The Scientist and the Cinema

Sometime, I get to combine both of my "passion" into one. I did that a while back when I found an article linking Enrico Fermi with his love of Winnie the Pooh.

This is a rather old review (from Dec. 2005), but it is still an interesting book. It is a review of Christopher Frayling's book Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema. But what was fascinating is the example of such an influence on Walt Disney by the famous rocket scientist Wernher von Braun during the early 1950's:

In the early 1950s Oberth’s most celebrated student - the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun - wrote a series of articles promoting the idea of human space travel for Collier’s magazine. Hollywood set artist Chesley Bonestell illustrated von Braun’s vision with stunning paintings of giant, spinning space stations and nuclear-powered vessels bound for Mars. The articles were hugely popular, and the showmanship that von Braun demonstrated in selling his rocket dreams to the American public attracted the attention of an even more successful showman - Walt Disney.

Disney was producing a TV series called The Wonderful World of Disney to promote his new theme park, Disneyland, which included a province called Tomorrowland. In 1955 von Braun was featured in three episodes of the series touting the wonders of Tomorrowland, and helped design the "trip to the Moon" ride located there. As we all know, the Soviet Union caught up with science fiction in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik. Frayling suggests that if it had not been for the Cold War and Hollywood, humans would not as yet have walked on the Moon. I suspect he is right.

Fascinating.

Zz.