It's the year 2010. Where is my rocket car?

What year is it?  For many people, we recently celebrated the auspicious start of the year two-thousand-and-ten.  But for me, this is twenty-ten.  Sounds more futuristic that way.  So, where is my self propelled rocket car, and the other technologies we were promised at the middle of the last century by industrial giants such as General Motors?  Perhaps given the recent financial crisis, it's lucky that there remains a General Motors at all.  Still, it's hard to abandon the romantic notion of a future that remains in the past.  That sentence was trippy, am I right?

Viewers in need of a real trip should take a look at the 1956 musical short "Design for Dreaming," which was brought to us by the good people at General Motors and Frigidaire.  In it, a sleeping woman is escorted by a masked man to an elegant ball (actually the 1956 General Motors Motorama pavilion at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.  She also tries her hand at baking a cake in Frigidaire's kitchen of the future.  Like all good corporate sponsored musical short films, the dialogue is entirely sung, rather than spoken.



The same was brilliantly lampooned by the cult television show Mystery Science Theatre: Three Thousand.  You must watch the real one first to get the full benefit.