A hearty thanks to BangShift contributor Benoit Pigeon for finding and sharing this video with me that is comprised of some fantastic footage from Burbank, California in the 1940s. Shot from a moving train that was running parallel to a road, you’ll see a bunch of great cars (one of which looks like a Citroen Traction Avant from France per Benoit’s eyes), lots of cool gas stations, diners, and the general scene of a kind of rural area. We’re not talking middle of nowhere rural but you’ll notice that most of the cars have dirt and dust on them like they regularly travel on dirt roads and there are large swaths of blackness that seems to go on forever in the background as the train makes its way down the track. Eventually you see what looks to be a city center where traffic is stopped but the train keeps on rolling through. This whole scene is backed up by Bing Crosby’s song “San Fernando Valley”. It is awesome.

Today Burbank is the antithesis of what you see in the video. It is a vibrant, bustling place that has a population of over 104,000 people according to the last census. There are television and movie studios and lots of homes that date from the era that the video you are seeing was shot. At the time this film was made (if it did come out in ’44) there was one big mother of a Lockheed airplane factory in the city. The military actually covered the place with massive tarps that were painted to look like towns and it worked. From the sky the massive plant looked like a sleepy rural town with no chance of having any military value. Pretty amazing stuff.

Anyway, this video is great and a window into an era when southern California was less about car chases and crazy people and more about a pretty rural and laid by lifestyle. This is a great window into the past complete with cool cars and background.