Some of the most amazing cartoons I've ever seen are the trio of television documentaries that Disney artist Ward Kimball created in cooperation with Wernher Von Braun inn the 1950's to promote the American Space Program "Man in Space," "Man and the Moon," and "Mars and Beyond". I saw these on SPACE several years ago but because they were so good I figured I'd be able to find them anywhere on video so I didn't record it (I was wrong they didn't exist on video).They were finally released in the late spring as part of the The Walt Disney Treasures DVD collection and I highly recommend them if you haven't seem them before- they're technical masterpieces as well a visionary piece of propaganda that really proves the case that if we want to create the future we first have to imagine it. According to the article Eisenhower wanted the movie made to prove a point about space exploration: "to show it to all those stove-shirt generals who don't believe we're going to be up there!" The shuttle segment is really amazingly close to what NASA ended up going with 20 or so years later. (Makes me think that somebody should do the same thing making the case for environmentally sustainable development, or really anything where we need to get people inspired to think long term. )

This leads me to the reason for this post: justification of my own personal obsessions. A recent Cartoon Brew link brought to my attention to an article that combines two of them, UFOs and cartoons, so I get a double hit of self-justification endorphins. Apparently, Kimball was working on similar documentary about UFO phenomenon at the request of the US Air Force:

According to Kimball's account, Disney went along with the USAF plan, which was not that unusual. The use of Walt Disney cartoons, after all had been suggested by the 1953 CIA Robertson UFO panel as part of a public-education program involving the mass media to "strip the UFO phenomenon of its special status and eliminate the aura of mystery it has acquired."

The film was apparently eventually squelched without the promised UFO footage being supplied, but the alien segment created by Disney animators were shown a late seventies UFO convention by Kimball. The article goes off into talk about aliens kept in Los Alamos safe houses, government disinformation campaigns and the like.

I don't believe all that stuff, but I love it anyway.

7:04 PM

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