Races

If you've been around Disney people, at some point you may have seen this picture on an office wall.

There's another similar one showing Mickey racing automobiles, in the same style and at about the same timeframe. (That one has not been easily found, though, at least not using basic Googling skills.) Both of them appear to be showing early adoption of advanced technology by up-and-coming young people who were making money in a new medium - animation, that is, although motion pictures in general were new at that point. If one was involved in the dot-com era, one might even notice similarities between what was happening with those young artists and the people making the World Wide Web happen.

The problem, though, is the date on the above poster: August 1933. It's well past the Roaring Twenties, solidly into the Great Depression. Someone presumably is still doing well enough to race airplanes, at least out in California. (Mickey Mouse has been around for five years; Snow White is almost four years in the future.) It's not quite the same Turning as the dot-com era, which was solidly in the Third. Then again, one could point to a similar situation in the Internet space: Some new companies showed up after the bust, and even as late as the start of the Crisis, and continue to do well enough for themselves.

Another issue is that there's no other evidence of this event easily available - again, not via basic Googling skills. It's not a problem to find these images, or people selling original copies, or references to Burbank Air Field (now Burbank Bob Hope Airport). Actual references to what the Disney Studios Air Races actually involved - who flew, what the course was like, how common air races were - can't be found. If anyone knows more about them, please post.