The above short (eight minute) film was made to be shown at General Motors 1956 Motorama show. it purports to show how the future of driving will look twenty years hence and, while it makes the usual inaccurate assumptions about a future that never comes (a la H.G. Welles ‘Things To Come’) it also gets a weird amount of things right. The film predicts car pool lanes, hands-free driving, talking touch screens giving the driver directions and warnings about upcoming traffic snarls etc. Alas, they are about thirty years too early;  they predict these modern luxuries will be available in 1976 instead of the early 2000s when most of this stuff began to be a reality. The film was directed by dancer/choreographer Michael Kidd, and the songs have lyrics by Jack Brooks (‘That’s Amore’) though no composer is credited. I like the space-age bubble roof the modern car gets–it’s a bit like the ‘Pope-Mobile’ and I wonder why a style like this never took off. The actual truth of driving 1976, in my memory, has something to do with a Dodge Colt, manual transmission, optional A.C., stuck in traffic on the Ventura Freeway en route to my piano lesson in Van Nuys. Ah, the wave of the future…