Tonight at 8, the TV Land channel is showing the 1983 movie The Day After. Does anyone remember the movie? It was a somewhat cheesy account of the Cold War-turned-WW III. The Soviets may have “started” (by launching a nuclear missile). Can’t remember.
It was freaky. As people near ground zero were incinerated, for a split second they turned into skeletons. Those unfortunate enough to still be alive walked around in constantly falling ash, with radiation poisoning, no hair, and running sores on their faces. Gross.
Then there was the inevitable chaos and disorder. It was Thunderdome! Well, maybe not that bad. What made The Day After all the more eerie was the lack of commercials after the attack. A commercial-free second half. I was paranoid for weeks afterward. I think I’ll watch it again. 
By the way, the post title comes from a line in another cheesy movie (which was a sequel to really good one). Can you name the movie?
Sources: Museum of Broadcast Communications and Wikipedia.
Unrelated Update: If you e-mailed me in the past week and I haven’t responded, I’m sorry. 
I implemented a new e-mail policy several months ago. I don’t have time to answer every e-mail, but I try to answer most.
Update II (7/1): Commenters reminded me of Red Dawn, a classic. I was a mere teen in 1984, so I could relate to the teen characters defending their country from Communists. I didn’t like Reagan at the time, but I didn’t like the idea of foreign invaders, either.
Side note: Some of you may have noticed my present position in the Ecosystem. I thought there was something strange about it, so I did some detective work. Under the Top Posts category I noticed my RSS feeds are being counted as links, so the #4 rank is false. I’ve already e-mailed the Bear about it and asked him to fix the bug. I want to acquire links the old-fashioned way: by earning them. Thanks for linking and reading.
Update III (7/2): I’m supposed to be on vacation. Just wanted to say that N.Z. Bear fixed the problem at TTLB, and my true rank is #14. Now I’m on vacation.
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Ugh, and what a horrible sequel it was … http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084021/
Only four mintues after I posted! I can’t believe it…
What’s up, Robbie? Haven’t heard from you in awhile.
I was in 7th grade I think when that movie came out…
Scared the heck out of me.
Another Cold War flick that came out around that time was
Red Dawn (about a Soviet/Cuban invasion of the US)…
I remember that all my friends and I in middle school just assumed that a major world war was inevitable…
it wasn’t IF, but WHEN. No one at the time knew how weak
the Soviet Union was internally… plus all the uncertainty with
that series of 3 Soviet leaders all within a couple of years…
I seem to remember that the villians looked like lizards when they took off their human skin –wait, wrong cheesy 80s TV movie: http://imdb.com/title/tt0085106/. (But just as plausible as The Day After.)
I was about 10 years old when I saw this, scared the living daylights out of me, I actually thought it was a real account, not realizing that if it were I would probably be dead.
If you recall, this movie took place in my home town (Kansas City). I was in high school at the time and it freaked us all out.
Of course, the miniseries “V” was a classic. Every time I see a small white rat I think of that!
There were several anti-nuke (read leftist) movies during the fifties & sixties.
Most impressive among them were On The Beach based on the book of the same name by Neville Shute. It starred Gregory Peck. A leter one was The Bedford Incident about how it could all begin accidentally starring Richard Widmark, Sydney Poitier, Martin Balsam, and Wally Cox (Mr. Peepers). There was, as one might expect, a humorous version of the end of the world called Dr. Strangelove starring the very funny and indefatigable Peter Sellers who played three different characters. One of the better, more realistic ones, was Testament from 1983 starring Jane Alexander, William Devane, Kevin Costner, and Lucas Haas.
If you haven’t seen these, they are worth renting.
I always liked Apocalypse Alley
The Day After scared the daylights out of me too. The fact that there was a Titan II missle practically in our backyard didn’t help. It was 3 miles away, but my parents had ingrained “20-mile radius” by then so 3 miles was essentially ground zero. This was about the time (I was also in 7th grade) that I realized the full scale of having 3 Titan II bases in our county, and their relative positions. I revealed my “revelation” to my mom: “So if the Soviets have all thier missles pointed at ours, and we had nuclear war, Conway County would be completely destroyed.” Mom: “Yes, they (the missle bases) were strategically placed.”
Anyone remember the Titan II that blew up at Damascus, AR base in 1980? Just across the county line, and we live just barely outside the 20-mile radius from that one.
