6/25/14

United Aircraft Corporation - Use your air.

Guess who wants you to fly all over the place? The United Aircraft Corporation! Derr! Let us remember that there was a time when air travel was glamorous and exciting, and not a dehumanizing humiliation.


You have to like the idealized paintings of travel ads, where everything is inviting and everyone is friendly, and almost no one has their body cavities searched, except in the nice romantic way. In 1957, getting on a plane was something to look forward to, and the UAC was keen for you to get cranked about picking your summer holiday destination, because they made the plane you'd be flying in.

When planning your 2014 summer vacation, remember that Florida used to be a place for beaches, not just baffling crime news. Also, only part of California used to be a desert, and the Alamo has never had a basement.

Remember this while standing in a queue in the airport, having orders barked at you by a barely employable high school dropout drunk on power.

Here is a partially fictionalized (read: corporate) film from 1959 produced by Pan Am, from the time of Airline Glamour. In this film, "6 1/2 Magic Hours" Pan Am uses insane phrases like "speed of service and convenience for passengers". Harumph! The very idea! Preposterous!




Click for big.


4 comments:

PhilAreGo@gmail.com said...

I've seen it now! Thanks for the Critical Urban Planning Update, Jim! Eames was great, but his chairs are outrageously overpriced. There was a store in Santa Monica called "Design Within reach". The store had Eames chairs and other MidMod stuff, vintage and newly produced. All of it was wildly expensive. It seemed to me the store's name was a little, err, misleading. Well, maybe not. You could technically reach the furniture and, you know, touch it. You just couldn't plausibly "purchase" and "own" such furniture.

MrsBug said...

I've gotten the Design Within Reach catalog somehow and I was thinking my arms must be too short because I couldn't reach anything in that doggone thing.

PhilAreGo@gmail.com said...

Okay, so it's not just me, then. Good.

[-Mgmt.]

phil said...

What was that device in the video where the guy hand-wrote something and it enlarged it onto the roll of paper? What would the result have been used for? Th video is neat, BTW. I’ve been on kind of an early jet-age kick lately.

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