Just Imagine
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- This article concerns the film musical. For the comic book series, see Just Imagine...:
Just Imagine was a humorous movie musical presented by 20th Century Fox in 1930 directed by David Butler, to console the audience distressed by the Great Depression. This is because it was set in 1980; and it showed the conventional expectations of progress having been achieved by that date. A large hangar was used to build a detailed, large-scale model of a modern city, complete with bridges between skyscrapers and model flying machines flitting around above the city as another level of traffic.
In this story, a man from the times of the audience gets trapped by a natural occurrence of suspended animation and awakens in the future. He also gets to go to Mars, inhabited by both friendly humans and their evil twins.
But the show is fully set in its time of production. The man is played by El Brendel, an ethnic vaudeville comedian of a forgotten type: the Swedish immigrant. Prohibition still lingers. Henry Ford's anti-semitism is smiled at in that the names of the aircraft manufacturers of the age (there are few cars in use) are all Jewish. ("Someone got back at Henry ford!") Instead of the sexual revolution, marriage partners are allotted by government marriage tribunal. (Quips Brendel's character in disbelief, as he sees babies delivered, without sex, via a coin operated chute: "Give me the good old days!!")
Clips from this movie were later used in the Universal serials Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; the mock-up spaceships were reused in the former.
The film was an expensive flop and as a result major studios would not back another big budget science fiction film until 1951.
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