Althouse: "Here's the whole world in colorful miniature. All the pavilions have exciting differences, but over them all, there's exciting oneness...."

August 23, 2021

"Here's the whole world in colorful miniature. All the pavilions have exciting differences, but over them all, there's exciting oneness...."

21 comments:

rehajm said...: I do enjoy a past look at the future. That one is exceptionally groovy, baby...

I like the look on that older fellow's face. That look that says, 'Q'uest que c'est?'; 8/23/21, 12:30 PM
Rosalyn C. said...: Seems like the world has gone from the exciting oneness of humanity and a sense of optimism to a general sense of pessimism about humanity being at each others' throats -- or maybe that's just the narrative of the woke Democratic Party (offering itself as the salvation) as projected by the media.; 8/23/21, 1:07 PM
Whiskeybum said...: Two things regarding this YouTube clip:

1. My family did visit Expo'67 in Montreal - I was 13 years old. We didn't visit Montreal itself - we were camping nearby and would drive in to see the Expo. I remember a lot of the sights shown in the newsreel, especially the American, Russian, British and Thai pavilions, as well as the pavilion which looks like contiguous tents with poles sticking up through their tops. The futuristic displays were quite well done for the time, but the overall experience was marred by the size of the crowds and inadequate facilities to handle them (think transport, food services, restrooms, etc.). The little monorail trams look fun in the video, but good luck getting on one unless you like standing in the sun in Disney-length-or-longer lines.

2. I had a hard time placing the narrator's accent. No doubt Canadian, but a 'dilatect' that at first sounded like an Englishman trying to sound French, and then later on, closer to the Queen's English. In particular, near the beginning of the newsreel, I pictured the narrator as Inspector Jacques Clouseau, asking the proprietor if he had a 'reum'.; 8/23/21, 1:20 PM
Amexpat said...: Went there on a family trip when I was 10. The thing that made the biggest impression was Habitat. Still looks very futurist - and cool.; 8/23/21, 1:32 PM
Pete said...: Whimsy and sophistication, foreshadowed by the drive to Expo in the excellent [and my wife's] vermillion MGB!

Pete Peterson
(The one and only) Southbury; 8/23/21, 1:54 PM
Lloyd W. Robertson said...: Austin Powers, yah baby! Mod women, cigarettes and a lunar lander that needs a few more years of development. What an exciting year that was for Canada. I was 11, and we didn't go, but we knew families that put the kids in the car (here we go again) and drove a long way to Montreal. There was a patriotic sense of uniting the country, especially French and English, alongside the stuff about uniting the world.; 8/23/21, 2:10 PM
tcrosse said...: The narrator's accent is Standard BBC of that era. Montréal is still a lot of fun, or was before the pandemic hit.; 8/23/21, 2:27 PM
Tina Trent said...: Ah yes, Quebec. Francophile wankers who require all Canadian street signs be in English and French but are permitted to have French-only signs in Quebec and who have succeeded in forcing all citizens of Canada who wish to become lawyers or civil servants learn French while the same requirement to learn English is not placed on them.

It would be poetic justice if those linguistic-supremacist pigs got a good soaking from Ouragan Henri. If it wasn’t for the poutine, I’d say nuke’em.; 8/23/21, 3:55 PM
Joe Smith said...: Where's my damn flying car!!?; 8/23/21, 4:06 PM
gilbar said...: I was 5 when we went
HABITAT was coolest; 8/23/21, 4:39 PM
tastid212 said...: Was 14 when I went. Yes, Habitat was the most talked about exhibit. We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, which had ducklings in the outdoor courtyard. Expo '67 was much more manageable than the NY World's Fair three years (?) earlier, which was so much bigger.; 8/23/21, 5:22 PM
Michael said...: The success of Expo led the city to think it could pull off the Olympics. It couldn't. Left the city with a horrible stadium and mountains of debt which wasn't finally paid off till 2007.

