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Design for Dreaming is a 1956 musical short made by MPO Productions for General Motors; the title card reads "Copyright MCMLVI General Motors." The item's own description calls it a film "set at the 1956 General Motors Motorama," one of the key Populuxe films of the 1950s, "showing futuristic dream cars and Frigidaire's 'Kitchen of the Future.'" It runs 9:16 and sits in the Prelinger collection on the Internet Archive.

It is a dream. A woman sleeps in a canopy bed under a painted moon; a man in a tuxedo walks in through a glowing door; and she is carried off to the Motorama, where she sings that "a brand new car is better than me" (01:26). A little later the film hauls her away from the car show and into the kitchen. There the singing turns to the appliances: "Put a card in the slot and onto the screen pops a picture of just how your dish will look" (03:35), then "push button magic" (03:54), and the line the whole film turns on, "No need for the bride to feel tragic" (03:51).

The strangest minute is the one this reel keeps. She tells the kitchen what to do: "Just set the timer and you're on your way" (04:04). A golden pot goes under a glass dome and the lid shuts. She walks off and dances through a run of costume changes, "free to have fun around the clock" (04:14), flops down exhausted, and a bell rings. Back in the kitchen the same dome holds a cake with lit candles. "My cake is ready" (04:46). The film never shows the pot turning into a cake, and it never shows the pot again.

What makes it strange now is the sales pitch: a General Motors musical sells a machine that cooks while she dances, as the cure for a bride's tragedy. It ends on the line "Everyone says the future is strange, but I have a feeling some things won't change" (05:21), sung over a grin.