Cutaways from the 1960s (1960 to 1969).
What about antiquity in ads from the 1960s? There is a point in advertising when we shift from forward-thinking (or even present-thinking) to thinking backwards. This Oldsmobile ad from April 11, 1969 is hardly the most prominent example of this, but it’s a start.
How to find that exact apex of U.S. culture? Let’s go a little farther out, bracketing it with two extreme points, one at the end of World War II and the other squarely in the funky late 1960s. Somewhere between these extremes lies the exact tipping point.
The headline stating “Charlie Brown and Snoopy: Winners at Last” also highlights the Cult of Loserdom that was fetishized beginning in the mid-1960s. Peanuts’ heyday was the 1960s and 1970s, and in many ways Peanuts encapsulates so many of those points that the Sixties held so dear: Freudian psychology, juvenalia, faux humility. We have this Naive Art style (contrast this with the draftsman-like art of cartoonist Winsor McCay in Little Nemo in Slumberland). Everything in Peanuts is slightly askew, off-centered; it’s the let’s-not-get-to-the-point pose of the embarrassed, self-hating majority. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is held near and dear to the heart of so many millenials. Recall, for fuck’s sake, the angst and tearing of garments in that TV special.
Twenty-three years before, we have a true winner-takes-all LIFE cover featuring titanium-balled General Montgomery in his beret, lambs-wool coat, and cable-knit sweater. Somehow I doubt that the Cult of Loserdom got much fawning press back in 1944.
Legend has it that there is a secret basketball court located inside that most famous fake mountain located in the Los Angeles area…Disneyland’s Matterhorn. Truth or fiction?
Truth.
Instead of a secret Bondian evil villain lair with shark tanks and stolen Rembrandts, the secret room in the Disneyland Matterhorn is actually a half-court basketball court.
As you can see, it’s clearly not even a half-court. Maybe a one-third court.
Not only that, but it’s clearly an “improvised” board and hoop and is attached to the side of the stairs.
Tony Baxter, Senior Vice President, Creative Development, Walt Disney Imagineering, says that there was an empty space in the upper two-thirds of the mountain, and it needed to be filled with something. Walt Disney himself even gave the “OK” to build the basketball court in the Matterhorn.
Rumor has it that local building code indicated that only sports-related buildings could be over a certain height (or something of that nature), so tacking on a basketball hoop was the loophole.
That appears to be false. The City of Anaheim is going to let Disney build a ground-breaking (in more ways than one) park with a whole slew of unconventional structures…but hold them to some archaic building code? Nah. I don’t see it.
Here is a close-up of the Matterhorn basketball court backboard, with a Disneyland sticker on it:
This video confirms the rumor of a secret basketball court in the Matterhorn. Skip ahead to minute 5:00 to see the actual court; there is a lot of filler before that.
The Titan II Missile Underground Launch Complex (Large Image) is classic Cold War-era cutaway stuff. At the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona, you can tour the entire facility. As their brochure states:
The Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) was the first liquid propellant missile that could be launched from underground. Equipped with a nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead, the Titan II was capable of reaching its target—more than half a world away—in less than thirty minutes. The preserved Titan II missile site, officially known as complex 571-7, was completed and turned over to the U.S. Air Force in 1963. Until 1987, when the last Titan II was deactivated, 54 Titan II
missile complexes across the United States stood “on alert” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
A cutaway from Fortune Magazine (1960) is a bit more artful and fanciful, and looks more like the cover of a sci-fi paperback than a true cutaway:
