The Day After: 35 years later
- Thread starter WarpFactorZ
- Start date
If you didn't think there was a real possibility of nuclear war, you definitely weren't paying attention. Since you were a teen, I suppose that was a given. But then again, I was a teen, as were as all my friends, and we were scared shitless.
Note that the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (a barometer of world threat issues) went from 7 to 3 minutes to midnight between 1980 and 1984:
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/past-statements/
That's the lowest it had been since 1953, after the Soviets developed the H-bomb. Global thermonuclear war (to quote Wargames) was most certainly a real danger at the time.
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It's a brilliant music video, but one that I think you've completely misinterpreted. If you read the lyrics, the Cold War mentality is very much a core element as something that we need to grow beyond as we come of age, but that's anything but a statement that fear of nuclear war even in the 1980s was unfounded hysteria.
Who remembers the NBC production World War III?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III_(miniseries)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III_(miniseries)
Yes, I do remember World War III. The title didn't ring a bell though. But after I clicked on the link and read what it was about and who starred in it, it brought back memories.
The show was set in Alaska. I recall the scene where the US national guardsmen took up positions inside oil pipes as they prepared to defend against the Soviet assault. It was a prelude to all out nuclear war.
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The scene that I most remember from The Day After was the Jason Robards character ducking under the dashboard of his car as mushroom clouds appeared in the distance.
I have better memories of the movie Damnation Alley. That movie was about a band of nuclear holocaust survivors travelling across the ravaged country in their armored vehicle in hopes of finding other survivors.
I only saw The Day After as a re-run as an adult, maybe a decade ago. I did find it haunting, though. It's one of those movies that you appreciate having seen, but that you never want to go through watching it again.
The one my mom showed my brothers and me when we were kids, though, was the British animated film "When the Wind Blows". That was pretty frightening as well. Especially for a kid. This might have been one, if not the, first movie I've seen without a Happy End, and the ending is that all life on Earth is over.
The one my mom showed my brothers and me when we were kids, though, was the British animated film "When the Wind Blows". That was pretty frightening as well. Especially for a kid. This might have been one, if not the, first movie I've seen without a Happy End, and the ending is that all life on Earth is over.
Threads was rerelased remastered on DVD earlier this year*, and on the commentary the creators talk about The Day After quite a lot. That they respected it and what it was trying to say, but basically it was TDA that really that made them want to do Threads; a far more realistic version.
They cite the hospital scenes from both films as examples. Where in TDA it's as if a minor earthquake has occured, everyone is basically just getting on with and doing their jobs, just a bit stressed. Whereas the hospital scene in Threads.... yeah, not so much. Not so pleasant.
Not that I don't like TDA though, very haunting. Especially the scene when during the baseball game they see the rockets being launched. "They're on their way to Russia..."
I would say though the ending is odd, as a few of the characters you follow throughout the film just disappear or the plots go nowhere and it's like "Oh hang on, what happened to them." I had to rewind it last time I watched it as I thought I must have missed something.
*Annoyingly the new DVD came out in April so I bought it, but now I see the Blu ray is out next month. Grrr, why couldn't they just release them at the same time
They cite the hospital scenes from both films as examples. Where in TDA it's as if a minor earthquake has occured, everyone is basically just getting on with and doing their jobs, just a bit stressed. Whereas the hospital scene in Threads.... yeah, not so much. Not so pleasant.
Not that I don't like TDA though, very haunting. Especially the scene when during the baseball game they see the rockets being launched. "They're on their way to Russia..."
I would say though the ending is odd, as a few of the characters you follow throughout the film just disappear or the plots go nowhere and it's like "Oh hang on, what happened to them." I had to rewind it last time I watched it as I thought I must have missed something.
*Annoyingly the new DVD came out in April so I bought it, but now I see the Blu ray is out next month. Grrr, why couldn't they just release them at the same time
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The Day After was originally planned as a 4-hour miniseries to be aired over two nights. They eventually pared it down to 2 hours, so it could be shown in its entirety in one night. That most likely explains the dangling plot-lines.
I recently discovered there's a 3-hour workprint online, that has an hour of cut footage:
The attack scene is much more graphic that what was actually aired. It shows people being lit on fire, as well as a woman trying to calm the little girl who was trampled in the fallout shelter just prior to the strike.
Didn’t see it at the time (not being conceived yet does that,) but I picked this up whilst still in high school and on a ‘nuclear war’ movie bender.
(Don’t ask)
Compared to the aforementioned Threads, Testament, On The Beach, etc, it’s probably the worst. But the stuff I hold against it, is probably what made it so accessible to others. Which ultimately ended up a good thing.
So here’s to the Americans making unbearably horrific things marketable to its prime time audience!
(Don’t ask)
Compared to the aforementioned Threads, Testament, On The Beach, etc, it’s probably the worst. But the stuff I hold against it, is probably what made it so accessible to others. Which ultimately ended up a good thing.
So here’s to the Americans making unbearably horrific things marketable to its prime time audience!
