Moon Buggy at GM workshop (4-5 feet long)
Left - Jungle Cutter Animatronic on display
Right - Road Laying Machine on Bench ( approx. 15 feet long!)
Pictures courtesy of General Motors
From WOTAN, correspondent in space:
I Have Seen The Future.....
The sixties was a big time for space and everything futuristic. All the major toy lines centered on space travel and popular programming too. In 1964 the New York Worlds Fair looked forward to a brighter tomorrow with the space race well advanced and new technologies appearing almost monthly, the show was a huge success.
Chief among the exhibits was the General Motors Futurama II pavilion which expanded and developed upon themes shown by Norman Bel Geddes in the 1939 World Fair , showing how the world might be living in 2024. GMs Futurama Pavilion covered superhighways, life under the sea, in space and on the moon and had a moving trainride through huge dioramas showing animated models.
Looking at some of the radical designs shown by GM for the futuristic transport solutions, I wonder if perhaps any of the Century 21 designers maybe stopped by for a visit ? The similarities between the Jungle Cutter slashing its way through the rainforests to be followed by the road building machine and the Crablogger from Thunderbirds and the Moon Buggies and the Scramble Bug seem a little too coincidental..
See: nywf64.com and futurama 2 for more.
I Have Seen The Future.....
The sixties was a big time for space and everything futuristic. All the major toy lines centered on space travel and popular programming too. In 1964 the New York Worlds Fair looked forward to a brighter tomorrow with the space race well advanced and new technologies appearing almost monthly, the show was a huge success.
Chief among the exhibits was the General Motors Futurama II pavilion which expanded and developed upon themes shown by Norman Bel Geddes in the 1939 World Fair , showing how the world might be living in 2024. GMs Futurama Pavilion covered superhighways, life under the sea, in space and on the moon and had a moving trainride through huge dioramas showing animated models.
Looking at some of the radical designs shown by GM for the futuristic transport solutions, I wonder if perhaps any of the Century 21 designers maybe stopped by for a visit ? The similarities between the Jungle Cutter slashing its way through the rainforests to be followed by the road building machine and the Crablogger from Thunderbirds and the Moon Buggies and the Scramble Bug seem a little too coincidental..
See: nywf64.com and futurama 2 for more.
I recall that moon buggy. I believe that sequence (and maybe others) were done by Douglas Trumbull, and that led to his working on "2001: A Space Odyssey".
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