Now, the dream cars of tomorrow!

July 17, 2019 6:11 PM

Created in 1956, Design for Dreaming [10m video] is an industrial short film performed entirely in song, in which a dreaming woman is whisked away by a masked man to the General Motors Motorama, then a Kitchen of the Future, then off to romance on the highway. It makes about as much sense as that sounds like.

Fun fact: the baritone is Thurl Ravenscroft, of Tony the Tiger and You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch fame.

Yeah yeah, we know it was also featured on MST3K ...

posted by tocts (18 comments total)

Whenever I wear pajamas, I can't help singing to myself,

"Girls don't go to motoramas
Dressed in a pair of pink pajamas"
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:20 PM on July 17, 2019

“She sings a lot, Mike.”
posted by Countess Elena at 6:45 PM on July 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Times were hard for Tuxedo Mask until he got his big break.
posted by blnkfrnk at 7:00 PM on July 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

“Look, dead raccoon of tomorrow.”
posted by gc at 8:30 PM on July 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

I also love how no one ever considered traffic jams would exist in the future. Like they always show the highways with like 8 cars max on them. Have some imagination!

That goes for you too, autonomous car nerds...
posted by gc at 8:33 PM on July 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Amazing! Something about it looks really familiar,
Were clips used in Hallo Spaceboy or something similar?
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 10:03 PM on July 17, 2019

I also love how no one ever considered traffic jams would exist in the future. Like they always show the highways with like 8 cars max on them.

This is after the Atomic War of '58, very few drivers remaining.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:19 PM on July 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

No spidercows in this one, but delightful nonetheless. A new Cyriak is always pleasant interesting.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 12:58 AM on July 18, 2019

Oh darn. That comment ended up in a thread I swear I never even opened. Rest assured there are no spidercows here. Or at least I think so.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 1:05 AM on July 18, 2019

The music was strangely discordant near the end - in keeping with the horrific retro-future vision - "Strange shapes will rise out of the night" indeed!
posted by domdib at 4:56 AM on July 18, 2019

Los pantalones del muerte made the perfect Freudian slip, as this film sure seems to be inspired by LSD.
posted by stannate at 6:22 AM on July 18, 2019

Just wait, in half a century our horrific retro-future vision will be revealed for what it is.
posted by Pembquist at 8:21 AM on July 18, 2019

I don't think anybody got a better picture of the "Car of Tomorrow" than Tex Avery.

(it was part of a series of toons about Tomorrow that Avery's cartoon team created in the '50s.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:08 AM on July 18, 2019

Back in the middle part of the 20th century, there were lots of articles, cartoons, films about life in the future, usually a time that now is past. And no, we never got the flying car or rocket pack. But I haven't seen these types of stories for years. So no one is prognosticating about life in the future anymore? I wonder why...
posted by njohnson23 at 10:11 AM on July 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

Well, we're only 40 years away from The Jetsons' vastly inaccurate view of 2060 (and it's abundantly clear that Futurama's decision to go 1,000 years into the future was a wise one). But then, my favorite future predictions are all from cartoons (an opinion which was solidified when they animated Star Trek).
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:51 AM on July 18, 2019

But I haven't seen these types of stories for years. So no one is prognosticating about life in the future anymore? I wonder why...

You still see concept videos once in a while. Microsoft was still doing them as of recently (Productivity Future Vision 2011, Future Vision 2020).

Apple had the famous Knowledge Navigator concept video, but Steve Jobs put the kibosh on these kinds of things after returning to Apple. And this blog post explains why:

"Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what’s delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability."

posted by JoeZydeco at 11:25 AM on July 18, 2019

One of my favorite MST3K jokes is, "I miss the old future!"
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:30 PM on July 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

The video for Bedouine's Dusty Eyes uses a few clips from this, and it was amusing to see them in their proper context. As it turns out, they made more sense in the music video.
posted by MrVisible at 1:53 PM on July 18, 2019