Stephen Worth says:
At the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, we digitized a beautiful
read-along record storybook based on John Sutherland's industrial film,
"Rhapsody of Steel." Made in 1959, this film features incredible space-age
imagery by animation designers Eyvind Earle (Sleeping Beauty, "Pigs Is Pigs")
and Maurice Noble ("What's Opera Doc?," "Duck Dodgers in the 24th
1/2 Century").According to Time Magazine, "Rhapsody of Steel" cost $300,000 to make,
a remarkable amount of money for an industrial film. It tells the story of the
history of steel, from the first meteor ever to strike the earth to the material
making up the first manned rocket to leave it.The film ends with this thought…
"This is an age when at last all things seem possible. Perhaps in the not
too distant future man will set about shaping his civilization on earth as
carefully as he has shaped the metal that takes him on the greatest journey
in all history… The progress of man is the progress of STEEL."