No such thing as aliens, that was a weather balloon... a very oddly shaped weather balloon....

Well cats and kittens it’s that time again… what’s that you say? No it’s not time to go back to the future… well maybe it is. Looking at the displays from the ’39 world’s fair we are again reminded of a simpler time before modern horror films, before reality that the 9-5 was going to be the bane of your existence and no matter what you did you’re still stuck but hey you can always dream right? No this was a time when ‘merica still used its imagination, before we became a bitter world dominating society and strove to be the innovators in technology…. Yes, before the cold war paranoia.

But we can see the beginning of or the infant stages of American infatuation with science fiction in this great exhibition. The thought that by today we would all be living like the jetsons (before the concept of the jetsons was there) going to work in flying cars, having robots ding almost everything for us all to make our lives that much more simple in the end. But one thing that stuck out the most was the power of corporate America at the fair, take a gander around the fair complex the various little mini cities and you will find corporations that are still around today but the most interesting was in the transportation district... And surely a sign of where the country was heading. As you look at the layout map so you don’t get lost you see that the rail industry is represented, as well as the aviation industry but the main centerpiece were the big two Ford and Chevrolet. Right smack in the middle the largest venues in this space. And yes maybe this is because the automobile was taking new forms, getting bigger and better and going faster. Gone were the days of the model T and a max speed of 15 miles an hour, as president van buren one said of the rail system surely humans were not meant to travel as such speeds. But travel we did and faster we went until today we have the bullet train and cars capable of hitting over 200 miles an hour in seconds.

 

But this by no means is the only example I offer you dear reader, in the midst of this wonder land if you look ever so closely you will see almost a mini version of a united world. The UN on created on these fair grounds, many of the prominent countries and even some not so prominent each having a little building in the city, to represent or introduce even their culture their people. Signs of world unification when hostilities in Europe were raging under the Nazi regime here we could at least pretend there was some harmony.

Yes the fair gave us hope that one day we would be living in an easy society where life was easy travel took hours instead of days and clothing was made from something other than wool or cotton (like petroleum or some form of plastic based material that held up better than any natural material in use) we would always have a view of nature because our homes would be made from glass…. But then the concept of there still being nature to admire is one which I personally am highly jealous of as today we have paved over most of the natural beauty that surrounds us.  

At the same time that we are imagining this wonderful harmonious world we were also preparing for one which at any point in time we could be taken over and made into a slave race by those who were far more technologically advanced than we…. Yes my darling followers I am talking about the ever menacing space aliens. Which at the time we had no actual visual concept of what they could possibly look like just that they were most certainly evil.

 

Let’s look at Mr. Wells fantastic story of invasion, the one that caused such a panic… here we have to ask ourselves why this fictional story caused such uproar at the time. Yes it is well known that this was a time of fire side chats with Franklin instead of zoning out to the latest reality TV show but there was a warning.  And yet panic ensured people left their homes to stare at the sky to get a glimpse of the invader ships which never came… because they were not real. By failing to listen to the end they failed to realize that what they were hearing was nothing more than fiction. But yet I cannot fault them totally… as the broadcast was presented as just another regular radio program with music to be enjoyed and news interruptions when necessary.

Nothing in the program was fact as there was no scientific evidence to state that alien life existed, just simple speculation and a great imagination. I mean we could only really assume that the aliens have heat rays of death and can annihilate an entire town in seconds. But then from there let’s look where we went with it, because the idea of invasion didn’t just die off like a bad joke. We took it further until we have the television series V, movies like the cone heads and the alien series but also comedies like Doctor Who and Red Dwarf (thanks England) somehow we found humor, love, and of course fear in our thoughts of alien life even the realization that they could easily look just like us. And I think we are a little more comfortable with that thought than with the giant green monsters with huge eyes and no mouths.

But I’ll leave you with this, as you may have noticed this posting is littered with little lewd images of the future from French artist Jean-Marc Cote from 1900and his ideas of life in the year 2000. As we look at the whole series of work one realized that he really wasn’t that far off on some of his ideas. The one which sticks out most being the idea of video calling which we now know as Skype. So I leave you with those and a link to more of his visual delicacies and i also leave you with this 30 second re-enactent of war of the worlds.... performed by bunnies... That’s all for this week darlings as I have so much time and so little to do…

Wait.

 Strike that, reverse it.