Oh boy. This was recorded like...

second after you got your voice back. And I'm like, Matt, you've got to do it because I'm a taskmaster. And I said, Matt, you have to do a show right now. And you're like, but I can't. But I can't. And I was like, well, you sound like Zelda, so it's fine. I did. We talked about Zelda and I sounded like Zelda. My back was all lumpy. Kevin, we are back here. It is the season finale. I can't even believe it. I can't believe we're here. It feels so recently that we did our first.

show on Robert Moses and the World's Fair and an overview. And then we didn't know we were going to do a second series. And there's been weird listeries. There's been some trip reports. It's been a really fun season. I think this was, except for the World's Fair episodes, this was a little less structured.

than last season and i think it feels like a little bit more loose but not like sloppy it feels fun yeah these these uh world's fair shows are a lot of research a lot of time a lot of care goes into them we also had a number of club 28 shows, which were like humongous, which you're going to hear here in the next couple of months. So yeah, this, this winter has been a lot.

in terms of research and recording and editing and all the stuff. So I'm excited to see it come to an end only because I'm excited. for where it will go. So we're wrapping not only the season, but the series on the 64 World's Fair. And I've learned a lot of stuff, including in this show, which I thought I knew a lot about Progress Land and GE and the Disney relationship. By George, Kev, I learned more. There's so much to learn. Like...

I remember how naive was I when I said to Matt, hey, can we do a show about the 64 World's Fair and just do five minutes on each attraction? And Matt's like, Matt laughed at me. And he's like, absolutely not. We're going to do a series. And I was like, I guess. I don't know if it's going to need that. This one progress land could have probably been its own. It's so big. We won't get to everything, but we'll get to as many things as possible before we get to it, Kev.

I want to mention our Listorians. They help support the show in our top tier of Patreon subscribers. So thank you so much for doing that. If you're not a Patreon subscriber yet, you can find out more in the links in the show notes. We have three tiers. two of which include secret shows. Yeah, yeah. If you're a Patreon member, you could be a fruit brute and take part in all of our polls. You could be, that's a $3 tier, a $10 tier, the Sad Tomato Kid.

And that's where you get access to Discord, secret shows. And then you can be a 3028 Listorian, which costs you $30.28 a month. And that's the highest tier. You get all of our shows earlier than everybody else. and you get access to the photo set. that we do for every show. Basically, the pictures that we look at in order to do the show. And this one's going to be a doozy. And you also get, by the way, a shout-out on the show if you're a Listorian. So we get some shout-outs here, Matt.

VIP Laura, comedy's own Dave Grinstead. Hey, Dave. Comedy's own? Comedy's own, yeah. Comedy, like, without Dave Grinstead, comedy wouldn't exist as it is today. Comedy owns Dave Grinstead. How about our friend Adam Dworkin, great supporter of the show, whom we missed on the last show, as far as the historians go, because some of these...

Some of these are canned. We canned these up our Club 28 shows and pre-recorded some of the bumpers for the intros and outros. So we are going to miss a few here and there, but have no fear. We will continue to include you where we can. So thank you, Adam, and thank you for being forgiving that we missed you on the last round. Yeah, the Adam Dworkin. We've also got our legacy fans, DragonCon Joeser. We know Joeser, friend of the show. Turkey Lake Jeff, of course. And of course...

Our fan club president, Chrissy. Hey, Chrissy. The 3028 Street teams. Do you think she's wearing 3028 gear right now? Hey, aren't we selling 3028 gear? We are selling 3028 gear. Check out our shop on Redbubble. There'll be a link in the show notes. And we've got some new designs coming for... Sad Tomato Kids, basically for all the tears. And then we've got some other Two Soup Dad stuff, Two Starbucks Dad stuff. Two Soup Dad. It's going to be really great. It's going to be a good time.

So look for all that. But without all, you know, we've gotten all that business out of the way to widen the field because, Matt, we can't stand in the way of progress. We've got so much to talk about, about Progressland. This is our finale show for both the season and the series, as Matt said. So without any further ado, let's forge ahead.

to electricity. As Disneyland developed into a mechanical and electric marvel, the United States was developing new products and processes for which electricity would become a driving force. From street lamps to electric refrigerators, the electric age dominated American life in the mid-1900s. During that time, Walt Disney used his theme park and television show to showcase innovations in electric tech and speculate about future advancements in electric and nuclear power.

And as we wrap up our 1964 World's Fair series, I think it's fitting that our final pavilion cements the enduring legacy of Disney corporate synergy. Not only did electricity continue to evolve and expand in our personal worlds, but the Disney company continued to employ electric processes that would expand the company's storytelling ability in its theme park.

So, Kevin, before we look at the prehistory here of Progress Land at the fair, the carousel theater, other GE stuff in the Disney space, I want to note your fascination and love for Horizons. and how that defined your interest in Disney theme park history. We probably aren't even talking right now if you don't watch the Horizons Martins vid. And, of course, that pavilion was sponsored by GE in its early days.

Yeah, so I've told this story before, but it goes, you know, on my, I think it was either my second or third trip to Disney World. I was with Joeser. We were staying at Pop Century because that's what we could afford. And we had done a day at the theme parks and we were going back for a midday nap. And Jozer said, hey, I have these, like, videos of old...

Disney attractions that aren't here anymore. I'm like, Disney has attractions that aren't here anymore? What? I was so young. And he broke out his iPad and played it on the TV and played a video, like a history video of Horizon. And it blew my mind. Yeah. And I was obsessed with it. And so, you know, I love retrofuturism. I've always loved like stuff like the Jetsons. This later informed my love of space age bachelor pad music.

and all this stuff. But I love going back and looking at the future via the past. And yeah, and so this kind of this going into the Progressland Pavilion is sort of like that. But all this stuff was happening at the time. I remember I don't know what short it was. We watched some short in school at one point.

that talked about Walt and like electricity. It was a Walt Disney thing. It was talking about electricity and how amazing electricity was. I'm like, yeah, everyone has it. It's fine. But not back then. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, you know, the post-war era.

If you walk through Walt Disney World today, you can see, you know, different areas, different theme lands where electricity is sort of in its rudimentary stage. Like I was pointing out to my wife on Sunset Boulevard the other day. I'm like, look at all the electric wires. that hang across the street. This is for like conductors of like trolley car.

and being able to conduct energy to the trolleys as they went through town. We obviously see that in Buena Vista Street. You can see some of the hanging electric interventions in Harambe Market. And all that stuff. So it's really cool to see how like Disney thematically has used electricity and how it also like really informs a lot of Tomorrowland in the mid-century.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we have electric lights, we have all this, like everything is electric. I mean, you know, everything is powered by electricity. And it's, you know, we don't think of that. There's so many little things that we don't think of as inventions or discoveries because they've always been part of our lives. But this was...

This was a big deal back in the day, especially in the mid-century. Post-war, electricity becomes a huge part. And then that's why it's all over Tomorrowland. That's why it's so lit up in Tomorrowland. because they're like showcasing electricity and what it can do and how it can enhance your life every day. Yeah, it's a really, really neat sort of discovery if you dive into the things that help, you know, lay the blueprint for...

you know, what Disney does in its theme parks and how it was looking forward. Some of the things that it looked forward into in the, like the sixties and seventies are like really funny. Like, well, there'll be murals everywhere, Kevin and wall carpet. and all this kind of stuff. So I like the history of Horizons, the history of the Carousel of Progress, all this stuff really begins with Progressland, even though some of the...

Some of the groundwork is laid earlier than that. And this is a really great marriage, honestly, between Disney and General Electric. Ron Reagan, one of your favorite presidents, was associated with General Electric in the mid-century as well. But yeah, the Progressland-style theme park. The ideas of that really go back to sort of the turn of the century when the idea of the electric city was becoming all the more real. And Kevin, we had an electric city in my hometown.

in basically between the 19, like 1900 and 1925. You know, as Walt is being born in 1901, this is like right in his like wheelhouse, right? Like, you know, he hears about this electric city and I... Are you drawn to Disney because so much of it...

is based in Kansas city area or, or is it the other way around? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Right. It makes my city flourish in a way that maybe I never would have anticipated. Like, as I go back and look through, like even driving to Marceline, it's like. wow, like this all happened in my state. And now people are going to like, you see the Marceline hotel when you're on Disneyland's main street, like that facade. And I'm like,

Like, this is my neighborhood. It's so weird. It's kind of like Liberty Square for you. Yeah, like when I walk to Liberty Square, I'm like, yep, these are all the old buildings. They're the stocks that I was put in that one time. Oh, my God. That's how I got to work on the Liberty Bell. Basically, there's everything that happens in Boston on a day-to-day basis. But Matt, so yeah, talk a little bit about the Kansas City Electric Park because I didn't know anything about it.

