The film I watched was titled "Destination Earth", and was created in 1956. Unlike most films in the archives, this one was a cartoon. The cartoon discusses the emergence of competition in America in the post-industrial economy and the rise of large businesses. An alien from a foreign planet is sent on a mission to America to discover how to run automobiles. Not only does he discover oil as the source of automobiles, but more importantly he realizes that business competition is what makes the country operate.
The main idea of this video applies directly to our world today. We can learn many things, mostly that business competition is healthy and is the true backbone of America. It is useful to students of our modern information infrastrructure because it represents how the post-industrial economy transitioned into what our economy is today. The alien discovers that oil is not just a resource used to operate automobiles, but rather it creates a whole new sector of competition and business in America. At the time the cartoon was created in the 1950's, a national economy was emerging during the age of affluence. Oil allowed for trains and automobiles to travel across the country to conduct business, filtering into what is now an extremely large economy.
Ultimately, this cartoon goes to show that competition is the reason America went away from a post-industrial economy to what is now a country filled with constant competition of businesses. This capitalist society makes America unique to many countries, and is a large contributing factor to the massive economy that exists in 2014.
https://archive.org/details/Destinat1956
This video was very interesting in how it used a cartoon to convey a message about the American economy. It shows the importance of oil in our economy and its multiple uses. The video also seems to hint that competition of American business and capitalism is the best way to operate an economy. The video was also produced during the beginning of the cold war and could have been used as an anti-communist campaign.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the use of the cartoon to convey the theme. It's really strange to look back at films like this and think that corporations used to effectively produce elaborate propaganda cartoons to sell the idea of oil. Especially since by 1956 I'm sure the entire country was sold on the utility of petroleum products. The growing US/Russia tensions of the cold war are also fairly apparent in the reluctance of the Martian leader to accept competition and these "superior American technologies" into his way of life.
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