Just watched this bizarrely quaint sci-fi musical from the early talkie era on YouTube. It takes place in 1980 from a 1930's perspective in a big city where food and drink are in the form of a pill, airplanes instead of cars are used for everyday leisure travel, and marriage is decided by the government. Oh, and characters use single letters and numbers instead of regular names for their identities. One more thing, one of the characters is awaken after 50 years having been struck by lightning at the end of his previous life. I'll stop there and just say this was quite entertainingly creative when the writers depicted what they imagined things could have been like so far in the future. Among the players worth mentioning: Maureen O'Sullivan, just before her star-making role as Jane in the Tarzan series, looking quite luminous in her youth. Marjorie White, a sassy blonde comedienne who steals many of her scenes making it such a tragedy she'd die a few years later in an accident. And El Brendel, a forgotten comic who provides the lion's share of the funny scenes that I highly enjoyed. Why this has never been available on VHS or DVD, I don't know but I'm glad I now saw this on YouTube as uploaded from the Fox Movie Channel as evidenced by the logo of that network that occasionally showed on the lower right hand corner of the screen. So, yeah, Just Imagine is worth a look. P.S. This is the second film in a row-after Whoopee!-I've seen that had a crack at Henry Ford that I read was a comment on his anti-Semitism. I enjoyed them both times.
Review of Just Imagine
