The World of Tomorrow

Archival footage and stills serve to juxtapose rosy predictions of the 1939 World’s Fair with dark realities of the time. Film clips of celebrities include Albert Einstein and Fiorello LaGuardia. Narrated by Jason Robards. Lance Bird directed., The World of Tomorrow is a delightful, lovingly assembled documentary of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Much of the footage is culled from promotional films made exclusively for the exhibition; one of these features a “typical” midwestern family, soaking in the fair’s many wonders. Other sequences are lifted from home movies, given the events of six decades’ past a surprising immediacy. Most of the film is devoted to the famous “World of Tomorrow” exhibit, which theorized as to what life would be like in 1960; some of this is quaint and naïve, but a lot of it is surprisingly accurate. Alternating gracefully between color and black and white, The World of Tomorrow occasionally leans towards condescension, but Jason Robards’ dead-on narration sidesteps cuteness. For its many PBS showings, the 83-minute World of Tomorrow was pared down to an hour.