This movie was the brain-child of S.W. Boggs, the U.S. Department of State’s official geographer (1927-1954). Graphic artist Boris Artzybasheff was allegedly recruited as a consultant for the effort, according to Timothy Barney, Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power, 2015. Unfortunately, the creative ideas Boggs described below - using aliens and spaceships - never made it into the movie. Instead, the movie is a relatively straight-forward animated map movie with a theme of growing globalization.
The quotes below are from Barney's book.
"Another example of Boggs reaching beyond traditional conceptions of geography was in his work for an animated educational film, for which he served as consultant and for which he also recruited Artzybasheff. The 1947 film, entitled Expanding World Relationships, was produced through Springer Pictures, and was later distributed internationally through the United States Information Agency.
The picture is a fascinating mid-century textual artifact designed to grapple with the new global relations of the United States in a changed post-war landscape, and emphasizing the role of perspective itself. In one production memorandum to Artzybasheff, for example, Boggs expresses his thought process in designing an appropriate air-age global perspective for educational objectives.
Boggs proposes that Artzybasheff design for the film a series of scenes where aliens approach the earth from a rocket ship, gaining a 'bird’s eye view' of the earth as they descend toward it. What the aliens find when they explore earth is a 'strong indication that man may not have sense enough to organize his affairs' and 'they end up with a very factual, realistic picture of the world as it is, especially as the relations between peoples in different parts of the world...have changed very unequally.'
Boggs goes on to talk about the benefits of using this alien perspective to 'attract the interest of anybody' and to show how humans must gain a better bird’s-eye view and knowledge of the earth before they commit 'racial suicide.' Here we see the brand of idealism behind Boggs’ approach—that better spatial knowledge can somehow 'save' us." (Barney, 2011, p. 189-191)
