Donald Duck's 1937 View of the Future

Filed in archive Humor on August 20, 2007

I came across a delightful post on Paleo-Future: A Look into the Future that Never Was titled Donald Duck's "Modern Inventions" (1937).

The post points to the short film "Modern Inventions" from Disney in 1937. The film pictures donald duck arriving at the "Museum of Modern Inventions". Through the film we are introduced to preposterous modern inventions such as the parcel wrapper, the potato peeler, the razor mangler" and other inventions.

I find it is always interesting to see how the future was interpreted from known inventions of the time. Everything in this film interprets the future in terms of the machines of the day.

From my perspective of the world where I am looking at a mobile office that is wireless and available anywhere that there is a lot of interpretation as to where things might need to go to ensure we have a useful and highly effective office outside of the 2 x 2 cubicle.

Maybe there are some lessons we can learn from a Disney view of 1937. That lesson is perhaps that the future is never like what we might imagine.

The question we might ask here is, "have we entered the post-PC era?" Are the Nokia N-series phones "what computers have become?"