Friday, January 27, 2012

Mary Blair Ad

I found this in my online travels today and simply had to share! What is better to see while flipping through the ads in a magazine than a two page spread of Mary Blair artistic gorgeousness?! I can’t think of anything!

This ad features one of the two The Spirit of Creative Energies Among Children murals Mary Blair designed for the 1967 New Tomorrowland. This mural was on the north side of Tomorrowland, covering the uppermost portion of the CircleVision-360 building.  I have left this ad LARGE so you can look at it all in all its glory. See below.

It reads:

“Welcome to the bright, new world of telephone communications!

This is the theme… and the promise… of the 88-foot-long mural that greets visitors to the new Bell System Exhibit in the new Tomorrowland at Disneyland, California.

The artist is Mary Blair, well-known illustrator of children’s books and a designer of the ‘it’s a small world’ exhibit at the New York World’s Fair and Disneyland. Miss Blair interpreted the promise of world-wide communications in a colorful tile mosaic of a children’s orchestra sending music to friends in other nations.

But the mural isn’t the only thing that’s new about the Bell System Exhibit. There’s a larger, expanded display area that shows you telephone communications of the future.

Feature of the Exhibit is a Walt Disney film, ‘America the Beautiful’, in CircleVision 360, the motion picture that surrounds you and puts you in the center of the most beautiful scenery in the world. This is the new year to discover America in person. If you and your family get to Disneyland, you’ll be warmly welcomed at our new building in Tomorrowland.”

Mary Blair Ad July 7 1967

From Life magazine dated July 7, 1967.

2 comments:

Major Pepperidge said...

Interesting! I need to go dig up some vintage photos of Mary Blair's murals "in situ", this illustration looks different than my recollections of the murals at the park. I don't trust my brain, though!

Tinker Bell said...

I felt the same way. I had to look at the mural to realize it was the same. I think it's just the context that it's in that fools our brain. It looks "wrong" not being on the side of the show building.