The fair was open for two seasons, from April to October each year, and was officially closed forever on October 27, 1940. To get the Fair's budget overruns under control before the 1940 season and augment gate revenues, the fair management in the second year replaced Whalen with a banker, Harvey Gibson, and placed much greater emphasis on the amusement features, and less on the educational and uplifting exhibits. Countries under the thumb of the Axis powers in Europe, e.g., Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France, ran their pavilions in 1940 with a special nationalistic pride. In both seasons, the only major world power that did not participate was Germany.

The great fair attracted over 45 million visitors and generated roughly $48 million in revenue. Since the Fair Corporation had invested 67 million dollars (in addition to nearly a hundred million dollars from other sources), it was an economic failure, and the corporation declared bankruptcy.

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Influence on later literature and popular culture

The 1939 World's Fair made a strong impression on attendees and influenced a generation of Americans. Later generations have attempted in to recapture the impression it made in fictional and artistic treatments:

• An episode of Pinky and the Brain takes place in the 1939 World's Fair.
• In the Charlie Chan Movie, Murder over New York, there is a reference to the World's Fair.
• World's Fair, by E. L. Doctorow
• 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, a mixed non-fiction and fictional book by David Gelernter
• All-Star Squadron, a comic book published by DC Comics from 1981 until 1987 and set during the 1940s, was about a superhero team whose headquarters were in the Trylon and Perisphere.
• In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, one of the main characters breaks into the abandoned fairgrounds and the Perisphere itself, where he has a significant sexual experience.
• "Fifty Years After the Fair" is a song written and recorded by Aimee Mann. With a mixture of nostalgia and remorse, it describes the Fair from the current vantage point of "tomorrow".
• "1939" is a song performed by the Brooklyn band Piñataland. The album version begins with a recording of President Franklin D. Roosevelt declaring the Fair's opening, followed immediately by a short excerpt of a 1939-contemporary song which includes the lyrics, "to the World of Tomorrow we come." The song makes reference to Great Depression and many of the Fair's celebrated features.
• In addition to the Fair's subtitle, the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow features a shot of what look like the Trylon and Perisphere and appears to be set in 1939.
• In the Looney Labs card game Chrononauts, in an alternate universe where Hitler has been assassinated in 1936, black forest cake is popularized at the German pavilion at the fair.
• Matt Groening's show Futurama was named after the GM exhibit. The first episode has a cryogenicist say, "Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!"
• In the animated film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a young Bruce Wayne and girlfriend attend the Gotham World's Fair, dubbed "The World of Tomorrow" and full of 1930's style architecture.
• "The Odyssey of Flight 33", a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, features an airplane that mysteriously travels back in time to 1939. The crew only realizes their strange situation when the World's Fair comes into sight under their plane.

• In his book The Demon Haunted World, astronomer Carl Sagan claimed that the 1939 World's Fair was pivotal in kindling his interest in science.

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References

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External links

• Tour of the 1939 World's Fair
• Images from the '39 NY World's Fair
• Welcome to Tomorrow
• Iain Baird (Television Historian), Television in The World of Tomorrow
• http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine3/items.html
• The New York World's Fair Community
• nywf64.com (1964/1965 New York World's Fair Website)

Preceded by Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937)

World Expositions 1939

Succeeded by Port-au-Prince International

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