![]() ![]() That honor went to A Tour of the West, presented by American Motors-builder of Hudson, Nash, and Rambler automobiles-and its appliance division, Kelvinator. Y.Īmerica the Beautiful in Circarama opened at Disneyland in June 1960. ![]() It was less than a decade ago that experienced Hollywood showmen failed to recognize the commercial possibilities of Cinerama, when its late inventor, Fred Waller, held demonstration showings in a barn in Oyster Bay, N. Disney, for one, does not rule out its potential adaptation to a highly specialized form of dramatic motion picture presentation. The name Circarama is a play on Cinerama, the three-film, three-projector process used to show some Hollywood features on wide, curving screens in specially-equipped movie houses.ĭoes this mean 360-degree movie houses will be next?Ī paragraph in a New York Times article (“Disney Presents Movies-In-Round,” June 28, 1955) suggests this might happen:Īlthough Circarama is not planned for theatre use at present, Mr. See where you’ve been instead of where you’re going. If you’ve seen this movie too many times-after all, it’s a free attraction-here’s how you can have an entirely new experience: Watch the entire movie facing back screens. The whole idea is to look all around to see what’s going on, even if the filmmakers seem to be directing your attention primarily to the front of the theater. Most other guests are staring at the front screens. This presentation puts you “in the middle of everything.”Įleven movie screens form a circle above your head.Įleven perfectly synchronized projectors show eleven 16mm films, surrounding you with a 360-degree travelogue. You can thank The Bell System and your local host company, Pacific Telephone. There’s no need to reach for your ticket book or to stop at a ticket booth. Perhaps you’re here because you saw this advertisement in the Los Angeles Times on June 14, 1960:Ĭircarama puts you in the middle of the action, completely surrounded by magnificent motion pictures in color.Īmong the many fascinating places Circarama takes you in “America the Beautiful” are New York Harbor Times Square a Vermont country church set against the splendor of the autumn foliage Williamsburg, Virginia-cradle of American culture Pittsburgh steel mills Detroit automobile factories Midwestern railroad freight yards Oklahoma cowboys rounding up cattle wheat-harvesting combines in Montana copper mines in Utah Monument Valley Hoover Dam The Grand Canyon San Francisco The Golden Gate Bridge and campus life at America’s great University of California at Los Angeles. ![]() While Bates was initially surprised by the poem’s success, she later reflected that its enduring "hold as it has upon our people, is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.Photo by Charles R. in manuals of hymns and prayers, and anthologies of patriotic prose and poetry. in a large number of regularly published song books, poetry readers, civic readers, patriotic readers. Within twenty years, Bates (after revising some of the lyrics in 1904) had "given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free permissions" for "America the Beautiful" to appear "in church hymnals and Sunday School song books of nearly all the denominations. Celebrating "country loved" and the "patriot dream," the song resonated with Americans from all walks of life and became enormously popular. Ward’s "Materna," the tune to which we sing it today. Bates’s patriotic words were soon set to music, most popularly to composer S. The poem was first printed in a weekly newspaper, The Congregationalist, on July 4, 1895. under those ample skies," and "the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind." Those opening lines-"O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!"-would eventually become the lyrics of one of the best-known songs in American history.īates finished writing "America the Beautiful" before leaving Colorado Springs but didn’t think of publishing it until two years later. At the top, Bates later wrote, she was inspired by "the sea-like expanse of fertile country. Bates and the other professors decided to "celebrate the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak." They made the ascent by prairie wagon. Bates was a professor at Wellesley and had traveled west to teach a summer course in Colorado Springs. 1925, poet Katharine Lee Bates described her inspiration for writing "America the Beautiful," the poem that would evolve into one of the nation’s best-loved patriotic songs, during a trip to Pike’s Peak in 1893. ![]()
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