The conditional optimist: Walt Disney's postwar futurism

Abstract

This article reconsiders popular and scholarly estimations of Walt Disney by exploring six short futuristic films he made in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than blithe optimism or heavy‐handed conservatism, these productions peddled a conditional optimism. They expressed the hope that futuristic technologies – embedded in a robust space program and the imagined community of EPCOT in Florida – might deliver humanity from urban blight, overpopulation, plundered habitats and natural resources, and the damaging forces of weather. In doing so, Disney entered the fray of contemporary debates and anticipated later ones over the relationship between humankind and nature, the proper uses of technology, the dangers and opportunities of atomic energy, and the social pathologies of urban, industrialized America.

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