I can't talk enough about it, honestly. There are still signs for this as you go around the city. And, you know, there's a lot of big stuff happening in the Midwest in the early 1900s. You know, the St. Louis World's Fair is like 1904, the Columbia Exposition in Chicago in the late in the early 1890s. And so all this stuff is happening and it's really kind of a burgeoning place. It's kind of like how like,

Major League Baseball moves to the West Coast in the 60s. That's what the Midwest is at the turn of the century. So lots of money coming in and a lot of new businesses and corporations that are not based in New York, Boston, Virginia. So in the early 1900s, actually, it's really the late 1800s, these brothers that owned the Heim Brothers Brewery, which at the time was like the largest brewery in the world.

opened up their own amusement plaza, and they called it Electric Park. And at Electric Park, you could dream the dreams of the children. I mean, it was an amusement park connected to a brewery. And it helped the brothers sort of diversify their company. We talked about this in the Hanna-Barbera show, Kevin, is that in the 60s. all these like TV companies and rich oil tycoons were like buying theme parks and like investing their money into like

sports stadiums and sports teams. That's the same stuff that was happening really at the turn of the century as well. Yeah. You think it's kind of silly that like a brewery would like do this, but then you think about like. core stadium you think about guinness book of worlds records you know that sort of thing the budweiser world on wheels like this This is a tradition that has gone back all those days. It's still happening nowadays. And so they build the first electric park.

you know, adjacent to their brewery, which is kind of amazing that you like. You do a tour of the brewery. You get sauced, and then you go on this, like, the cups. Oh, gosh. You're in your cups, in your cups. Oh, boy. Yeah, you're getting your flight, your four-beer flight. and then you're going to the theme park. This was a huge theme park, and the footprint of this still exists. These are now like city parks.

where none of the attractions and none of the things that were there are really around today. But let me tell you this, some of the stuff that the electric park featured, because you're going to, this is going to blow your mind. Big band concerts. Okay. Pretty standard vaudeville act. an electric fountain, which is like water and electric lights, ballrooms, a natatorium swimming zone, a German village, which German villages in the Midwest are like still popular. It's a weird thing.

alligator farm, a giant like a water shoot. And then let's get more specific on stuff that, that sounds familiar. Penny parlors. a Japanese rolling ball, Scenic railways, a pool room. soda fountains and ice cream shops, a shooting gallery, a giant teeter-totter, boating, outdoor swimming, a carousel, a cafe, a casino, five-cent theater.

Fortune telling and palmistry and then a big promenade and horseless buggy garage and ride. Yeah. So this is the sort of there's a lot going on here. But I have to imagine when like Waldo's first. putting his ideas out for an amusement park or a theme park. People, they're like, we don't want to do some of this. Some of this stuff sounds fine, but some of this stuff sounds real seedy. Seedy.

Yeah. Also, I'm hoping that the alligator farm and the natatorium were in very separate areas. Why are the alligators continually going into the natatorium? There's some other really wild stuff here, too. But this is one of the interesting things here is that. They consider this like Kansas City's Coney Island and a hundred thousand light bulbs on its buildings. This lights become a huge part of Kansas City. So does so do fountains.

And they had a ton of people who visited here. There were actually two different separate electric parks. I think both of them actually burned at some point. But this is going to sound familiar. Unlike a lot of other parks, the Kansas City Electric Park. were known for their meticulous landscaping and their cleanliness. And so when you walked around the park, it didn't feel like you were at a seedy brewery, even if they had like some seedy entertainment. So taking that concept.

of a really clean sort of family area, even though it's connected to a brewery, this really takes shape in the 1920s. That's exactly when Walt Disney is living in the city. We have some postcards that we're going to put in the show notes or on the on the blue sky and and the.

What do you call it? The Patreon. But they look like meticulous, right? So you've got these flower beds that are gorgeous. You have this like water shoot the shoot that looks like all the landscaping is beautiful. None of it looks. Like, the way, because when I read Devil in the White City and the Chicago World's Fair, for some reason I thought of it as like, yeah, everything's gross.

even though it was like really bright and white. But now I'm looking at this stuff and I'm like, no, this just looks like a... a city park with amusements in it. And I think that that's what gets him Walt's head. Yeah. It's very pretty. I mean, all of that's what you could say. I mean, it's like, it's, I know it's corporate led or whatever, but like they understood, like if we want people to come here, it better be nice.

And we better offer lots of attractions. The other two things I want to note here that were offered at the electric. park. And this always blows my mind. One of which is a train that ringed the park grounds, right? Okay. So you can take a circuitous tour around the park and fireworks at closing time. Oh, yeah. I wonder if this had any impact on Walt Disney at all. Oh, wait, it had every impact on Walt Disney. Isn't that nuts? This is amazing that, like...

And we've talked a little bit about Balt and Amsterdam and looking at those parks there and being inspired. But very close to home, he has this idea. These innovations are already happening. you know, very close to home. This is what he brings to Disneyland when he goes out. Basically, he's bringing this part of his childhood with him. It's a very Ray Bradbury thing. And he's like, if I can't have Kansas City, I'm going to make Kansas City.

happened right here in California. So this is amazing that he got exposure to these very specific things that later end up in Disneyland already. And this was a place he couldn't go back to, right? I think of all the Walt Disney-isms in Kansas City, I mean, some of those memories were not good. And that's why he always leaned into Marceline, because those memories were good. A boy on a farm kind of thing.

But, yeah, you can't go back, right? Who says you can't go back? Yeah, you can't because the actual park burns down in 1925. It's actually during Prohibition, which is kind of weird. Just gonna throw that out there. So anyway, so this is I mean, really, you could look at this in many ways as like a proto Disneyland. You have the corporate. you have cleanliness, all these different attractions and things.

And then you have bright lights that makes it familial and people want to come there. Right. So this is really interesting. So we've got electricity. We've got the basis of electricity. We've got candidacy. So let's talk about. basically the sponsor we're talking about today, General Electric. So General Electric is one of the major U.S. corporations developed in the early 20th century, and they have deep ties to Disney, Disney theme parks, but it also had deep ties to Edison.

basically the merging of a lot of these Edison financier projects and sub-industries that Edison owned and patented and stole from Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century. So General Electric basically... is formed through the merging of the Edison General Electric Company and the Thompson Houston Electric Company.

So this is a big merger. You think the corporate mergers are new? They're not. They are not new. In fact, like he had a big backing. There was like JP Morgan was one of the backers on this. Like it's a major, major deal. Edison was able to retain his own Edison company and then pieces of his company become General Electric. And it's not because they were breaking up monopolies, Kevin. It's like, this is how we're going to make money. We're going to pair all this together.

and then distribute it. This was one of the original companies, General Electric, on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And there were only 12 companies on that in the early days of Wall Street. So that tells you how big General Electric was when it... Yeah, from Wall Street to Walt Street. This happens... Walt, later on, will develop a theme park land around GE and Edison at Disneyland. We're going to get to that. Edison Square is something...

Basically, we did this entire series so that Matt could talk about Edison Square. Yes. So we're very excited about this. But basically, it helps to create this infotainment footprint that... will eventually inform G's progress land, which we are going to talk about the most. So just like a lot of connections here. And like any other major corporation of their age, GE found itself in both U.S. and international world fairs all throughout the 20th century.

And it started in 1933, the 1933-1934 Chicago World's Fair. Matt, it's the century of progress. Wow, this is so cool. I mean, this is like 40 years after the Columbia Exposition. We go back to Chicago, which is the biggest Midwestern city. Science finds, industry applies, man conforms. Kevin, is that the most like corporate mid-century thing? It is, but I also love that they're putting like science first.

Then industry's in there. Basically, you know what? Industry is your daddy. It's in charge of everything. Bend to the will. Bend to the will of science and corporations. But at this point, like 1933, 1934, science and America are super intertwined. One of the biggest going concerns is like how science is going to change us and save us and make us better.

You know, we have all this stuff that's happening between, you know, the 30s and the 50s, huge leaps in scientific discovery. We've got, you know, man on the moon. We've got vaccines. We've got all this other stuff. So all these things are happening, and I'm not going to say the 30s are where it all begins, but this is where we get our first big, like the public gets its first. look at how things are going to change in the future, especially as it relates to electricity.

Yeah, I mean, you can go to the Oppenheimer film, right? And just talking about like the scientific pioneers of their time and nuclear physics and... and all this different stuff. And then you can also relate it back to home. I mean, this is the first rising birth rate in the history of the world. And this is, like you mentioned, vaccines and modern medicine all come from this. There's latent effects of that too, like lobotomies and these kinds of things.

And so you have all of this science happening at the same time here. And I think... You know, those it's not different than now. Those who controlled science control the world and world's fairs. As much as we like to like highlight the positivity and the creativity that come out of these.

They're also about competition and showing off that competition was something that a company like General Electric could do in an age really before global economics. So this is all about how does the United States allow. companies like GE and Standard Oil and all these to thrive and then help create industries that make America the best. And I also want to point out, so

I'm obsessed with the pavilion for the 33-34 GE building. It's so humongous. It is massive. It's regal. It's like an Egyptian or a Roman building rather than a U.S. building. This is 1933 and 34. This is during the Great Depression. Right. And so... What we're seeing here is people starving on the streets and then, and Okies and everything, all that, all that's happening. And then General Electric is building this gigantic pay into itself.

which we love. We think it's cool. And again, it's one of those things where people, even like people that didn't have anything to eat, they would still go to this fair and look at this thing to give themselves some optimism. So there's a balance here. of, you know, what are we doing presenting this giant of industry while just all this bad stuff is happening? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it bread and circuses?

There's also, there's, you know, they're using people that are friendly and familiar. This is like when Walter Cronkite would talk about Vietnam. There was this Chicago-based war correspondent. His name was Floyd Gibson. And he talked like this. And he was like, one of those guys that talked in the radio voice. And if he was going to be supposing, he was going to be supposing, Kevin. Yeah, he's great. And everybody loves him. And so...

