Tomorrowland Today

Disney’s 1950s television show Tomorrowland, a stunning example of the future’s history, is now out on DVD. This morning, National Public Radio aired a nice history of the program by commentator Andrew Chaikin. The story goes that famed Disney artist Ward Kimball pitched Tomorrowland to Walt after reading a series of articles about space exploration in Collier’s Magazine. Real rocket scientists like Wernher Von Braun were then brought in to Disney as consultants on the show. The first episode, Man In Space, aired March 9, 1955. From the NPR piece:

“Man In Space got rave reviews. President Dwight Eisenhower personally requested a copy of the show to screen for military brass at the Pentagon to help them understand plans to launch a satellite.”

Link (Thanks, David “Swapdrive” Steinberg!)

UPDATE: BB pal Stefan Jones says “I first learned about the Tomorrowland episodes from a book that a friend self-published, the Spaceship Handbook. It also has a history of the Collier’s articles, plus scale drawings of the von Braun spaceships.”

UPDATE: Jesse Mazer says: “If any boingboing readers are interested in buying that DVD, it seems to be out of stock at amazon and the cheapest used copies there go for $44.95, so you might want to include a link to a place that sells it for cheaper…the DVDpricesearch.com page lists two places that sell it for under $30.”