Who Killed the Disneyland Dream? - Frank Rich

[groovedaddy]

OF the many notable Americans we lost in 2010, three leap out as paragons of a certain optimistic American spirit that we also seemed to lose this year. Two you know: Theodore Sorensen, the speechwriter present at the creation of J.F.K.’s clarion call to “ask what you can do for your country,” and Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat who brought peace to the killing fields of Bosnia in the 1990s. Holbrooke, who was my friend, came of age in the Kennedy years and exemplified its can-do idealism. He gave his life to the proposition that there was nothing an American couldn’t accomplish if he marshaled his energy and talents. His premature death — while heroically bearing the crushing burdens of Afghanistan and Pakistan — is tragic in more ways than many Americans yet realize.

But a third representative American optimist who died this year, at age 91, is a Connecticut man who was not a player in great events and whom I’d never heard of until I read his Times obituary: Robbins Barstow, an amateur filmmaker who for decades recorded his family’s doings in home movies of such novelty and quality that one of them, the 30-minute “Disneyland Dream,” was admitted to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress two years ago. That rare honor elevates Barstow’s filmmaking to a pantheon otherwise restricted mostly to Hollywood classics, from “Citizen Kane” to “Star Wars.”

“Disneyland Dream” was made in the summer of 1956, shortly before the dawn of the Kennedy era. You can watch it on line at archive.org or on YouTube. Its narrative is simple. The young Barstow family of Wethersfield, Conn. — Robbins; his wife, Meg; and their three children aged 4 to 11 — enter a nationwide contest to win a free trip to Disneyland, then just a year old. The contest was sponsored by 3M, which asked contestants to submit imaginative encomiums to the wonders of its signature product. Danny, the 4-year-old, comes up with the winning testimonial, emblazoned on poster board: “I like ‘Scotch’ brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it.”

Soon enough, the entire neighborhood is cheering the Barstows as they embark on their first visit to the golden land of Anaheim, Calif. As narrated by Robbins Barstow (he added his voiceover soundtrack to the silent Kodachrome film in 1995), every aspect of this pilgrimage is a joy, from the “giant TWA Super Constellation” propeller plane (seating 64) that crosses the country in a single day (with a refueling stop in St. Louis) to the home-made Davy Crockett jackets the family wears en route.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26rich.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212

[LibDemAlways]

1. The idyllic America depicted by Barstow that existed for a brief

Post WWII time for white, middle to upper middle classes probably died along with Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. The decades which have followed have been bloody, turbulent, and increasingly non-Democratic as Americans continue to surrender their freedoms to the state.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. +1000 Much like Camelot....one brief shining moment.

[damntexdem]

2. Scrooge McDuck did it.

Along with his super-rich cronies.

[DemReadingDU]

4. Watch the Barstow 1956 movie here

30 minutes

"WHO KILLED THE DiSNeYLaND DReaM"
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/who-killed-disneyland-dream


edit for spelling

[KurtNYC]

5. you can't kill a dream since it isnt real to begin with

Americans were fed a steady diet of dreams in the 1950s -- Western icons, Cold War posturing, comic books, serials and pop idols. The media was feeding this.

The media doesn't affirm American ideals anymore. It beams out a steady stream of fear.

[KurtNYC]

6. kicking

bc after 24 hours scenes from the home movies and the era that it evokes still haunt me.