It was 1984, or perhaps 1983, when I first entered the world of my future dreams. Horizons. Say it with me, “Horizons.” Feel how it just spills off the tongue, flows effortlessly from the lips. The word on its own imbues a sense of hopeful life to so many nascent forms taking shape off in the distance. That impossibly thin line stretching across your field of view, from left to right, delineating the moment you cross from the here to the there. And there is so very amazing. There is the future. But not just any future, a future crafted from the deepest depths of the present. That was Horizons, the future of my dreams, as seen from Epcot Center in the early 1980s.
After that first visit to the future, I went back many times – probably fifteen or twenty in all. Each trip to the future seeming just a little less “future” and more “futuristic,” less tomorrow’s possibilities and more yesterday’s hopeful snapshot of a future that solved all our problems. That is, all our problems as of October 1st, 1983. Horizons stood as a testament to our distinctly American dreams of how tomorrow would be so much better than today. It’s just that today became yesterday very quickly.
As I continued to visit Horizons I became fascinated by the ever increasing disconnect between this yesterday’s tomorrow and the real tomorrow that was quickly becoming a very different today.
Back in the present I was given this amazing book from 1976. Another view of yesterday’s tomorrow. Contained in its pages is a delicious array of thoughts and predictions about what is to pass in the decades ahead. Many of these decades now rest squarely in our past. This book, Horizons, and a small army of other references to a former future all serve as source material for a film we are producing about yesterday’s tomorrow. In the meanwhile, expect more tidbits from this book. Page 115 is particularly exciting.
Posted by goodfocus 