Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
An elderly farm couple, Elmer and Mirandy, hicks in the Fleischer manner, drive their jalopy to a World's Fair of the future, a city of streamlined pavilions run entirely by robots. They are taken in hand by the machines. A robot barber and a robot beautician give them haircuts, shaves and facials; a mechanical restaurant feeds them a marvellous meal; a clinic of machines works them over and restores their youth, so that the old couple come out young and spry. At the dance pavilion a robot partner takes each of them and whirls them round the floor in a jitterbug, and the film ends with the rejuvenated pair dancing out of the fair, their jalopy left behind.
Why It Matters
- Made a year before the 1939 New York World's Fair opened, the film is a cartoon preview of the World of Tomorrow, with its robots, automats and streamlined architecture, and the Fleischers, who had always loved machines, give the fair a cheerful futurism; the rejuvenation clinic is the kind of gadget gag the studio had been making since the Crazy Inventions.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright having lapsed with most of the series. The trade press called it "very clever and novel", and it is one of the first Color Classics made in Technicolor at the studio's new Miami plant, a sign of the Fleischers' ambitions on the eve of Gulliver's Travels.
Notes and Trivia
- Edward Heyman, co-composer, wrote the lyrics of "Body and Soul".
- Elektro, the Westinghouse robot, was the real fair's star attraction a year later.
- See also: Educated Fish (1937), The Playful Polar Bears (1938), Betty Boop's Crazy Inventions (1933).