He did this popular series of radio broadcasts where he actually went to the GE laboratory. and referred to them as the House of Magic. This was his idea, but the name catches on, and then GE, when they come to the World's Fair in 1933, they call their big exhibition hall the House of Magic. Matt, it's a wonder show of science. Yeah, I mean, this is like, look at the electromagnetic wave and like harnessing the wave in the early 20th century. I mean, I'm a radio kid. I grew up.

doing radio into my 30s. And even the radio wave is kind of a magic electric marvel. Think about the fact that you can raise a tower, pump a bunch of electricity through it. harness the wave with your voice, and then someone can receive it on a box. That's crazy. It's insane. And it's invisible. That's the other thing that makes it magic to a lot of people. Especially in the 30s.

They show you in the House of Magic, in this little pavilion area, they show you what radio waves actually look like, and they do all these neat sign tricks. science tricks where like they popcorn by radio. Um, they talk about, uh, the air conditioning. There's like air conditioning in here for the first time. Um, there's x-rays, there's lighting, there's industrial equipment.

Power of transportation. One of the really cool things is highlighting that there's a star in the sky, a real star called Arcturus. which was identified during the Columbia Exposition in 1893, where Walt's father worked before he was born. So light that left that star in 1893 would reach Chicago during the 1933 World's Fair.

So basically it's, and I know this sounds hokey, but I wrote it in the notes and I'm going to just say it. It's like light shining from father to son. And I think that's just neat. That is special. That's very nice. I like that. I mean, this whole era of like. generating new I mean this is before you get to like consumer product So the idea of like using waves and like you said, x-rays and like the medical field, like all the ways that

modern companies are using this new technology. I mean, we're seeing this now in the digitization of many things. And you know, you and I have had our own criticisms of AI. I even wrote a whole show about it that you'll hear soon. But yeah, this idea that this new tech is sort of taking over and there's possibility. You don't talk about the latent things whenever it's new. And so these are the kinds of things that are being celebrated.

We talk about curing polio with science. We don't talk about thalidomide. Right, right. But the other thing, you mentioned consumer products. So one of the other things that's happening is In this World's Fair, the 33 World's Fair, is something called the Talking Kitchen. The Talking Kitchen. You love this. I love it so much. Not as much as the next one, but basically, hey, hey, little lady of the house.

you get all the modern conveniences. This is like it was really all about not necessarily talking down to housewives, but saying, hey, We know that you're tired from doing all that work, quote unquote. So here's all your modern conveniences. Basically, though, they're showing this kitchen of the future. Matt, this kitchen of the future looks a lot.

like the one in Carousel of Progress. Yeah, I mean, the one in the 20s and the one in the 40s, you know, the first one that you see in the 20s in Carousel of Progress has the pump. Right? Like you're at a well. And then the one by the time you get to the 40s has like a faucet head. And then, of course, that carries on into the to the mid-century. So like you can really see where we're at. There's also a ton of cabinetry, but not a lot of electricity, which is interesting.

is that you don't see big, large appliances in the way that you will later. Yeah, it's interesting. Like the fridge has that like ice bucket on the top of it. Uh, but you do see like a light bulb, um, like dangling and there's, there's others, you know, like Matt said, running water, there's, there's blenders on the counter. Like that's that sort of thing. And stoves. So we're getting some electricity here, but... So this is the 33-34 World's Fair. And GE comes back, Matt, in 1939 in New York.

We've talked about the 1939 New York World's Fair. This is where Robert Moses gets the idea that he had... Done a lot with the 39 World's Fair, but he really, like, he didn't put enough of a stamp, basically. He said the 39 World's Fair was a big failure because no one remembers me. So I'm going to do a new World's Fair so everyone remembers me. And they remembered you. Yes, they remembered you in the wrong way. They definitely remembered you. Everybody knows.

He did clean up that ash dump, though, Kev. I mean, that did happen. There's that. That did happen. So 1939, the tagline of the 1939 World's Fair is the World of Tomorrow. It's in New York. And the GE Pavilion is just as big. You know, the Great Depression is starting to end. Prohibition has ended. Lots of things to celebrate.

But it's as if nothing has happened with GE because it's still the level of opulence and giganticism that the other one had. But there are three sections that make up the GE pavilion. Steinmetz Hall, where there is a 10 million volt display of electricity over a 30 foot arc. We have one of these at the Boston Museum of Science. where they have Tesla coils and electricity. There's a person that gets in a cage. A metal cage and can touch the inside of the bars of a metal cage.

It goes up on an elevator and like electricity is going through all these Tesla coils. and jumping from one place to another. It's gigantic. And I can't even imagine... Like people seeing basically an electric storm inside in this place. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it'd be incredible. I mean, I'm even, you know, wild when I see this, we have a discovery center here that has a Tesla coil.

and they do little demonstrations on it. It's like a children's, you know, it's like a Chuck E. Cheese, but for science. And yeah, I'm still wowed by these things. And this was the 30s. Yeah, 1939. I don't think anybody's prepared to actually see electricity that can be harnessed, right? You know, you have to wait until 1955 for that. Doc Brown.

So we also have a new house of magic where there's like these whirling discs, this floating metal carpet, a solar motor. And then this is very interesting. A shadow that came and went independent of the person who was cast. But the big thing, the thing that everybody loved was the exhibit hall. And so this has like a complete television studio. Which is like a big deal. A modern electric appliance store. So you could actually buy GE appliances there. An x-ray.

General Electric X-ray Corporation, there was this X-ray machine that actually looked at the remains of a 2,700-year-old mummy. And so you could look inside this mummy with this x-ray. It was really, really interesting. Matt, we can talk about the pamphlet. We can talk about the pamphlet. I want to know quickly. I mean, that makes sense. TV in the 30s. David Sarnoff is in New York.

A lot of stuff happening there. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. RCA. Anyway, a lot of things happening in the... Yeah, let's talk about the pamphlet. This pamphlet blew my mind because I read it. Like, I just read it and Kevin was like, you don't just read it. It has to be sung, son. So GE issued this weird old pamphlet about Cinderella and how she escaped her drudgery by using GE products.

like water heaters and vacuum cleaners, and it rhymed. So I'm just going to read a couple of these verses. It's a picture pamphlet, and there's these elves that are helping Cinderella. I don't know why they're not just doing the work for her. And then the next appliance, credited to laundry science, was an ironer they placed upon the floor.

She clapped her hands elated when the elves had demonstrated how much easier this job was than before. You know, in this version of the Cinderella story, she escapes all of her drudgery so much that she doesn't want to leave the castle. She never meets Prince Charming and things go weird. She's just hanging out and doing chores. Because he likes doing them now. Elves are helpers, Kevin. They don't do things for you. They're helpers. Unless they're cobblers.

And just to make life sweeter, they installed a water heater and guaranteed hot water day and night. At this time, she almost doubted, but her fears were quickly routed when they proved to her that they were surely right. These are bad poems um i had to look up lyrics for the wizard of oz oh yeah uh as we as we as kevin posted these in the notes and we had to go we had to look up who sang the songs because i was like this sounds like the wizard of oz

Twitch. A switch. I'm like, you just dropped a house on someone. Oh my god. Why are we singing? Slowly going off the rails. Yeah. So this thing, this pavilion was great. Outside the pavilion, there was, again, a giant fountain, which was awesome. And then this really interesting, like, sculpture of a bolt of electricity in, like, metal. And it had, like, this...

this sphere on top of it. So it's basically like a metal cloud shooting down metal lightning. It's really, really neat. Very impressive. It lit up at night. And so I love This version, you know, it hits the ground and there's like these sparks that come. It's all made of metal and it's really, really neat. So 1939, General Electric really outdid itself. Going forward, General Electric and Walt Disney...

kind of have a lot of the same thoughts about how industry will save us in the future and how it will shape our day-to-day lives. I mean, both companies take a break. From World's Fairs in the 40s, everybody took a break basically through the 50s. And so as Walt Disney is building Disneyland and generating ideas for the theme park, I think General Electric makes so much sense, not only because... the park relies more and more and more on electric entertainment.

but also because these are two huge companies that survived the war. Everybody's thinking optimistically. And marrying the two together makes so much sense for what Walt Disney is trying to accomplish. And we talked a lot about this in the Lincoln show. As Walt Disney is trying to fund Liberty Street, he's going to all these different sponsors to help fund, you know, all the different attractions. And the same thing is true with Edison Square in the 1950s and into the 60s.

I mean, what better company than GE and Edison subsidiary that merges into a massive corporation to be the sort of, you know, financier for that project? Yeah, I mean, this is amazing. Like, Walt had a lot of really big ideas for early Disneyland. A couple of adjuncts to Main Street. This is the really big one. This is the one that makes...

sort of the most sense, even more than Liberty Square. You know, this guy, imagine you're Sam McKim. We've talked about Sam McKim in the past. He does this full-color concept about this entrance. suburban addition to Main Street that would resemble a gated community that had two red brick pillars supporting this curved all-electric sign saying Edison Square. There's something very similar to this.

going into the New York area, going into the Coney Island area in Tokyo Disney, Tokyo Disney Sea. It's really, really neat. Those brick stanchions on either side of the street, you can find those in like the Grand Park area that still exists at the Disney Hollywood Studios. And it also is reminiscent of Liberty Square. Before you cross the bridge, you see those two giant...

brick sort of structures. And how they modernized it here is with the electric signage, which, by the way, looks a lot like the electric park in Kansas City sign. Yeah, yeah, really, they're taking a lot of ideas. from the Electric City and really bringing it into, you know, what is the representation of this time period. You know, there's going to be a brick paved street, the most modern electric and gas power horseless carriages.

