[00:00:06] Speaker A: Walt Disney was fascinated by the wonders of science. But did his passion for new technologies eventually lead him to champion scientism and the rule of a technological elite? In today's episode of ID the Future, we're going to explore Walt Disney's multifaceted view of science and how it was expressed in his films and attractions.
This is John West, Associate director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. I'm also author of the new book Walt Disney and Live Action, which explores the themes and making of Walt Disney's many live action films and television features. It if you're interested in Walt Disney and his impact on popular culture, I hope you'll consider getting my book.
Someone once quipped that Walt Disney harbored 19th century emotions in conflict with a 21st century brain. The characterization was apt. Disney was known for championing traditional morality and promoting nostalgia for the past. At the same time, he was widely recognized as a visionary futurist who enthusiastically embraced the new horizons offered by science and technology.
Disney's idiosyncratic mixture of moral traditionalism and techno optimism didn't always seem to cohere, and it led people to admire him for vastly different reasons. Conservatives embraced Disney for his defense of Judeo Christian morality, his unrepentant support for the American founding, his love of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, and his distrust of big government and the welfare state.
By contrast, fellow futurists were attracted to Disney's modernist ideas about urban planning, his exalted view of science and technology, and his utopian visions of human progress. Although I have a keen appreciation for Disney and his achievements, I admit I'm not one of those who is especially enamored with his techno optimism. During the last century, we've seen far too much destruction arising from the abuse of science for me to believe that science can fundamentally reform the human heart or usher in a utopia. For me, scientific and technological progress is bittersweet. I think Disney was correct to see that science can produce wondrous benefits for humanity. But science can also make it easier for humans to accomplish their own destruction. And that darker side of scientific and technological progress was rarely on display in Disney's projects of the futuristic. Consider the Carousel of Progress, a stage show first developed by Disney for the 1964 World's Fair in New York City and later relocated to Disneyland and then Walt Disney World, where it still operates.
Featuring audio animatronic robots rather than live actors, the Carousel of Progress depicts the benefits to American society of the rapid technological advances during the first half of the 20th century. In this show, the audience follows a middle class American family from the 1900s to the 1960s. In the 1900s, the family marvels over labor saving inventions such as cast iron stoves, gas lamps, iceboxes and telephones.
By the 1920s, the family's home has been wired for electricity, leading to electric lights, electric sewing machines, refrigerators, toasters and coffee percolators.
By the 1940s, the family's home has added even bigger and more efficient electric appliances. And by the 1960s, electric appliances now make preparations for previously exhausting holidays. Like Christmas a breeze.
Each act of this unfolding march of progress is linked together by the song There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. A secular hymn demands creativity. Composed by Richard and Robert Sherman of Mary Poppins fame, the infectious tune boasts that human know how can make dreams a reality and usher in a great big beautiful tomorrow. Disney's techno optimism was also on display in the Tomorrowland area in Disneyland and his planned but never built experimental prototype Community of Tomorrow in Florida. There is definitely something alluring about the cheerful optimism of these efforts, but there is also something more than a little disturbing. The Carousel of Progress celebrated, apparently without irony, the use of television as parents new electronic babysitter. It also boasted of the relocation of grandparents from their children's homes into segregated retirement communities for seniors. Then there was the House of the Future in Disneyland.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: All curves and plastic. Monsanto's House of the Future is open to the public at Disneyland. The four wing plastic shell makes a snug and solid five room dwelling designed for a family of four. And coincidentally, it's a fairly typical family of four that gets first look. A family food center to store atomically irradiated food, a work surface that includes a combination supersonic dishwasher and storage unit.
The kids bathroom has a wash basin that adjusts to fit the height of the growing child. Throughout, the emphasis is on new uses of plastics in every area of family living. Pioneering the use of features that may be standard in 10 years or so.
A look at the future looks good, eh?
[00:05:44] Speaker A: The House of the Future featured modernist plastic interiors, a far cry from the iconic small towns featured in many of Disney's films. The vision for Disney's experimental prototype Community of Tomorrow was even more hideous, exhibiting many of the worst features of modernist urban planning. It featured the top down micromanagement of every part of life, the artificial separation of where people live and work and play, bleak Bauhaus style architecture and the attempt to herd everyone into mass transit.
The visual center of the experimental prototype Community of Tomorrow was a modernist 30 story hotel that was designed to be seen for miles around.
