Design for Dreaming

Produced to bring the 1956 G.M. Motorama to audiences unable to see it in major cities, this fim introduces the new 1956 cars, Frigidaire's "Kitchen of Tomorrow," and the electronic highways of the future. G.M.'s "dream cars" of the 1950s, including the Oldsmobile Golden Rocket and the turbine-powered Pontiac Firebird II, are also displayed. One of the more self-consciously surreal films in our collection, Design for Dreaming often looks like a Hollywood musical. A Fifties-style sleeping beauty is awakened into a dream by a magician dressed in tails who hands her an invitation to the Motorama at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. She flies through the nighttime sky to the hotel, where she sees the milling crowds and marvels at the new cars. With the magician she expresses her desires ("I want a Corvette..."; "This Buick's a beaut...Oh, what a dreamy ride! I think that I'd like to buy it!") until suddenly an apron appears around her waist and he carries her into the "Kitchen of Tomorrow." She briefly laments the plight of woman but is distracted by the wonders of the machine that reads recipes off computer cards, the glass-walled refrigerator, and the hemispherical glass oven that se