And of course, Matt, brand new electric streetlights instead of Main Street's gas lamps. I love this very subtle. I don't think like in my head, I'm thinking that this happened. It didn't. But I. I just have this idea in my head of like, yeah, you're seeing the gas lamps and very subtly, like just subliminally, it goes to electric lights. And half the people that would go through this wouldn't have noticed it. But it's a really smart.

If you walk through the National Mall in Washington, D.C., you'll see the transition between gas lamp. and electric streetlights like they still have gas lamp structures and many of them have electric streetlights in them or electric electric lights as you walk through like near where the capitol building is and stuff like it's really cool you see this like transition of time like happening in real time

Matt, they don't have any gaslights still in DC. You're just crazy. I'm gaslighting you. They should have kept the gaslights, right? Oh my God, you got me. I was like, what are you talking about? I guess they do. Oh, boy, I'm so dense. No, it's good. It's good times. So they had these facades for the building. The facades were going to look like the red brick houses of Philadelphia, New York's brownstones, the wooden edifices of St. Louis and San Francisco. I love it.

The Greystones of Chicago, not the Greystokes, that's Tarzan. And then, of course, my place, the Colonial Brick of Boston. Basically, it is a northeastern, sort of, somewhat midwest. version of Main Street. It's not just a small Midwestern town. We're actually in a city now, even though it's the summer. Right, you can feel it, right? It's urban, very early suburban, you know, living that's happening here. Automobiles, but not-

you know, there's no 10 story buildings. That's the key. Everything is two stories. So it feels like it's from the sort of turn of the century before they had the ability to do a high rise. And then this is the same time period where electricity is coming online. Yeah, and then there's going to be this cul-de-sac at the end.

with this little fenced-in circular green park. I love the cul-de-sac. That's so suburban. It's so suburban. I lived near a cul-de-sac at one point. It was going to have this life-size statue of Thomas Edison. with his right arm raised high in the air and his finger pointing upward, basically saying, look, there's lightning. And look over there. Everyone ignore Tesla. He did none of this. I did all of it. I did all this myself.

And if you like movies, then come to New York. Don't go to Hollywood. So Edison Square is going to be this astounding dramatization, Matt, called Harnessing the Lightning. This new attraction... was so far along in planning that it was featured as a coming attraction in Disneyland Guide Maps and Maps.

I, like, without giving any spoilers, everyone's been on the Carousel of Progress. Basically, this looks like if you took the Carousel of Progress and unrolled it. Yeah, and stretched it out around a cul-de-sac. You could walk in one side and then walk out the other. It's a it's a it's basically a big horse. And it's a walkthrough attraction, and it's separated into several acts.

And each one of the acts has a demonstration of the technology of the time related to how that technology interacted with the American family. It's a super, super smart attraction. Hard to sing delight. A story of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A feast for eye and ear. with Mr. Wilbur K. Watt, the incredible electric man, and a cast of 50. Marvelous electromechanical personalities, Kevin. They didn't even say audio animatronics.

We're never going to say audio electronics again on the show. We're only going to say marvelous electromechanical personalities. I sing the body electric, Kevin. That's what this is. This is robotic man. This is like... Can you imagine seeing those words together if you're like a kid? Electromechanical personalities that sing, dance, and talk?

It's like that electric grandmother from, there's a Ray Bradbury story. I sing the body electric. I sing the body electric. Yes, exactly. Like this whole thing. I would have gone nuts. I go nuts for this now. I'm looking at this. I'm like, oh, yeah, I want to see that.

You should watch that Twilight Zone episode, by the way. I Sing the Body Electric. That's what introduced me to all this. And I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. This is so great. I did a speaking engagement about Twilight Zone, and I talked about that episode. But, okay, so. The Wizard's Progress is basically the Wizard of, not of Waverly Place, Menlo Park. The Wizard of Menlo Park.

is Thomas Edison. And so there's five dramatic dioramas, including the famous 40-hour watch. So, basically, so think about the carousel progress. Think about what would happen if all the rumors were ending. And this is the walkthrough. So Act One is around 1898. Oh, it's called 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration. That's a Thomas Edison little bon mo there.

Act II, circa 1918, The Initials of a Friend. What's that mean, I guess? The Copper Wire Jungle? I don't know. It's something about... how electricity finds its way into modern building. Right, right. And then act three circa 1958, which is around this time, live better electrically. This is the present. And, you know, there's. songs and all this other stuff. And then Act 4, the far-flung future, Matt, of 1978. More power to America.

And this, you know, talks about spaceships, electricity everywhere. This is like the big thing. So we get to talk about Thornton Wilder. Basically, Matt, Matt, Walt had grown enamored of the stage. I grew enamored. Matt loves Thornton Wilder, guys. Walt had grown enamored of the stage play called Our Town, which is very cool by Thornton Wilder. And he basically wanted to bring that.

to the GE stage show. So Harnessing the Lightning would be performed in this, like, horseshoe theater at multiple stages inside these buildings in the cul-de-sac. And it's going to be following this typical American family through the decades with each step showing how GE had made the future brighter and better. So Wilbur K. Watt, the K stands for kilo, so kilowatt.

He's going to be the onstage narrator for this show. So according to the brochure prepared for GE, it says, Our narrator, Wilbur K. Watt, is an incredible electromechanical man. As he rocks back and forth in his armchair, he describes a scene we see on stage. It's almost as though Mr. Watt were alive. for his movements are synchronized and lifelike as he describes the play. So basically, he's the stage manager in our town.

And he's also John from the Carousel of Progress. This is amazing. Yeah, he's the narrator, essentially, of the world you're walking into and what people are doing and connecting the threads of each of the acts. of the play. And that's basically what this is. It's like a walkthrough stage production. Guys, where do you see this picture of the proposal? It's just awesome.

So basically, Disney said, OK, so we want to do this. It's very ambitious. It's very cool. We are going to do all these electromechanical people. It's going to be the stage that you walk through. It's going to be huge. Everyone will love it. So they're like, we can't afford this. We're Disney. It's still, you know, mid-century. So we need a sponsor. So they pitched this thing to GE, and their pitch goes as such.

Edison Square in Disneyland will dramatically present the story of the way in which one invention by Thomas A. Edison has influenced the growth and development of America. Edison Square is the story of that area. The birth, growth, development, and future of electricity and general electric products. That's a really cool way to say, we're still going to advertise for you. This is like... This is not just like talking about our history. There's going to be product.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's the real connective thread between Disney and GE is that GE... in the post-war era, even in the pre-war era in 39. I mean, the demonstrations and what's in the pavilion at the 39 World's Fair, a bunch of irons, vacuum cleaners, all this stuff. How are we going to showcase that for you? We're going to do it on stage.

marvelous electro-mechanical personalities are going to do that for you. Yeah, and so not only are they going to be the spokespeople for you, they are themselves a demonstration of your electricity. So there's a much longer proposal, but that's like the gist of it. And GE is more receptive than you think. So, you know, Walt sends the proposal to GE, but Matt, something else is happening in this company right now. We talk a lot about the oil crisis of the 70s, but have we ever talked...

about the GE price-fixing scandal of the 60s? We have not. We've talked about quite a few scandals on this show. Everybody loves us for this, animals and scandals. pink hippo clubs, and oil crises. Let me just describe it quickly to you. The GE price fixing scandal. It sounds like it's like... It sounds like corporate malfeasance and insider trading or something, but it actually comes down to the light bulb, Kevin. It's literally about patenting and controlling the price.

of a light bulb. Yeah, GE owns a few patents. Basically, it deals with tungsten filaments, and GE accounted for 69% of total manufacture of all the light bulbs. And Westinghouse is like mad about this. So GE licenses Westinghouse to manufacture. Basically, it's light bulbs. They wanted to fix the price of light bulbs and, you know, due to what they say.

It's the great light bulb scandal of our time. I mean, it's the teapot dome scandal, Kevin. I don't know. I mean, I never knew that we had a light bulb scandal. We actually... By the way, we did have a light bulb war that happened in the last 20 years. I don't know if you know this. Remember the spiral light bulbs that came out in like the early two? Yeah. And then those had to go away and everybody went back to the old light bulbs.

And this was like, you know, decisions made in Congress over the light bulb. Like we're still doing a little bit of light bulb stuff. Lightbulb scandals of all time. So anyway, the Justice Department basically indicts General Electric for price fixing on electrical equipment. GE had to pay $500,000, an additional $50 million in damages paid to utilities who had purchased the price-fixing equipment, and three GE managers went to jail. And a bunch of people had to leave the company, Matt.

This is something that would clearly happen today because, you know, this is just so grossly obvious that anything would send these people to jail nowadays, right? Yeah, of course. With great power comes no responsibility, Kevin. That's the motto in our country. So certainly they would have gone to jail, gone to prison after breaking the law.

