Today’s Tech, Predicted in 1960 by a Bad Cartoon
By Harry McCracken | Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 11:33 am
Here’s a 1960 Paramount cartoon about future tech that predicts the Roomba and Skype–and therefore reminds me of the eerily accurate/hilariously off-base 1940s whiskey-ad predictions I discovered a couple of months back.
(Via Jerry Beck at Cartoon Brew)
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March 17th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
You’re right — that is a bad cartoon!
March 17th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Bad cartoon? Whoa! I gotta defend the Paramount Cartoon Studios, makers of “Silly Science”. You have to remember that this cartoon is from 1960, and Paramount had just sold off their back inventory and characters to Harvey Films, so they had nothing but what they were putting out at the time. No continuing characters at this time. Most of the stories that season were about outer space (films with names like “Galaxia” and “Electronica” and “Cape Kidnaveral” and “Planet Mouseola”), so this concept lent itself to a spot-gag framework not seen since the Bouncing Ball song cartoons.
But then again, all this stuff was done much better by Tex Avery in “Farm of Tomorrow” or “House of Tomorrow” or “Car of Tomorrow”. Sorry, Seymour Kneitel and company.