Beyond 'Tomorrowland': A Brief History of the 1964 World's Fair in the Movies

‘Tomorrowland’ (Disney)

Conceived as tribute to progress, peace, and prosperity, the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Queens, New York, proved to be a defining moment in pop culture, inspiring a generation with its gleaming structures, idealistic experiences, and futuristic vibe.

Walt Disney embraced and embodied that aesthetic. One of the exposition’s key architects — the World’s Fair introduced the Disneyland staple It’s a Small World and featured elements that would later appear in Epcot and Tomorrowland — Uncle Walt described his vision for the exposition as “a beautiful tomorrow, just a dream away.”

Walt Disney in ‘Disneyland Goes to the World Fair’ (Disney)

Tomorrowland — the Brad Bird-helmed sci-fi fantasy starring George Clooney and Britt Robertson — runs with that notion, using the 1964 World’s Fair as a (literal) launching pad for its story. The film, opening this weekend, is the most recent to feature the signature structures of the fair: The giant, instantly recognizable Unisphere globe, and the otherworldly observation towers of the nearby New York State Pavilion.

Here’s a brief look at how Hollywood has employed the enduring symbols of the fair in the half-century since the exposition closed its gates.

The Wiz (1978)

The New York Pavilion stood in for Munchkinland in Sidney Lumet’s movie musical The Wiz, starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

Though in disrepair at the time the film was shot, the structure retained its retro-future ambience and conveyed a sense of the fantastic, especially when the camera tilted upward to show the lit-up flying saucer-shaped observation towers.

'The Wiz’ (Universal)

Black Rain (1989)

While it eventually became a go-to symbol for the sci-fi genre, the Unisphere’s cinematic debut came in a decidedly non-sci-fi film. The title sequence of Ridley Scott’s crime thriller Black Rain dissolves into the unmistakable orb as Michael Douglas cruises by on a motorcycle. Here, the Unisphere merely serves as a geographical marker for Queens in a montage of New York landmarks.

'Black Rain’ (Paramount Pictures)

Men in Black (1999) and Men in Black 3 (2012)

The World’s Fair site actually serves as a major plot point in the 1999 sci-fi comedy starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. In the film, the observation towers are operational UFOs that landed in 1961. The government hid the saucers in plain sight by erecting the towers around them and creating the World’s Fair to cover up the existence of aliens. (“Why else would we hold it in Queens?” explains Jones’s Agent K.)

At the end of the movie, the rogue Edgar Bug tries to escape Earth in one of the ships, but gets blasted by J and K and crashes through the Unisphere on its way down.

'Men in Black’ (Sony Pictures)

J and K briefly revisit the plaza in the 2012 sequel, during a motorcycle chase set in 1969.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

The Unisphere has an anachronistic cameo in the scene where Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) pay a visit to the fictional 1943 World Expo (the real event was canceled due to World War II). They pass by a Unisphere-like structure that was digitally rendered and composited onto green-screen footage of the actors.

'Captain America: The First Avenger’ (Marvel/Paramount Pictures)

While the statue isn’t real, its inclusion establishes the fair as a place of wonder and innovation, with an Easter egg shot of Marvel’s original android Human Torch and a Stark booth that would hint at bigger things to come…

Iron Man 2 (2010)

The familiar Flushing Meadows setting appears twice in the Marvel sequel, once as the actual location for Tony (Robert Downey Jr.)’s flashy Stark Expo 2010 (Iron Man lands in the center of the New York Pavilion) and also as the model for Howard Stark (John Slattery)’s Stark Expo '74.

'Iron Man 2’ (Marvel/Paramount Pictures)

Again, filmmakers employ the Unisphere and its Space Age surroundings as shorthand for technology, invention, and unfettered dreams.

'Iron Man 2’ (Marvel/Paramount Pictures)

Tomorrowland (2015)

Early scenes painstakingly recreate the vintage Flushing Meadows fairgrounds of 1964, which serve as a secret portal to the film’s titular Utopia. While Bird did not shoot on location in Queens, the director dispatched a crew the site to shoot the iconic Unisphere globe and adjacent towers; those images were incorporated into background composites.

'Tomorrowland’ concept art (Disney)

Fifty years on, most of the World’s Fair structures are no longer standing — and many that remain are rusted, crumbling husks closed to the public (the pavilion was opened for one day last year to mark the anniversary of the fair’s debut; there’s also an effort to restore some of the extant buildings). But the Unisphere and observation towers still reign over Queens, drawing tourists to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, captivating and inspiring decades after the fair was shuttered. Created as science fiction, the monuments have, aptly, been coopted by sci-fi filmmakers, and have been firmly entrenched in the genre’s cinematic iconography.

The Unisphere and New York Pavilion today in Flushing Meadows Corona Park (Getty Images)