I was 21 and serving on a nuclear submarine when this originally aired. It may not have been the best movie made on the topic, but it definitely captured the public's imagination. And it certainly seemed plausible to me and my shipmates at the time. If I remember correctly, there was even a Carl Sagan-hosted special later that evening on the topic of nuclear winter. A very sobering time that seems to have faded considerably in the public memory.
I was a sophomore in high school when TDA aired; watched it at home with the family and thought it was pretty grim, but I grew up in a military family and I have to say it just didn't affect me as much as it did some people. What I remember was talking about it the next day in almost every class at school. One girl in my Spanish class had seen it and was so freaked out that she started crying and ranting about how Jesus was going to come again and the 'Rapture' would occur, and all the good Christians (meaning her) would go to heaven before something that horrible ever actually happened. I have no comment on her religious beliefs either now or then, but I remember distinctly feeling sorry for her, that the movie had so obviously completely wigged her out.
I saw Testament when I was a teenager too, and also thought it was pretty dark, but not as engaging as TDA. Ironically, as some others have said, my perspective on both movies changed as an adult after I had kids of my own. Having rewatched both in the past decade, TDA seemed a little more cheesy and preachy, and Testament disturbed me deeply and left me damn near in tears. The scene where she dips her dying kid's little hiney in that sink of water and it just runs red with blood- that does me in every freaking time.
I saw Testament when I was a teenager too, and also thought it was pretty dark, but not as engaging as TDA. Ironically, as some others have said, my perspective on both movies changed as an adult after I had kids of my own. Having rewatched both in the past decade, TDA seemed a little more cheesy and preachy, and Testament disturbed me deeply and left me damn near in tears. The scene where she dips her dying kid's little hiney in that sink of water and it just runs red with blood- that does me in every freaking time.
As someone who was 20 when this aired - sorry, but if you were a teenager, then you weren't paying close attention to the news of the time.
Hell, Ronald Reagan was ratcheting his rhetoric up to 11 with his whole 'Evil Empire" litany, and with a war going on in Afghanistan that the U.S.S.R. was invading (it was oft referred to as 'Russia's Vietnam'); as well as the Solidarity situation in Poland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade_union)
There was also the Korean Airlines Flight 007 sotuatiomn where the U.S.S.R. shot down a civilian jetliner that had mistakenly veered into and then out of Soviet airspace; but the downing happened in International territory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#Post-attack_flight
If you didn't think that Nuclear War between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. was more than a remote possibility; you were blissfully ignorant.
In fact, you may want to read up on what happened with the NATO exercise Able Archer that also occurred in 1983:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
I didn't care much for Ronald Reagan's policies; but I will give the man this:
Once he realized just what his 'Evil Empire' rhetoric was doing for the international political situation; he dialed it back.
At 1:16:58 There was one of the few non-test effects--a wall of fire:
The video at 1:17:59--I think that was High Flyer going up during the Texas City disaster--perhaps also in WHITE HEAT, IIRC
I think the Grandcamp explosion may have been mistaken for Pearl Harbor footage
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Interesting retrospective article about the film from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
https://thebulletin.org/facing-nuclear-reality-35-years-after-the-day-after/
https://thebulletin.org/facing-nuclear-reality-35-years-after-the-day-after/
I clearly remember the shooting down of the KAL flight, some scary stuff at the time (I was 12). I just watched this documentary the other day on the incident and Able Archer.
Tell me about it. I spent two years (1981-83) stationed in West Germany waiting for the Soviets to come streaming through Fulda Gap.
Able Archer '83 was worse than Cuban Missile Crisis. None of those Cuban missiles were yet operational. The Kometas, the FROGs aimed at GITMO and the atomic tipped torpedoes on the other hand--would have made for a tactical nuclear hell. The only ICBM the Russians had were the early R-7s, and maybe one or two would have worked before any (potential) air strikes. It "took almost twenty hours to prepare for launching:"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-7_Semyorka
That was the whole point of moving smaller, cheaper missiles to Cuba to start with. Sadly, by going cheap, the Crisis spelled the end to Khrushchev's reign (his son, by the way, worked with the creator of the UR-500 Proton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Khrushchev )
With the reach of R-7 Nikita hoped to not have to compete with the US deep water navy for deep water navy--or bomber for bomber. In the USA, the two big technocrats were LeMay and Rickover--in the USSR, it was Korolev and Glushko. After Nikita was removed, space lost influence and after the deaths of the Soviet Chief Designers like Korolev and Glushko, Russian space has been on the down-hill slide.
It took time for the USSR to achieve deep parity and perfect crater lethal ICBMs and field UR-100s (The Red Minuteman) and UR-36 (Red Titans) in any numbers. Only then were the events from THE DAY AFTER possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile#Land-based_ICBMs
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, most of the Soviet Unions nuclear arsenal was in the form of free-fall bombs carried by turbo-prop Bear bombers
The worst time for a nuclear exchange would have been before any of the SALT or START talks, when nuclear weapons were at their largest and most numerous..
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