My nemesis proved to be Myopic Peters. Here was a truly hopeless human being, short and rotund, with heavy spectacles that obviously weren’t heavy enough if the puzzled way he stared at the world and everything in it was any guide. He was the dumbest kid in my class. He was dumbest because, rather than getting wrong answers like many of the rest of us did to varying degrees, Myopic always got less because he would not attempt any answer at all. He could not read or write. He was hopelessly incompetent at absolutely everything. He never got jokes, never had anything interesting to say, never did anything except sit like a vegetable and stare stupidly at the world. Then one day, the bit of the world he decided to stare stupidly at most was me.
    I found it intensely unnerving. Every time I would look up from whatever I was doing, there he would be, staring at me through those weird distorting lenses. Soon, everyone began to notice.
“Why does he stare at you like that?”
“I don’t know. It makes me feel like I’ve done something terrible to him. But I haven’t.”
“Maybe he’s fallen in love with you.”
We all contemplated that for one terrible moment.
“No, that isn’t possible,” we agreed.

In 1955 Walt Disney and Eric Von Braun teamed up with Ward Kimball, Hans Haub and Wily Ley and a  bunch of space artists—including Chesley Bonestell—to produce Man in Space for the Disneyland TV show a program depicting what was then thought to be the immediate future of space travel. It was followed by two other such programs, dealing with lunar and planetary exploration and was also the basis of the Tomorrowland exhibit at the Disneyland theme park. Nobody wants to admit the impact of the program—a great deal of US money had been invested in the space program anyway by then, but it is known that President Eisenhower saw it and, two days later, got behind the program—which he had not taken seriously previously. The public imagination was certainly fired by the show, and probably that was what the politically savvy Ike really saw.
    The program used many witty animations to demonstrate the science,  which were the first of the sort of thing that they still utilise to show the public what they are intending to achieve to this day.