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Just Imagine was the first feature length science fiction film by a US studio. Just Imagine is a humorous science-fiction movie musical presented by Fox Film Corporation in 1930, directed by David Butler, to console audiences distressed by the Great Depression.
New York, 1980: airplanes have replaced cars, numbers have replaced names, pills have replaced food, government-arranged marriages have replaced love, and test tube babies have replaced ... well, you get the idea. Scientists revive a man struck by lightning in 1930; he is rechristened "Single O". He is befriended by J-21, who can't marry the girl of his dreams because he isn't "distinguished" enough -- until he is chosen for a 4-month expedition to Mars by a renegade scientist. The Mars J-21, his friend, and stowaway Single O visit is full of scantily clad women doing Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers and worshiping a fat middle-aged man.
The film was set in the year 1980, and it depicted the conventional expectations of technological progress associated with that "distant future" date. A large dirigible hangar was used to house a huge, detailed, large-scale model of a modern city, complete with suspension bridges between towering skyscrapers, multi-lane elevated roadways, and a flock of flying machines flitting around above the city as another level of traffic. To modern viewers, the city resembles an implausibly exaggerated version of 1930s New York City.
The plot involves a man from 1930, who is experimentally revived from the dead by a team of physicians who have no interest whatsoever in him after he awakens. Two young men who have observed the process as guests of one of the nurses kindly take him in hand and show him (and the audience) the wonders of 1980. He also gets to travel to Mars, which turns out to be inhabited by friendly humans, each of whom has an evil, otherwise-identical twin.
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