This one’s been flittering about for a while, finally remembered again while I was near the computer…
This was one of Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories. It’s gotta be pretty old from the book I remember…Expedition to Earth? Anyway, the name excapes me, but the plot was that there was an unnamed tribe trying to escape glaciers, and they brought with them from their ancestors some artifacts - one was a radio beacon, and one was an unidentified things in a box. It was revealed rather early on that this was Earth, and the tribe didn’t make it.
Then 5000 years later people from Venus came by - apparently what doomed Earth gave life to Venus - and they weren’t going to stop but then they got a signal from the beacon. They gathered the artifacts and returned to Venus. (Not that this was important, but I think they were lizards).
So the Venusian scientists finally got the thing in the box to work, and it was a movie. The (rather hokey for Clarke, IMO) ending was that the words they struggled to for centuries to analyze at the end were “A Walty Disney Production.”
My question is, what Disney cartoon was this? The descriptions of it are the part I remember the least, but IIRC there was something about a battle, and something about a car driving into a city.
Not much description I realize, but hopefully someone will remember the story better than I have.
Yes, that’s it. Are you sure it’s not a specific cartoon? I just assumed it was a famous (at the time) Walt Disney cartoon. I wonder why he didn’t use “That’s all Folks!” or Betty Boop or something.
The description of the action – horrible crashes that everyone survives, the closing shot that apertures down to the main character’s face – is certainly cartoonish. The irony of the story is that Venusians see a cartoon and believe the movie they see is an accurate representation of life on Earth, and attempt to scientifically extrapolate from that. Clark’s obviously poking fun at archeologists and paleontologists. There is an even deeper message for people who don’t or can’t “think outside the box” – or, in this case, outside the film can.
It may be cartoonish, but I don’t think that means that it must be a cartoon. I’m sure that the traits you mentioned could also describe any number of screwball or slapstick comedies.
I guess the reason I thought so was I didn’t know Disney made anything other than cartoons in the late forties / early fifties. Plus now that I read it again I think the last shot of the head expressing a powerful emotion was Mickey Mouse.
I think it’s pretty clear that it’s supposed to be a cartoon. The extreme violence that has no lasting effect, the vehicle capable of "extraordinary feats of locomotion, the reference to it being stylized … .
It’s absolutely not one of the animated features. None of them begin with a crowd scene or have a slap-stick fight. And a feature wouldn’t fit in a single film can anyway.
It could *possibly * be a Mickey Mouse or a Donald Duck short. Disney often began his shorts with a crowd scene as a show-off move to get the audience’s attention. BUT … I’ve watched most of the early shorts and I can’t think of a single one that contains:
A crowd scene
A fight
A drive through the country &
A car crash in the city
in that order.
And then more stuff after that? That’s more content than you’d find in a typical short. They usually don’t have that much variety. Usually they’re just a succession of gags all set in the same location.
(I just went and pulled out my DVDs of the Mickey and Donald shorts. None of the Mickey shorts from 1928 through 1949 match this sequence of action. Production of Mickey Mouse cartoons had almost stopped by the late 40’s as Donald Duck took over as the main gag star. But none of the early Donald shorts match either, although I don’t have *every * Donald Duck cartoon from the late 1940’s so there is a narrow possibility I’ve missed something.)
My verdict: I don’t think it represents any particular cartoon either.
In 1949, when “History Lesson” was published, Walt Disney had produced only two fictional, live action, feature-length movies: Song of the South (1946), and So Dear to My Heart (1948). Thus what Arthur C. Clarke was describing was almost certainly a cartoon, and given that Disney’s feature-length cartoons at that time were all based on classic stories, probably a short cartoon.
The sentence “Then came a furious drive over miles of country in a four wheeled mechanical device which was capable of extraordinary feats of locomotion” sounds like it was inspired by the Wind in the Willows segment of Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), except that wasn’t released in the U.S. until October 1949 and probably later in Britain, after Clarke’s “History Lesson” was published.
Did Disney use this device? I know it’s common in other cartoons, but I can’t remember seeing it in a Disney one. Is it possible that Clarke just described what he considered to be a stereotypical cartoon, and picked out the phrase “A Walt Disney Production” as an instantly-recognisable label of fiction, without cross-checking to see if the attributes of his stereotypical cartoon were all represented in Disney’s work?
Yes - reminiscent of another where’d-everyone-go story (by Asimov I think, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I’d misremembered) in which the inhabitants of the doomed planet evacuated their population on giant spaceships… and handled the logistics and planning by means of punched-card computers.
The Clarke story contains the following sentence in its description of the cartoon:
To me this sounds like a sex scene (the “slightly different” is a bit of a giveaway). And since Disney films in 1949 didn’t do sex, it’s clear to me that Clarke had no specific film in mind. Could it be that he was predicting a future society in which attitudes to sex had loosened to the extent that it even got into Disney cartoons? Or do I just have an over-active imagination?
I’d say the latter. Imagine one of the Friz Freleng cartoons (I know, not Disney, but I don’t know enough Disney cartoons to give an example) where Sylvester and an alley cat (slightly different characters) beat on each other in such a fearsome manner that neither could survive in real life, but then just go on to the next scene none the worse. It’s the kind of thing that’s being described, and has nothing to do with sex, which was not portrayed in any studio cartoons of the era.
