“Eyes in Outer Space”

I don’t know for sure that this aired on The Disney Channel back in the ‘80s. Further, I don’t know for sure that Ron DeSantis (born in September 1978 and therefore also of the age to have watched the glory days of that channel) had The Disney Channel and would have had the opportunity to watch it. It also seems possible to me that either one of us could have seen it in school as an educational film, outdated though it is. But friends, this would not be an unsurprising origin story—it talks about the cycles of climate changes and suggests that Disney supports the idea of weather control. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this short film has been living rent-free in his head since about 1987.

Our eyes in outer space are what Paul Frees solemnly informs us are artificial satellites. The specific ones we’re talking about are intended to predict the weather; we start with a discussion of both weather and its effects on human life. We get a discussion of the current state of weather satellites and a theoretical discussion of where we might go from there. Much of it, including the contemplation of the future, involves the work of Ward Kimball, though there are also human actors and a retro-futuristic set. The satellite sees a hurricane forming a thousand miles east of Miami, and Frees tells us how technology might someday simply change the weather, albeit not without consequences.

Honestly, it’s a bit amazing to see how prescient this is. Sputnik had launched a bare two years earlier. Vanguard 2 launched a few months before the short and had not been enormously successful. The first fully successful weather satellite would not be until the next year. However, the short is open about the potential to have the best weather prediction technology humanity would ever know. It’s easy to joke about how bad predictions are, but consider how much better they’ve gotten in living memory. They continue to improve all the time, though we’re not exactly able to deflect anything yet.

The short does not even fully suggest that we will be able to prevent hurricanes. Just deflect them and maybe lessen their impact. Even that is more of Walt’s beloved futurism; he had an unfailing belief that technology would make the future better and seldom met a piece of tech that didn’t thrill him. But I can imagine thinking, “Disney never says who will control this technology and therefore it’s obviously what they’re hiding in that area where they have a ridiculous amount of control over their own government.” It’s also true that it suggests that a tiny amount of fiddling will make more of the planet fruitful and habitable for humanity, which, uh, is not how any of this works.

I am, I don’t mind telling you, scraping the bottom of the barrel for 1959 content, and apparently we’re taking this month as a do-over when the site gets properly started. That’s okay; I’ll look into the Wonderful World of Disney archives or something. I had watched all of this month’s entries before the decision was made, and I realized the interesting thing about the possible ramifications of some of us seeing this in our formative years. So I’m sharing now, before I forget it again. And if I’m right, it means he and I are about the only people who remember this exists at all.