The city's 50 acre business and shopping district was supposed to include fake buildings and streets patterned after architecture from other parts of the world. But these buildings would be located within a giant temperature controlled enclosure, in essence, a great big enclosed shopping mall. The narrator of an early promotional film for the project promised that in this climate controlled environment, shoppers, theater goers and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions. Protected day and night from rain, heat and cold and humidity. Walt Disney loved nature. He grew up in the midst of real small towns and farms and he loved to travel to other parts of the world. But in his city of the future, he planned to get rid of the natural environment in his new artificial downtown. No one need ever experience the discomfort of the elements, of course. Neither would they experience its joys, including sunsets, or summer breezes, or raindrops, or the songs of birds.
What rescued Walt Disney from being a completely uncritical champion of scientific and technological progress was not his ventures into theme parks or urban planning.
It was the messages in some of his films. The Disney film that offers arguably the most explicit warning about the abuse of science and technology is 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.
Released in 1954, Disney's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea is still the definitive cinematic adaptation of the Jules Verne novel of the same name.
The film depicts a supposedly civilized world where international powers employ science and technology for enslavement and death. The film's Captain Nemo is a twisted genius who on the surface opposes the misuse of science. But in the course of the film, he himself willingly employs science to kill others.
At the end of the film, Nemo blows up his discoveries in an iconic mushroom cloud.
To audiences in the 1950s, where fallout shelters and duck and cover drills were a fact of life, the film's ending was likely even more powerful than it is today.
Softening the film's otherwise bleak ending, Walt Disney tacked on a hopeful voiceover before the final credits, repeating the words of Captain Nemo himself from earlier in the film. There is hope for the future, and when the world is ready for a new and better life, all this will someday come to pass in God's good time.
But what ultimately makes 20,000 leagues under the Sea so powerful is not those hopeful words, but the film's unflinching portrait of the human capacity to misuse science. A depiction that even its final words cannot completely obliterate.
The dangers of science and technology can also be seen In Disney's comic fantasies, especially the Absent minded Professor in 1961 and and Son of Flubber in 1963, two phenomenally popular films starring Fred McMurray, the Absent Minded professor and Son of Flubber both focus on Professor Ned Brainard of mythical Medfield College. Brainerd invents flubber, a gooey substance that makes things defy gravity. Brainerd is portrayed as a scientific genius, but also as a complete blunderer. As a human being, with his single minded devotion to science, he neglects his human relationships, leading him to miss his own wedding.
Brainerd is also oblivious to the larger consequences of his research. In Son of Flubber, he runs an experiment that inflicts widespread damage on the rest of his community, even while he remains utterly clueless about what he's just done.
Both the Absent professor and Son of Flubber highlight how non scientists try to manipulate scientific discoveries for their own ends, satirizing in particular the behavior of politicians, the military, the IRS, and big business.
Professor Brainard himself is shown to be corruptible, misusing his discoveries to take revenge on his romantic rival. For all of their celebration of the creativity of science, these comedies also warned against the pervasive dangers scientific progress can pose. As beneficial as science may be for society, it cannot be left free from social norms. And scientists themselves may not be the best judges of the cultural consequences of their discoveries.
But perhaps Disney's most scathing indictment of the dark side of technological progress came in a 1952 animated short based on an award winning children's book.
The children's book was the Little House, which tells how a beloved house in the country is eventually swallowed up by the encroaching city.
Disney's version of the tale was considerably darker than the original book, with the forces of technological development portrayed by Disney as nothing less than demonic. The film explicitly attacks the modern slogan of progress. While the screen reveals the depressing tenements now towering over the little house. The narrator ironically comments, everything was bigger and better, for this was the age of progress.
Each new wave of progress in the film produces ever more nightmarish results, finally resulting in an inferno of crime and noise and traffic and tawdry 24 hours a day neon lights. Here was a hellish vision of technological progress that seemed to represent the very opposite of the techno optimism of Disney's experimental prototype community of tomorrow. Perhaps Disney viewed his ventures in urban planning as an answer to the problems posed by past technological progress. Maybe Disney thought science and technology in the future could be harnessed to build better urban environments through all pervasive master planning. How Disney reconciled his proposed micromanagement of civic life in his experimental prototype community of tomorrow with his own faith in human freedom, free enterprise, and limited government is anybody's guess. For myself. I don't think Disney ever completely reconciled the tensions between his techno optimism and the rest of his worldview. But it's those unresolved tensions that made him all the more intriguing as a shaper of popular culture and his films all the more worth watching. If you'd like to explore more about the cultural themes in the work of Walt Disney, I'd encourage you to get my book Walt Disney in Live action,
[email protected] and elsewhere. That's Walt Disney in live action for ID the future. This is John West. Thanks for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: Center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: For more information, visit intelligent design.org and idthefuture.com it.