But the Expo was really cool. I was eight. Parents pulled us from school for a week to travel up. Went at end of September, so crowds were relatively light.; 8/23/21, 5:55 PM
Leora said...: I was there. My major memories are of my really nice pant suit and how lame French Rock was. Oh and my parents screwed up our hotel reservation and the only rooms available were at a Ritz Carlton which was not at all cool about my brother wearing shorts, a T-shirt and a baseball cap in the lobby. The Rolling Stones were staying there also but we didn't get to see them.; 8/23/21, 6:01 PM
Wince said...: I gather those vignettes of St. Catherine Street and the nude statues inside the windowless British pavilion explain that "throbbing city" business.

We visited the Expo several years later when it was a relic.; 8/23/21, 6:21 PM
Joe Smith said...: Not to be 'that guy,' but the use of the apostrophe in '67 is wrong. It should be an apostrophe, not an opening quote mark.

The comments here don't seem to use the correct ones to show the proper use and I'm not an html wizard.

It's a common error, but it drives me crazy...; 8/23/21, 8:25 PM
Big Mike said...: Bouffant hairdos. Three button suits. Narrow ties. All those head scarves. To me it had the look of being pretty square, and quite a bit earlier in the 1960s than 1967. Of course, it was Canada, so … Keep in mind that the grooviness that was Woodstock would be only two years into the future and about 275 miles south.; 8/23/21, 9:20 PM
Narr said...: According to the intertubes, the Soviet Pavilion was real crowd-pleaser that was dismantled after the Expo year and shipped back to the motherland.

Which makes me wonder, where did the Soviets have their last outpost when two friends and I visited in 1974 or so? As history and polisci students we wanted to see their propaganda in person, and found a building with a room full of USSR kitsch.

There was a stunningly gorgeous Russian brunette in attendance; I bought a poster of Lenin just to spend a few minutes flirting with her. It's still rolled up around here someplace.

In Montreal itself, we discovered both Molson and Labatt, beers we'd never even heard of,
but otherwise it just seemed like a big city anywhere. Quebec City was way more interesting.

On the way into Canada from New York, we were treated politely; on the way back home through Detroit, we were made to wait while our car and everything in it was thoroughly checked for contraband. To be sure, it was about 1am and we'd been driving since Quebec City, and had lived in the car or in parks for about a week before, and looked like college guys looked in 1974 . . . Still, we resented that they thought we could have been stupid enough to try to bring drugs across the border. Hell, one of our number--not me--never drank, or so much as smoked pot.; 8/23/21, 9:38 PM
gadfly said...: Wapo sez:

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the coronavirus, and approvals for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines could follow soon.

It’s . . . an opportunity . . . to say to the hard-core vaccine refusers: We’re done with you.

It’s gotten to the point where at a rally on Saturday in Alabama of his most loyal dead-enders, former president Donald Trump said . . . “I recommend: take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good. Take the vaccines,” and boos rang out.

I’m pretty sure that if between swigs of horse dewormer, your uncle is booing his god-king Donald Trump for saying a good word about vaccination, gentle persuasion isn’t going to have much effect on him.; 8/24/21, 1:53 AM
gadfly said...: Joe Smith said...
Where's my damn flying car!!?

No Joe, the real question is "Where the fuck is my jetpack?"; 8/24/21, 2:15 AM
Bart Hall said...: One glaring error -- the capital of Québec is ... Québec [City], not Montréal. I went to Expo several times, once with my parents during the summer, then several more times after thumbing north from college in Vermont. In that era you didn't even have to show any ID to cross the border. I really disliked all the futurist stuff, but spent a LOT of time in the more down-to-Earth pavilions, most of which had real substance to them.

After finishing my graduate degrees in Alberta, I actually moved to rural Québec, where I farmed for 15 years and raised my sons as native French speakers. Eventually the high taxes, officious bureaucracy, poor health care, and a flood of crushing regulations got to be too much. The end came when I was fined and had a rifle seized for having shot an entire pack of feral dogs which kept attacking my calves, killing a few of them. I was even charged with animal cruelty -- to the DOGS !! -- but it was dropped when I insisted on a jury trial.

I returned to my natal USA in '91, a decision I've not regretted.; 8/24/21, 4:56 AM
Joe Smith said...: 'No Joe, the real question is "Where the fuck is my jetpack?"'

Look in the trunk of your flying car : ); 8/24/21, 9:06 AM