It gives you a vision of a place you want to be, and all the conflict underneath, even serious conflict, but without mean spiritedness. Such a hard line to tread. It's one of the incredibly rare good movies or even competent scripts without a true antagonist.
Watching it in the 1980s, the scene that blew my mind was the Russians arriving. It beautifully skewed every xenophobic thing that Hollywood was pushing at the time: Firefox, Red Dawn, Rambo, etc.
If you haven't seen The Coca-Cola Kid, I would highly recommend it as a film with similar mood and theme, although a little less subtle in its theme of progress in the face of (seemingly) blissful tradition.