Author's Note: This is just a practice script that I quickly typed up after reading about Hank's script writing workshop thing that he posted about on tumblr (he also talked about it in his vlog). This was my first attempt at it, so please be gracious...
Anyways, I hope you enjoy it.
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Hello.
“It’s a Small World” is perhaps one of the most recognizable Disney tunes. The tune quickly gets stuck in your head, and before you know it, it’s stuck there for the rest of the day, and you’ll find yourself humming it while driving to the grocery store. And sure it’s a simple tune, but it really got me thinking.
I don’t think that the phrase “it’s a small world” is necessarily reflective of the scale of the earth’s size. Sure, the earth is tiny compared to stars like Betelgeuse or even our sun. However, to me, this phrase is more reflective of the idea of innovation in a tangible sense. And to illustrate this example, let me take you back in time.
When colonists first settled in the British colonies along the east coast, none of them had ever traveled across what would become the United States. To them, the rest of this land was just vast amounts of unknown. Traveling on foot to the end of this mass of land certainly would have seemed impossible because of the immense size of the unknown. As people explored the other parts of the US, more was learned about this unknown vast of land, and I’m sure this vast unknown “shrunk” in people’s minds because there was a physical, tangible end to it. Flash forward to the Oregon Trail, a trip that normally took a year by sea was cut in half by horse-drawn wagon. The size of the US didn’t change at all, but the rate of travel did. And now, their endpoint was even more tangible in the sense that a journey that had previously taken a year now took roughly six months. Nowadays, a car trip from where I live in Southern California to Texas, a trip that roughly covers the distance of half of the continental US, takes around 22 hours- less than a day if you were to drive it all at once… which is not recommended, of course. And a flight is even less than that from here in SoCal to Texas, at about three and a half hours.
Now, the world hasn’t shrunk in size physically, but it sure seems to have done so. The process of sharing information has become a practically instantaneous process because with the click of a button, an email can be sent to anywhere in the world with Internet. Whereas in the past, this process could have taken months and even up to a full year. This is even seen in space exploration. The moon had always been this far-off wonder, a place reached in dreams, but now, there’s a flag on the moon and evidence of people walking on its surface.
And maybe I’m the only one who thinks of “it’s a small world” in a tangible sense of innovation, but it just proves to show that we are but a small dot in this universe. Our planet is truly a “small world” compared to the vast unknown that is the rest of the unexplored universe. And maybe perhaps I’m just crazy and over-analyzing a Disney song, but I hope that you at least got some insight into my perspective on the size of our world.
