Ward Kimball's 1957 Mars animation on DVD?

If you saw the Mike Judge/Don Hertzfeldt animation show that's making its way around the country, you saw an amazing bit of Ward Kimball's 1957 movie "Mars and Beyond".

I'd like to know if anyone knows whether the full version will be available on DVD. Don mentioned in the Q&A that he thought it was going to be part of a Disney animation compilation to come out this Xmas, but I can't find any info about it. Anyone know anything about this?

Look for Walt Disney Treasures - Tomorrowland: Disney in Space and Beyond available December 2nd.

Awesome - thanks!

A Tiki Cheers To You!

[ Edited by: Unga Bunga on 2003-09-29 19:49 ]

I have finally had the time to watch (and re-watch) this DVD and it is just about the greatest thing ever. As a mild fan of Disney, but a huge fan of retro-futurism, this 2 DVD set is a goldmine of solid science and wonderfully fanciful conjecture.

Ward kimball's animations in the Mars segment are astounding in their beauty, surrealism and mid-century modernism.

The Man and the Moon segment has an incredible "dramatic" live action staging of a trip to the moon and it's like a Collier's magazine spread come to life. It's pure gold when the captain asks a crewman to enter something into the computer and he uses an old-fasioned telephone dialer to do it! ZAZ! Everyone stares into oscilliscopes that magically tell them everything they need to know. It may be campy and amusing, but the underlying concepts are solid and even pretty accurate in some cases. It's shocking that this moon segment is almost 50 years(!) old, but holds up very well as a presentation of science mixed with entertainment.

An absolute must-own for any Disney, space, or mid-century modernism fan. I'd love to hear anyone else's comments on these shows.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000BWVAI/002-7112213-5729638?v=glance#product-details

Hot damn!

Can you buy this anywhere besides the internet? Is it available in Disneyland??

you can buy it just about anywhere that sells DVDs. Costco & Sam's has 'em too.

-Z

Hmmmm - I've read that this one was produced in more limited quantities than the others.... In any case, I picked up the War Years one at Costco this weekend - but no trace of the Tomorrowland one!

I guess I'll have to darken WalMarts door...

Why not just order from Amazon? Are they evil like Walmart and I missed it?

I finally got around to watching the second disk and it's also spell-binding. It has the pitch movie Walt made for the State of Florida about his plans for WDW and Epcot just 2 months before he died.

I remember hearing about Epcot when I was a kid and I wanted nothing more than to live in Walt's future city. Too bad it became nothing more than a World's Fair-type exhibit instead of an actual city. Then again, planned communities like this have a creepy, isolationist quality to them. Walt's blind optimism is refreshing, though, after years of dystopian future imagery.

The weather satellite segment is amusing, too. While the use of satellites to predict weather is dead-on, the idea of manipulating the weather on the grand scale they do is pretty frightening. All I could think about is the lawsuits (or riots!) that would arise due to the damage wreaked by the man-made storms they create. Again, very optimistic ideals. Gotta love that Peter Ellenshaw matte painting of the weather control center, though.

I wish the set had Ward Kimball's Cosmic Capers short though! Just like "Toot, Whistle.." and other Disney shorts from back then, it's the perfect combination of humor, pacing, education, imagination, and art too! Would've been a perfect inclusion on the Tomorrowland set. But I guess I shouldn't complain too much - the glass is already more than half full!

[Correction - it IS on the dvd set! I didn't know Cosmic Capers was part of the Mars And Beyond episode. Within the episode, it's the animated sequence beginning with a runthrough of man's perception of the cosmos over history, ending with a robot-kidnaps-girl sequence. So fantastic to see this and so much more in the clear dvd quality!]

-Randy

[ Edited by: aquarj on 2004-08-10 00:27 ]

On 2004-06-22 07:44, Tangaroa wrote:
Hmmmm - I've read that this one was produced in more limited quantities than the others....

I got mine last night; and yes, there are less of them.
The Tomorrow Land set has 105,000 copies while the Mickey set has 175K and the War years has 250K.

-Z

There is an easter egg on this disk. Haven't watched it yet, though:

Click right on the Main Menu button of the Bonus Features on the 2nd disc and it will highlight a red button (next to the Register Your DVD writing). Click on this to watch the taping of a pitch to GE for the World Fair. It features Walt and the Sherman Brothers singing "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" which was going to be shown at the GE pavilion at the New York World Fair. It is a great pitch with some artwork and Walt's vision for the exhibit. This is when the Carousel of Progress is used (to show how electricity changed life).