Johnny Carson Welcomes You to Beautiful Downtown Burbank.

Description

This large and exuberant pictorial map of Burbank, California, drawn by Jack Paul Miller and published by the Greater Burbank Visitors Guide in 1981, is a cheerful document of American promotional cartography. It depicts a city that had been famous for decades as the butt of a joke — Beautiful Downtown Burbank, the phrase coined on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and adopted with relish by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show as a running gag about the particular unglamour of the San Fernando Valley suburb where NBC had moved his show in 1972.

By 1981 the joke had become something else: a brand, a civic identity, a genuine source of pride. Carson’s photograph smiles from the upper left corner of the map, his facsimile signature floating above the city in cursive: Johnny Carson welcomes you to Beautiful Downtown Burbank. The city accepted the compliment.

The Map in Detail

Miller’s bird’s-eye pictorial style fills the sheet with a compressed and affectionate rendering of Burbank’s commercial and entertainment geography circa 1981. The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport is placed at the upper center, its runways busy with PSA jets and what appears to be a substantial air traffic problem. NBC occupies a prominent position near the center of the composition, its logo large and unmistakable, with NBC Tours signage inviting the public in. To the right, Disney Studios announces itself with a miniature Mickey Mouse; nearby, the Burbank Studios — the Warner Bros. facility then known by that name — and Col-Gems/Warner Records complete the entertainment cluster. Universal Studios Tour anchors the lower left, with the Sheraton Universal and Toluca Lake nearby. Forest Lawn’s Hall of Liberty sits at the lower center, serene amid the commercial chaos. Lockheed, the aerospace giant that had been a Burbank institution since the 1930s, appears in the upper center, its presence a reminder that before The Tonight Show moved here, Burbank was better known for building aircraft than for making television.

The surrounding streets are packed with the full supporting cast of American suburban commercial life: the Holiday Inn, the Burbank Mall, the Valley Mall, the Smoke House restaurant, Victoria Station, the Irish Pub, a Pizza Time Theatre, Mini Golf, a Water Slide, car dealerships (Buick, Dodge, Burbank Toyota), Wells Fargo, Budget, and an Amtrak station. Highway 5 and Route 134 cut through the composition. Six Flags Magic Mountain appears on the distant hills to the upper left, and a cartoon sun beams above the mountains at upper right. The whole is rendered in the bright, comic-strip palette that Miller brought to his city maps, with buildings slightly inflated in self-importance and the sky an optimistic California blue.

Historical Context

Carson moved The Tonight Show from New York to NBC’s Burbank studios in May 1972, and the phrase Beautiful Downtown Burbank — which Laugh-In’s announcer Gary Owens had delivered with mock grandeur for years before that — became Carson’s signature geographical gag, deployed almost nightly for two decades. It worked because Burbank was, by the standards of glamorous Southern California, conspicuously unglamorous: an industrial and commercial suburb whose principal employers were an aerospace company (Lockheed), a government broadcaster (NBC), a handful of film studios, and the usual sprawl of malls and car dealerships. Carson’s joke made this unremarkableness famous, and the city eventually had the wit to embrace it. By 1981, when this map was produced, Beautiful Downtown Burbank had completed its journey from insult to ironic civic motto, and the Greater Burbank Visitors Guide commissioned both a map and Carson’s endorsement to make it official. Carson’s production company cooperated, providing the photograph and facsimile signature with explicit permission noted in the fine print at the lower left: Photo and signature courtesy of Carson Productions for use by Greater Burbank Visitors Guide.

Publication History and Census

Jack Paul Miller (illustrator), © 1981. Produced by Greater Burbank Visitors Guide, P.O. Box 4401, Burbank, CA 91503. Color separations by RECO; printed by JTL Printing, Inc. Published as a promotional poster/pictorial map for the city of Burbank. Pictorial tourist maps of this type were typically produced in large press runs for free distribution and survive poorly; fine examples in this condition are uncommon.