EVOLUTION OF THE SCRAMBLE BUG

 Seeing Woodstocks many recent references to the Scramble Bug in literature and in video etc, reminded me of one of my favourite incarnations of the concept of a lunar vehicle, the 'moon buggy' from the Futurama II exhibition by General Motors.

 In 1964, the Worlds Fair was hosted by New York and part of the General Motors display was a vast, multi-themed look at the future of transport and society in the future. A large part of the display, which was toured on a miniature train, was a moonscape featuring automated vehicles.

 As you can see from these photographs, kindly supplied by the GM Museum, the buggy itself was large - and highly detailed. Rather than use a wheeled chassis, GM designers opted for the full ball - presumably to aid the vehicle while traversing the dusty lunar seas.

 As the 'train' toured the set, the public listened to an audio description of the scene as the buggies rolled across the terrain and astronauts bobbed about in simulated vaccum. Just below the front of the vehicle you can see the large 'blade' which engaged the track within the diorama, pulling the buggy along. The shot below of an engineer maintaining the model shows the actual scale of the scene.

 Its entirely feasible that Century 21 designers may have seen the show at the Worlds Fair and were influenced by the display, with its lunar territories, superhighways, jungle road layers and deep sea settlements - a shame we'll never see its like in our modern days!