Yeah, so this is the big GE downturn. It's post-war. Everything's optimistic. They're making all these consumer products, making people's lives better. I mean, I'm not going to lie to you. I like the vacuum cleaner. I love the... you know, the light bulb. I love all these things. I mean, they make my life so much easier and they're wonderful.

But GE is now associated with this scandal and everybody knows it. As soon as you say prison time, it sounds like this is a company I don't want to be associated with and it opens the door to competitors. GE is very conscious of this. This is also the era when public relations becomes a very big part. of the corporate world and advertising becomes ever more important as discussed on the show Mad Men. Not to go too far afield, but I remember there was a Tylenol scandal in the 80s.

where two people had gotten poison Tylenol. Someone had like... poison their Tylenol. And like Tylenol had to do this huge thing, you know, advertising and coming back from the brink of this huge scandal so that they could be back on top.

This sort of thing happens with GE. GE is in a very fragile position at this point. People don't like GE, and GE is like, we need people to like us because we can be in everyone's homes, but if we... fail here if people keep associating us with jail time and all this bad stuff. We are going to sync. So they use the power. They're like, we need the power of advertising. We need the power of good press. And we need the power, basically, of Uncle Walt on our side.

Old Uncle Walt, who's now on television. and can make this very easy for them. So just attach your name to Old Uncle Walt, and it sort of purifies, just like it did with the cautionary tales of the 18th and 19th centuries. purifies the brand. And that's what they're looking for here. And Disney, I'm sure Disney was conscious of this. Oh, yeah. I mean, not to be too grandiose about this, but there's a reason why Robert Moses goes to Walt Disney. He has integrity. He has quality.

Personally, if the country company isn't as sweet as it says it is, the pub, I mean, let's talk about union busting for a second. Honestly, the public perception of Walt Disney is wholesomeness, is integrity, is right. Family. Family, nostalgia. So it's a bargaining chip for Walt. He uses it with Robert Moses. He can use it with GE. And so GE wants to partner badly with him. But...

Basically, GE says, if we just do this in your theme park, it's not going to be good enough. It's not going to be big enough. Right now, Disneyland is a West Coast thing. It's still a regional park. Even if you have it on your TV, it's not going to be... as big for us so waltz is like okay we'll pivot And so Walt and GE both pivot to the New York World's Fair. Yeah, and we talked a lot about when the Disney company partnered with

different corporations to produce attractions. And this was one of the very early partnership so ge was very very invested and so was walt disney and imagineering and wed in constructing something that would make sense for both them and what Walt wanted to do inside Disneyland. We talked about it earlier. This partnership makes total sense.

you know, for Disney, but it also made total sense for GE. And that's why we get such an amazing attraction out of it because there's so much lifeblood at WED that is pumped into them. Yeah, I mean, not for nothing, but by the time we get to, like, it's a small world. And nothing to take away from it's a small world is a brilliant attraction. But this is just next level. This is, like, such... an involved and gigantic thing uh that like this is you can see the entire company is uh

once they get on board, is fully invested in this. And Walt and his company is fully invested in this. There's no pulling teeth like with the Ford Pavilion. There's a little bit, but not very much stuff about like... proposing to a bunch of different places, like with the Lincoln Pavilion. And there's no, like, no, we're not doing that with the birds in the Coke Pavilion. That just didn't happen. Basically...

Everybody wants us to succeed eventually. And boy, did they succeed. Yeah. So Walt Disney does what Walt Disney does and goes and taps his old friend, Welton Beckett. who we just did a show on. It's crazy because when we did that show, I was writing the first pieces of this show. And we talked about the Pan Pacific Theater.

Welton Beckett's early joint there and by the 1960s I mean this is just a standard household name in the world of architecture, and Walt Disney taps him and says, hey, I need you to create something that's going to make a stamp, that's going to put its stamp on this fair, and we're going to use it for the GE Pavilion, and that's where we get. The Progress Land Pavilion structure. It is this...

that stretches over the entire Progressland Pavilion. You have seen this dome. It was in the Wonders of Life Pavilion. It is the Wonders of Life Pavilion, basically. It's also the Cinerama Dome that's in Los Angeles. Welton Beckett was a futurist, and he's just amazing. He's basically... If you think of Buckminster Fuller and his domes, Welton Beckett is like not far behind in his domes.

So he just does all these amazing, like, multifaceted domes. And this was such an eye-catching, like, basically structure, this roof. for the Progress Land Pavilion. You can see it from miles away. There's a lot of amazing structures in the New York World's Fair, and this is one of the most eye-catching. Yeah, and a lot of that's because it's not a standard structure, right? I mean, this is an era of geometry.

And we're using the ectoskeleton of a building to provide the support structure for the building. And that's a very mid-century thing is to have these big open vistas. We talked about it on the Pan Pacific Theater Show is that when you walked into. you know, floor of a high rise that you wouldn't have a bunch of pillars in your face. And that's what this dome is, you know, leaning into. And we're going to see.

Look, this is a year before the Astrodome and five years before the Superdome. One of those is in Houston, the other in New Orleans, which was the site of this year's Super Bowl. So most of us saw it on TV. So this predates those, and it just becomes this, like, iconic moment in the history of architecture, so much so that they bring it into Future World at Epcot later. Matt, there was something that...

Something about Raleigh Crump, you talked about, you had this interview with Raleigh Crump and this is something that he wouldn't talk about. Yeah, it wasn't the structure. So Raleigh Crump did a ton of work on the Health and Life Pavilion. going into the design of Future World and all of these different theaters and ideas that they had for health and life.

came from Rolly Crump. And this is like a post Walt era within the company. So he doesn't have the backing of Walt when he's doing these designs. And I don't know who he had his greatest conflict with. It could have been. card walker it could have been marty sklar i don't know uh but he would not speak to what happened with the the life and health pavilion that later becomes wonders of life and there's a reason why it was delayed for so long i think they just kind of discounted

a lot of the designs that he had. And then he was like, nope, tight lipped on that one. Oh boy. Poor Ollie Crump. Yeah. Yeah. He's amazing. He's just the best. I mean, that was like the first cool interview I ever did in my life. He was a beach boy. He was basically a surfer and he was just amazing. He designs everything. Be nice to Raleigh Crump. He rules. Progress Land, so we talk about...

We talk about Progressland, and when I first got into this, I was like, oh yeah, Progressland, the Carousel of Progress. Matt's like, oh, no, Kevin. Carousel progress is a big part of this. It is definitely not the only part of this. And I was like, oh, so there's some little exhibits you think? No.

There's so many things that are happening in Progress Land. Yeah, Progress Land is this giant structure. I mean, we talked about the Magic Skyway, and that one housed a very big attraction with the Ford Motor Vehicles. This one's a little bit different. It has the obviously it has the carousel theater and you know the original design for The Edison square was not a carousel in which you would, you know, ride in the, the, the theater itself would remain stationary. It was a walkthrough.

So bringing in the sort of roundabout attraction, I was going to save it for the outro, but I'm just going to say it. The Roditorium. that disney designs why don't they use that they should totally use it uh tm tm matt parish on that one the rotatorium is designed in this era because like we talked about with

Future World, sometimes the style of the attraction itself is futuristic, and that's what this stage performance was. Yeah, so you have this iconic shape and structure. It has a carousel of progress, but... There's so much else going on here. On the bottom floor of the interaction, you go under this walkway. There's an arch. It's like this three-pronged arch with this big medallion on it. There was a whole thing back in the day, in the late 50s, early 60s, that if you had a medallion house,

That meant that you had good electricity, like you were energy efficient in your home and you can get these medallions. And so there was a big medallion on this art saying, hey, you're energy efficient here. It wasn't, because it's World's Fair. It's the mid-century. Yeah, come on, guys. But in the brochure, it's a fascinating medallion city. Beyond the arch is a real all-electric city.

with homes and stores, civic and industrial buildings, even a space observatory. And Matt, this medallion city, this is, like, amazing. It was on the ground floor and purported to be a whole city that ran only on electricity. So there were all these exhibits that explained what you were seeing, and it was pre-recorded. It was on tape. So there was the medallion home completely run on electricity. And it looked like a regular house. Yeah. It's not like the house of the future. It just looks like.

Like a split-level house. Yeah, like a little bungalow-style split-level. Yeah. There was a closed-circuit TV in a hospital. This model classroom based on Steinmetz High School. Steinmetz High School actually exists. What is that? It's in Illinois. But remember we talked about Steinmetz Hall? Yes. That had the electricity. Basically, this guy Steinmetz was a big deal in Illinois. Okay. And everything's named after him. I was like, who is this Steinmetz?

I don't know. I mean, I could do some research on the show and go into it. And then there's this automated steel mill, so you could watch the steel mill making steel happen. Everything's automated, and it's basically like... you know the checkout of today where you know everything's automated there uh except it's you know making steel My favorite part of this, Matt, is the Hotpoint Storybook Kitchen. Oh, yes. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my whole life.

There's so many soffits and like hanging lights in here. It's crazy. Everything, everything is sepia. There's kitchen carpet, which is, oh my God. There's these stained glass that looks like you're in a pizza hut. It is the most orange refrigerators you'll ever see. Orange and brown. The washer and disher, the washing machine and the dryer are in the kitchen. They're in the kitchen because everything has to happen in the kitchen, Matt.

