This year marks the 50th and 75th anniversaries of the two World’s Fairs held in Flushing Meadows, Queens, in 1964-65 and 1939-40.
Excerpts from six short films shown at the fairs predicting the future with less than stellar accuracy — including a smoking robot — are being exhibited through Aug. 31 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.
Through the then-unforeseen miracle of YouTube, here are the shorts in their entirety:
‘The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair’ (1939)
The most famous of the fair films, this 55-minute Technicolor opus depicts a Long Island family whose daughter has thrown over a Westinghouse Electric engineer for her anti-capitalist art teacher. Not hard to guess how that works out, given that Westinghouse sponsored the film. Better remembered is Electro the smoking robot, who had a 700-word vocabulary stored on a 78-rpm vinyl disc.
‘To New Horizons’ (1939)
On the verge of World War II, General Motors presented a utopian vision of the automotive future, with happy motorists rolling down blessedly traffic-free highways.
‘World’s Fair Report With Lowell Thomas’ (1961)
The then-famous broadcaster previews the 1964-65 fair, which was then under construction, in this promotional film — along with adjacent Shea Stadium, the longtime home of the Mets that was torn down in 2009.
‘Sinclair at the World’s Fair’ (1965)
This long-defunct oil company featured its kid-friendly mascot, a green brontosaurus, in this film shown at its pavilion during the fair’s second season. Sinclair was absorbed in 1969 by BP.
‘Unisphere: Biggest World On Earth’ (1964)
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the 1964-65 World’s Fair — it still stands in Flushing Meadows — is the gleaming Unisphere, a 12-story globe built by United States Steel Corp., which also sponsored this film on its making.
‘To The Fair’ (1964)
Czech avant-garde filmmaker Alexander Hammid collaborated on this humorous 26-minute promotional short depicting people traveling to the fair from around the world.