Wow -- here's a totally fantastic post from Boing Boing on the future of air travel, courtesy of Braniff Airlines. Braniff is the model for Venus Airlines in PLANE CRAZY, so I just eat this stuff up...

However, I do have one minor quibble with David Pescovitz and whoever posted this commercial. The title at the top (which is part of the ad because it's an optical title, not a super added as part of a reel) reads "Braniff International 1975" -- meaning that this is a vision of Braniff's FUTURE in the year 1975, from the perspective of the 1960s. I would guess that the actual year of manufacture of this commercial is 1965, which is the same year that Braniff placed its order for the Concorde. Other giveaways include the voiceover (he did so many classic ads in the '60s), the fact that all the TV screens are black & white, the cinematography (3-color, not 4-color process), and the length of the commercial -- 2 minutes -- which had disappeared by the '70s. No agency would have produced something like this in the mid-'70s...

Also, from the great Airliners.net site, here's the definitive word on the dating of the ad:

Also the livery of the Braniff supersonic in this commercial is their 1965 livery with the white tail with BI in bold black letters, rather than their 1971. So my guess is that this commerical was made in the mid-1960s judging by the clothing/hair/makeup styles and accompanying music.

Look for the scene where the actress scratches her butt -- it's good to see that they still have itchy butts in the future. I'm also quite fond of the "pneumatic tubes" line...

At the Institute for the Future, we're big fans of videos of futures past. This 1975 Braniff commercial about the future of supersonic air travel is a perfect example, complete with video phones, jetpacks, myriad personal robots, and plenty of Aarnio-esque egg chairs. In fact, the oddest thing to me about this commercial is that it was produced in the mid-'70s but the furniture and clothing is very '60s space age.

Over at Future Now, my colleague Alex Pang comments on this artifact from the history of the future:

* The design tries really hard to Look Like the Future. Everyone is wearing these robe-and-cowl things (the women look like Bene Gesserit going clubbing). Chairs have been replaced by giant eggs. (Perhaps in the future people are hatched; the commercial doesn't go there, thankfully.)

* Absolutely ordinary human activities have been automated. People don't walk any more: instead, their chairs are pushed around by robots or something.

* More seriously, the commercial makes the classic mistake of positing vast technological changes, with no accompanying social changes. When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female. This is something you see in lots of "home of the future" exhibits. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about this (PDF) so eloquently, it should be called the Nunberg Error.

Related are Emilio Pucci's vintage designs for Braniff International flight attendant uniforms.

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