And then there's like a flambeau. There's like – everyone has a chandelier. You got to get a chandelier. I have chandeliers, Kevin. I have chandeliers. I used to have a chandelier in my house. By the way, one of the big differences here between this kitchen and a kitchen of like the 40s. is the stovetop, right? This is a stovetop that's not attached to the stove itself. And that became a huge trend in the 60s and 70s.

Yeah, yeah, and you have the electric eyes. Everything's electric. This is not a gas stove at all. In fact, I believe there's a rotisserie in here. I think everybody believed that we would use rotisseries. a lot in the future. I don't know. Now just people go to Costco and line up for those rotisserie chickens. You just get them in this like little bubble. Yeah. It always hits in a bubble.

Oh, that's so funny. I want to point out, Matt, that this This was so popular that it had a spinoff cookbook. The Hot Points Storybook Kitchen Cookbook. There's going to be a picture. I cannot wait to share it with everybody. There is a rack of lamb that a woman is staring at with such lovingness. It's so weird. She's like, oh, me? Me? I get to eat the rack of wine?

Am I the rack of lamb? Me? A commoner? By the way, it costs 60 cents. How do I know that? It was on the front of the cookbook. It's so good. This thing is so amazing. how big this thing was. Next to the kitchen of the sepia kitchen of the future is, of course, Matt, the thermonuclear reactor. I mean, that's exactly where you would put yours, right? Right next to your kitchen. Okay, so this was wild.

The very early days of the Disneyland TV show, they did a nuclear reaction. I've talked about this with the ping pong balls and the mousetrap. And they basically talked about how like if you shot a neutron into an unstable atom, it would create this nuclear reaction. All right. So they wanted to give you nuclear is all the rage and nuclear is going to become the. most forward-thinking energy source that will help power electricity into the new age, right? This is all the atomic age stuff.

And this is pre-Chernobyl, obviously pre-Three Mile Island. So nuclear really is looked at as the wave of the future. And so they wanted to give this sort of demonstration to say, hey, General Electric is on top of where the future is going from an electricity standpoint. And so we're going to show you how we're going to conduct electricity for you. And we're going to do that with. thermonuclear fusion and they had this weird geometric

Bubble? It's another bubble. Yeah, why are they all these bubbles? And, because everything's round. And so you could stand around this thermonuclear fission demonstration. And, you know, what's the difference between fission and fusion? Fission is the splitting and fusion is the marrying. And so you could see how they split a piece of the atom within this like nuclear bubble. It's so weird. You just stood around it as it like, it was like a little laser that zapped.

This reminds me of, like, you know, on Bikini Island, they would watch, like, nuclear bomb tests happen. It was just, it was recreation. And... And this is a science thing, but it's also partially recreation. They're just having nuclear demonstrations. It's like one of those things where, you know, we know enough science for it to be fun, but not enough to know that it's world dangerous.

And so this is happening, and it's very weird. We're just playing God in this pavilion. If this had gone wrong, this would have been a whole different option. But in addition, there's also something called the Sky Dome. Matt, when it was constructed, the Sky Dome was the world's largest projection screen. How amazing is this? This is amazing. All right. This is going to go on to help.

inspire lots of different attractions most of them like i grew up with the incredidome kev and we went to worlds of fun owned by the hunt family you sat in a dome structure And on the ceiling, you rode roller coasters. And it's just basically like... Circa Rama at Disneyland, except it's projected onto a dome above you. That's basically what it is. Or today, the modern version would be the sphere in Las Vegas.

where the projection is on the outside and the inside of the sphere simultaneously. That's what you got with the Skydome. I loved that sphere, by the way. We tried to get tickets to that when we were in Vegas.

There wasn't anything playing except for this nature film that cost like $75. I'm like, I don't need to see this view that much. You can see it from the outside anyway. But it becomes like a big advertising screen. This obviously was not that. This was housed inside the Progressland Pavilion. And you went inside this dome and you could see like these different demonstrations that were on.

on the ceiling inside. Let me reach for this. It says, the search for a better life in the future. You enter the corridor of mirrors. It's endless vistas dotted with reflected photographs of general electric scientists and engineers doing basic research, yada, yada, yada. Then ahead of you, you see a large marquee. It heralds the Sky Dome Spectacular, the epic story of man's efforts to control...

and use the new energy sources of nature for the benefit of all. This is man controlling nature, right? This is the era that we're in. Instead of conforming to it, now we control it. Yeah, and this is, yeah, it's no longer man-conformed. It's like man now playing God, which is great. You know, this is... General Electric has harnessed all this stuff, and now it is in full control. And it will be for a little while longer.

But, you know, we make fun of this nowadays. But if I saw something called the Sky Dome Spectacular, if I saw a nuclear vision test, I would love this. in the 60s. Come on. This is amazing. I mean, I can't fully articulate how weird that nuclear demonstration is. It looks like you're looking at Luke Skywalker's house on Tatooine. And like in the middle of it is like a giant piece of metal doing nuclear work. Like people had no idea how nuclear reactions occurred.

This was the only place you could ever see that. Everybody's standing around on like this ledge, like it's an operating theater. We want to see someone get their spleen taken out or a thermonuclear demonstration. Sure. This is what I come to New York for. This could have leveled New York. Could it have leveled New York if bad things had happened? Maybe. I don't know. Fission.

Yeah, I mean, the CERN team did their little demonstration years ago in their hydro collider. And people were like, it might create a black hole, but we don't know. So let's just find out. Yeah, I remember when that happened. You know, people just get used to anything. I remember the CERN Collider happening, and I was like, oh, that would be bad if it happened. Anyway, what's on the funnies page? Yeah. So, Matt, now we come to the...

This is great. So the theme is we bring good things to light. There's a purpose. But it's really... Not entirely. I don't want to be crazy cynical, but a little bit. Mainly, this is to sell GE products. Yeah, it's full of products. I'll put some audio in the show if you haven't heard it already in the intro talking about how... products were discussed and they didn't hold back. Like they were like this modern blender from General Electric.

makes mom's life easier. And that's a lot of what the Carousel of Progress script was like. Now today, that's watered down. They talk about the American family and the era in which the characters are living. And more of that is described. And the, I think the consumer products are better embedded in the script, but here they literally, it was like overt advertising for consumer products.

You know, ever you see a commercial where instead of people saying, you know, oh, look, mom made apple pie tonight. He was like, oh, mom made Mrs. Smith's apple pie. Yes. stuff like that was happening. Oh, this, uh, instead of saying, Hey, open the fridge, open the general electric, uh, you know, world's refrigerator, you know, that sort of thing, you know, it was very, very, uh, it's arch a little bit.

But, you know, we've talked about the Sherman Brothers before. They did the It's a Small World theme song, and they did the theme song here. Everyone sing along. It's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. I can't believe it took us that long, over an hour, to sing that song on this show. That's hard to believe. Yeah, the Sherman Brothers did a great job. Carousel of Progress. Music is iconic, as is It's a Small World, etc. The lead vocals... were Rex Allen, and he sings it. He's the father.

And he did other Disney narration. And so he's basically your host. rex allen do you know anything about rex allen there kevin no was he was he an actor was he a voice actor yeah he was like um i i think of him as like a western uh star of the time and he uh he was known as the Arizona cowboy yeah yeah yeah so I think he got his early start like many of these people in radio and then transitioned into

uh, film and television like most of them did. And so his voice was, I wouldn't say it was like as iconic as like a Bing Crosby or something. You may have recognized his voice, but his voice, I think worked perfectly because it was kind of folksy and homely. He narrated a bunch of Disney films back in the day. The Legend of Lobo, Matt, Run Appaloosa Run, and of course, Charlie the Lonesome Cougar, which later became a movie on Cinemax. No, this is... I love Lobo, by the way.

Lobo! He also did the, speaking of Hanna-Barbera, he did the narration for Charlotte's Web. Oh. So he's a folksy guy. He's someone that you trust. He's got a Walter Cronkite. Not a Walter Cronkite. Tight voice. You trust it, right? He sounds like a father figure or even like a grandfatherly figure whom you would buy into the things that he was saying. So that's Rex Allen and his voice. You can hear it here on the show in the audio part.

Over time, there's going to be more songs developed for this attraction. Best time of your life. Now is the best. Now is the time. Now is the best time. I often reference that on this show. People may not know what that is, but that was a later iteration.

of the Carousel of Progress song. And so they went away from Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow and they're like, hey, let's sound more modern. Instead of telling people to buy stuff tomorrow, let's tell them to buy it now. This is a real cynical move. Now I get it. The song is very catchy. Best time of your life. But it's not a great big beautiful tomorrow. And it's basically saying, hey, you know how we told you to buy things in the future? No, don't do that. Buy things right now. Right this second.

You don't need to save up for this. Just use a credit card. Credit cards are all the rage. All your friends have them. Use credit cards. They also, later on, GE commissioned a third song from the Sherman Brothers called New Horizons. But in the end, they said, we're not going to use the Sherman Brothers, obviously. The CEO, GE's CEO at the time, wrote a song instead and no one liked it. Nope. So, basically, so this is all happening. Nobody liked the third song. And so...

General Electric dropped sponsorship of the Carousel Progress in 1985. Now, this is going a little bit in the future, but eventually General Electric divorces itself from the Carousel Progress. And the newer song remained for a while, which is weird. I grew up with it. Now is the time. But in 1993, happily, Walt Disney brought back the original theme song. There's a great big beautiful tomorrow. And Nate Parrish and I were like, why did they bring this song back? We like, now is the best time.

Just like the people who lament the fact that the Sorcerer's Hat went away mad. We didn't know there was a previous version. Our version was Now is the Best Time. I didn't know that, like, you could see the Chinese theater down Hollywood Boulevard, Kevin. So let's talk about some specs for the Council of Progress.

This is not really a show about the Carousel of Progress. It's more a show about Progress Land in which this takes place. We will eventually do a deeper dive into the Carousel of Progress. Some really neat stuff here. Stuff that, you know, we talked a little bit about Lincoln and how intense it was to bring Lincoln to life. But Lincoln had to be a very specific... figure and had to be very detailed. These audio electronics could be slightly less detailed, and there were 32 of them.

Right. None of them got up and walked. Right. There's a lot of, you know, father moving his arms and head, you know, in synchronicity. And, you know, panning over to what Mother is doing and her movements with the iron and the vacuum cleaner and this sort of thing. So these aren't really sophisticated like Lincoln, but they are audio animatronics nonetheless. And that was still a new thing.

Yeah, there's a really great video of Walt interviewing Walthall Rogers. He's basically the guide for what John is going to be doing as the narrator. He's hooked into this harness. It looks like a medieval torture device. And he's sitting there and he's doing all these movements. And Walt walks over and is like, hey, can you have him pick up the newspaper? And he's like, yeah.

And he hasn't picked up the newspaper. And it's clear that this is uncomfortable and very tedious for Walthall Rogers. And Walt is just having the best time. And I think I read somewhere where Walt said, hey, this whole thing was great. Can you do it again? And Walter Rogers said, absolutely not. I am not going through this again.

You got the right take the first time. I love this story. So it was really, really fun. He basically said, hell no. Yeah, we won't go. There's a lot of Imagineers that work. attraction, Matt. Not just Waltham Rogers, but we've got Roger Brogy, we've got Alice Davis, Mark Davis, Blaine Gibson, Johnny Hench, our buddy Johnny Hench, and of course Sam McKim.

who did that original sketch for Edison Park. Yeah, and all these names can be found on windows of Main Street. I mean, these are iconic Disney names in Imagineering, and... Even some of them that transitioned from animation. So yeah, this is a cast of Disney's elite working on this huge project. And I think that that speaks to how important this was for Disney. and how much they thought of the carousel attraction and its ability to come back to Disneyland. I mean, this is something that they-

you know, had laid the blueprints for as, you know, as far back as Edison square in the late fifties. So it makes sense here that they really believed in this. They really, you know, appreciated, I think the partnership with general electric, it's going to transcend into Walt Disney world later. And so it makes sense here that your best, best men and women would be on this on the beat here. And so and I got to talk about how popular.

progress land and the carousel progress were so um a few stats here this proved to be so popular that there were often two-hour waits to get into this pavilion. It's crazy. No virtual cues. Nobody could be able to take out their cell phone and just say, hey, I'm near this. I'm over at the Ford Pavilion. Let me know when I can come over. None of that. This is so.

In the 64, uh... season they had like this it all the lines went out into this like parking lot uh in 65 they utilized a switchback this is the first attraction to use a wait time board so you like to walk up and see how long it's going to take And then there's this outside queue. There's a switchback queue covered now so people aren't waiting out in the hot sun. They basically, GE leased the vacant lot nearby so they could do this.

And people at the World's Fair immediately dubbed that the Progress. Oh, buddy. Which I think is really funny. I like that. Progress Lane. That's kind of like Rodatorium. It is. It is. So, Matt, so... So we've got a switch back here. We've got a wait time thing. These are things that are going to come to Disneyland, but there's other legacies of this attraction.

Yeah, the relationship with Welton Beckett would continue into Disneyland as well. So we talked about the iconic structure of the Progressland Pavilion. We're going to find that later in Future World at the Wonders of Life, which I think opened in 86-ish. maybe 87, not an opening day future world attraction, but over in Disneyland, instead of Edison square, the revitalization and the tomorrow on the move.

refurb of Tomorrowland itself took place and one of the signature attractions there was not Space Mountain, it was the Carousel of Progress and the People Mover cast. The most mid-century modern structure I've seen outside LAX is the... It's just so gorgeous. I love... It looks like... It sort of does look like the Guardian's queue. On the inside. On the inside. But this is an outside. This is a Welton Beckett joint. He comes to Disneyland, builds a whole exterior for this.

Basically, it looks like a rich person's house in the Hollywood Hills in 1962. It's so amazing. It does. It totally looks like that. It's got the archways outside. It's got giant ramps that lead you up into the interior of the pavilion itself. awesome. I mean, the whole thing is very Welton Beckett. It looks very Disney. It's interesting because

I wonder, I mean, I think at the time, you know, the Tomorrow on the Move, the People Mover, et cetera, I think that was like great additions to Tomorrowland and Disneyland. But like now all of that is like defunct. So Edison Square I think would have been the more lasting land and or theming and probably something that we would be in love with today.

You know, I don't want to harp on this because, you know, as much as I love the Carousel Progress, I was real happy when it went away from Disneyland because then we get... Micah sings, yes, yes, of course. So in this pavilion, you've got this outer ring of seating. There's six sections, six stationary stages, and then people move. Oh, it's like a people move. And the people mover goes around it, which is awesome. Oh my God, it totally does. It all works.

So in the second level, there is the original Progress City model. This thing is massive. Yes. It's gigantic. When it later comes to the People Mover at Walt Disney World. I think more than a half had been cut off. Yeah, it's like a quarter of the original Progressland model. So a couple of cool things here.

Number one, the Progressland model and Carousel of Progress were like highly connected because in the fifth rotation of the Carousel of Progress at Disneyland, You moved into an open sort of walkway that released into a speed ramp, Kevin, that went up to the second floor. Guests were invited to spring up from their seats through the doorway and up the moving ramp.

On the second floor, mother and father from the theater show will join you and tell you all about Progress City. So please keep moving. Don't stand in the way of progress. Of course. I believe these are just like narration. that you can't see. They're like taped narrations. But you go up and you look at this gigantic model. It's amazing. There's a speed ramp in here. I want to go on speed ramps.

I like, there's a picture here of like the original carousel at Disneyland. And there's a woman who looks like a stewardess. From like an airplane. And she's the one with white gloves. Like telling you where to go. It's amazing. She is like. She works for Pan Am. It's a whole situation. Love everything about this. So when that model.

moved from Disneyland over to Walt Disney World. Because eventually, Matt, by the way, let's underscore this here. This attraction, which had a purpose-built building for it in Disneyland, Lasts for six years? That's it. Six. years, all of the work in developing the partnership with GE, all the work in building the Progress City model, which by the way, had a viewing platform that kind of looks like the Tiki Room at Walt Disney World, where it's like tiered.

And you look down on the Progress City model and the people mover on it would move. And you could see how cars coming into the city would have to park and then take the blue line into the metro. All this different cool stuff. all this work rounding the people mover around this building, and then it goes away. It's so weird.

Does it go immediately to Magic Kingdom? It does not. It leaves in 1973, and it takes a couple years before it opens in 75, and it's going to open alongside the refurbishments in Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World. Yeah, so Space Mountain comes in in 75. A lot of really, like, just mind-blowing stuff happens in 1975. Let's just look at the world very briefly. We've got Salem's Lot, we've got Born to Run, we've got Rocky Horror Picture Show, we've got Space Mountain, and we've got Meat.

And the Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World. Which is still there, Kevin. But there's some obvious limitations here. This looks like they kind of shoehorned it into the air. It does become part of the PeopleMover track. But there's no second level. There's no speed ramp. There's no virtual queue, Kevin. And there's no progress city model. They move the progress city model over to the people mover. And as you mentioned, it's like.

A quarter of the size is its original version. They take out a lot of houses. They take out cars. They take out landscaping. They left the tiki room in there, which is great. The tiki bar in there. But everything else is like sliced up. It's urban replacement theory or whatever. Don't like anything. Yeah. Like this, this progress of the future, Matt Walt's idea of the progress of the future.

Sliced up. It's a very apt metaphor. Yes, very metaphorical. So the Disneyland carousel closes September 9th, 1973. Doesn't come to Walt Disney World until 1975. But then something else happens a little bit later on in the brand new Epcot Park. And we referenced this at the top of the show, Horizon. which I think many would see as a sequel to The Carousel Project. So the thing about Horizons, this is not a Horizon show, but this carries on those ideas.

So the Sherman Brothers don't write the theme song to this. There's a composer named George Wilkins that writes this. And it has a Sherman Brothers like... a grandeur to it. And in order to reference the Sherman Brothers, there is a little bit of the Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow song in one part of Horizons. So it's a continuity. And we dream the dream of the future. But there's a lot of neat stuff. I love this. There's so much stuff.

That ties back into the 64 World's Fair. There's an underwater city in Horizons. That's not part of the GE model. That's part of General Motors at the New York World's Fair. Seacastle, Kevin. Seacastle. It's astounding. Back in the GM, right next to your house. is underwater oil drilling. Why not? Yeah, why not? This is like your kitchen being right next to a thermonuclear demonstration. Why would that be weird, Kevin? Everybody loves this.

But the other thing is, okay, so the Carousel of Progress focuses on the family and the home. Horizons focuses on the family in the world and beyond. So basically, Horizons existed to show that family bonds don't change just because tech does. It's a giant world, but family is still always together. So it's just sort of a really smart way to make people less scared of or resistant to future tech.

Yeah, I mean, Horizons is brilliant because it's the convergence of the themes of Future World, right? It's communication, it's transportation, it's imagination, it's technology, it's resource mining, it's all the things. that are going to lead us into the future i think that's the it has the benefit of being a 1983 attraction and sort of using the pillars. We did a whole show.

By the way, in the in the first season of the 3028 about this, it took like seven years to do it. And we just talked about the pillars, the elements of future world and horizons had all of them. And so it was so great. It was amazing. It had the communication, energy, health and wellness, the land, the seas, even imagination. The other cool thing is that... You know, Carousel Progress, we can say, is a little bit hokey. It's a little bit outdated. I don't think this happened with Horizon.

For a couple reasons. One, they talk about more scientific stuff, not just how your home has helped, but how the world has helped. And, you know, we say it's bringing the same family in, but it's a little bit different. There's one narrator, really, for the Carousel of Progress, and that's... you know, the white suburban dad. And here we have, like, the older...

Father, grandfather, probably grandfather and grandmother, both talking about how technology helps things. We have two boomers arguing, Kevin. It's it couldn't be more perfect for the for the air. They probably get divorced after this. And the thing is, you know, if this happened in later generations, they probably would be divorced, still living together, still sleeping in the same bed. But they're very divorced and seeing other people. Thanks, millennials.

So, but I don't think that the Carousel Progress does this with Tomorrowland, either at Disneyland or Magic Kingdom. I don't think it ties the land together in that same way. And I wonder, did it do this at the New York World's Fair with the rest of the... What was happening around this? Like, does it tie all the things together in the same way that Horizon... No, no, no. That's what makes Horizon so unique is that it did that.

I mean, you could argue that Carousel of Progress doesn't even tie the rest of the pavilion together, right? Like it doesn't talk about nuclear energy. It doesn't do any of those things. I mean, it's merely a vehicle for selling consumer products. Yeah, and it's hard for me to think of any attraction in any Disney park that really, like,

exemplifies all the things that make up that land. I mean, maybe if you go to Frontierland in Paris, the Haunted Mansion there, the Phantom Manor, that sort of does, but this is really like... This is on a thematic level. The only one I could really conceive that, I mean, Spaceship Earth attempts that today. And it's not as successful, I don't think, as Horizons in that manner. The only other close one is probably The Great Movie Ride.

And that sort of connected different eras of film history and the idea of production behind the films. And then the sort of. cinematic facades that you see within the ride i mean that's the only other one where you're you know you're connecting you know your your central your central attraction expresses explains the rest of the theme park horizons and maybe you know one or two others

Yeah, so unfortunately we don't have Horizons anymore. We do, however, still have Carousel of Progress. It's been updated a few times, 67. 75, my year. 85, 81. Matt, isn't that when you were born? I was born in 80. Yeah, Jimmy Carter, baby. Jimmy Carter, baby. 85 in 1994. Last updated in 1994. I just want to underscore that too. The future. The future is 94. By the way.

Maybe the last good year of human history, 1994. I'm going to throw that. Speed? Speed came out at the movie theater. It's the year after Jurassic Park. Good things are happening. You know, it's a great year for movies. And so recently they did get some new, like a refurb, like a light refurb, new clothes, new hair, you know, all that stuff.

But it's still – it's a very dated attraction. So it's the thing that happens with retrofuturism that eventually it gets too retro and then it goes from retro to vintage to old. I still love going on the Carousel of Progress. I love... The fact that we have that continuity to the 64 World's Fair in a way that we don't have totally with any of the other things, except for maybe it's Small World.

You know, even though the Carousel of Progress and Progressland didn't necessarily tie everything together at the New York World's Fair, it ties this series together because it really exemplifies everything that we've been talking about since the beginning of season eight till now. was amazing. I really enjoyed Progressland. I've been looking forward to this since last spring when we discussed doing the 64 World's Fair as our

Summer series. Oh, summer series. Oh, it starts in one summer and ends in the next. Yeah, why not? I mean, I remember very distinctly, I remember texting Matt and saying, hey, let's do this one show. And he laughed at me and said, this is the entire series for season eight. Season eight has been a very interesting season. And we're not going to talk too much about Season 8 or go over it too much. But we started off.

Our whole thought was that we were going to leave all the bloopers in. We did that for two episodes, and we're like, no, we don't want to leave the bloopers. We're going to put the bloopers at the end. We don't want coughing in the show and reading the reading we do. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we don't need all that.

Yeah, and also I had an asthma thing that happened. And so I've been coughing more. And then so Matt has to get rid of all those. Thanks, Matt. I was coughing. I couldn't even talk one episode. That's right. of grief in this particular I mean my kid was in the hospital at one point in the season that was horrific and terrifying um my other kid had alpha gal in the season. It's been a lot of stuff, Kevin. By the way, that is not a nickname for Captain Marvel. Alpha Gal is a sickness. It's not.

It's an allergy to mammalian products, Kevin, which are in everything. Everything. Everything. You can't wear a leather jacket. So thank you for coming along on this journey through season eight. We've got a whole series. Actually, we have two series. Up ahead for you. Up ahead for you. A whole future awaits us, Kevin. Yeah, there's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow in season nine.

I just have been wanting to do for a while, and it was fully on board immediately. I'm very excited about this series. And then, randomly, we had an idea for a second series. last week and we're like oh yeah we've already written two of those episodes oh yeah already ready to go now we're just connecting them it's that's the best part is we already did the hard work i cannot wait to talk about the series um so season nine will be coming in the spring

In between now and then, we're going to have a bunch of our hiatus shows. Basically, you're not going to notice any interruption. In fact, the shows might come up more regularly. because we record a bunch of shows for Club 28. We banked some other shows, like all these shows that are coming out. So you're going to get Club 28. You know, we do this once or twice a year. And we do these like psycho deep dives into the topics that our people give us. They say, hey, I want an episode on this.

And we give that to them. And so you're going to get a lot of really deep dives into stuff that we normally wouldn't have talked about. So you're going to really love that. But some of those episodes are going to be Patreons exclusive. And we have a lot of those coming up in season nine as well.

So if you want to join our Patreon here every episode that we do, I would recommend signing up for our Patreon and either doing the Listorian level, which is $30.28 per month, or the Sad Tomato Kids, which is $10. It's an awesome way to support the show. Another great way to do it is with five-star reviews on the Apple Podcast app. We are thirsty, Kev. We need some reviews. We are sort of...

So if you could find the time to leave a review, we would really, really appreciate it. It just lets more people know that we do a regular show here. It lets people know that we have extra shows, Patreon shows, and we're trying to make sure that we release. quite a few shows for people who are not part of the Patreon as well, because we know that's how we started in the feed. So thank you so much for continuing to listen and thank you to those.

who came over to support us on Patreon too. It's a more consistent way for us to support the show ourselves. and to continue to do, you know, I think great research and put all of that and our fun idiosyncratic. personalities into the show as well. So all of those things come through when you support us. The best way to do that without finances is via the five-star review on the Apple Podcast app.

We really, really love that. Yeah, like Matt said, we don't want to lose sight of the streets. I'm still Kevi from the block. We're still going to put out our regular shows. We just have some more shows now. that you can hear if you are also a member, but we're not going to abandon our regular shows. We're not going to do our season nine series.

hidden we're gonna that's for everyone everyone i do want to point out though if you sign up for the patreon on the web you avoid apple's feed apple if you do it through the the podcast or the uh the patreon app Apple charges 30% fees on everything. What? I don't get it and I won't like it. We didn't know that. We didn't know that. We had no idea. So don't sign up on the app. Do it on the line. On the line. Online.

Do it offline. Do it offline. We can't even get out of this season. We can't get out. We're going to break out of this. Folks, from all of us here at the 3028, to all of you out there, thank you so, so much for listening, and we will see you real soon. Melvin the Cat hung out and listened to that entire show.

Melvin the cat is very mellow today. Yeah, he's chill, man. He's not a kitten anymore. He just sleeps. This is the best, best cat you'll ever meet. He doesn't climb the Christmas tree anymore. He doesn't swipe at you when you're like going to get a glass of water. He's very used to you now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how cats are. We're like in their space.

Does Halloween cat still do everything? Oh, my God. Halloween cat is a monster. Halloween cat thinks she's an outside cat. I can't even get her inside anymore. She'll come in every two days and eat like she hasn't eaten in six years. It's it's it's. Poor Halloween cat. Why don't you feed me? I do feed the cat. I fed you like an hour ago. On the Avenue of Commerce near the Pool of Industry. The Pool of Industry. You can go into that pool and you come out and you're covered in it.

What time did we start recording this noon? It's... Is it 6 p.m.? What time is it? Ladies and gentlemen, please take your packages, coats, hats, and purses and spring up out of your seats. America's most exciting new city is straight ahead, through the doorway and up the moving ramp. On the second floor, Mother and... from our theater show will join you to tell you all about Progress City so please keep moving don't stand in the way of progress