I was seven when this movie aired. For some reason my parents never thought maybe I shouldn’t watch. They didn’t even watch it. It really scared me. “V” was much better. I never saw the original “On the Beach” but I watched the remake a couple of years ago and it was yet another truly depressing movie. If people insist on making movies like that, they really should offer some free Zoloft for viewers. It sure would have helped me.
That movie FREAKED me completely out when I first saw it! I was scared silly as a little boy.
Especially the missiles launching in broad daylight from the wheat and cornfields surrounding the Little League games as enemy missiles closed in. And then……..THE IMPACTS!!!! No joke. Reality TV for your behind.
Surreal but possibly oh so real.
Scarier than The Omen and the Exorcist to me.
I liked it! I love sci-fi and that’s all it was to me. My fav “anti-nuke” movie is War Games. Except for the lib speech towards the end when the professor tries to convince the kids that Americans are evil war mongers and we’re all gonna die like the dinosaurs, it was a great flick.
Laurie
Jason Robards, right? I remember seeing the missiles flying out of their silos all across “flyover country”…
“this is Lawrence, Kansas, can anyone hear me? THis is Lawrence, Kansas”
It was an earlier instance of hollywood anticonservative propaganda.. if only we all would realize how horrible a nuke war would be, then we’d disarm and there wouldn’t be one, right? Except if we had disarmed the Soviets would have taken over, like in that other movie with Patrick Swayze called Red Dawn…
La Shawn:
I have not seen the new “War of the Worlds”, but I heard it has a communist theme (no surprise for Castro fan Spielberg) – GIVE UP.
Likewise, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) was about an alien who told the stupid Earthlings “Join us and stop your fighting and testing nuclear weapons and have world peace – or we will kill you all.” Again, a communist theme, at a time when Hollywood elites denied being Soviet sympathizers.
Apparently, not much has changed in Hollywood in 55 years.
I don’t know if I would say the Day the Earth Stood Still was communist, but it certainly was luddite and quite naieve.
An even better take on this theme is the English film, “Threads.”
It came out about the same time as “The day after.” It’s darker, and even more depressing but it feels……genuine.
It takes place in Scheffield, England and I’d recommend it.
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” was a really bad movie. I love “war Games” and the mini-series, “V”. I’m going to see “War of the World” because I like he original so much.
OK, La Shawn, since this is the sci-fi thread I thought I’d let you know I saw the new War of the Worlds last night.
Aside from Tom Cruise, I thought it was GREAT. I’m gonna have to see it again. It was pretty much non-stop action from beginning to end. Way too creepy, though. I posted a VERY mini review on my site. This one’s definitely not for the kids.
The best Sci-Fi movie ever: “Rollerbal” with James Caan
I didn’t realize the movie was on until I passed it flipping channels at 8:15. I watched the rest of it and it brought back some memories. I was only 13 in 1983 when it first aired, and it was very spooky viewing back then, the nuclear war threat seeming very real.
I was somewhat surprised to see TV Land cut out some of the scenes when the bombs exploded. My most vivid memory of the movie was the part when people were looking into the cloud and turing into skeletons for an instant before they disentigrated. Very impactful image! I found the piles of dead people in the streets more gorss than that.
Considering the movie had no budget and took some “artistic liberties,” it was a good movie. Glad I got to see it again.
Failsafe was a pretty good “accidental nuclear war” flick.
Dr. Strangelove was seen by some as a liberal film, but I didn’t think so. It seemed to me to be a pretty good satire on the insanity of starting a nuclear war. After all, the guy who pushed the button was a complete loon. Besides, it had some great lines in it, like President Muffley (sp?) yelling, “You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
The Day After and Red Dawn were both impactful movies! I’d buy both.
Wasn’t “Red Dawn” a movie about teenagers leading an insurgency against an overwhelming force occupying their homeland?
And another note, I just caught “Rambo III” in a re-run on cable the other night, where he goes to Afghanistan, rescues his friend from torture in a prison camp and fights alongside the Mujahadeen.
It’s amazing how this movie plays out in 2005.
–Cobra
Dragonlady:
Yeah, I remember the Titan II explosion. There was another made-for-TV movie about it, as I recall.
I was in junior high when “The Day After” first aired. My father was in SAC, so it wasn’t like I didn’t already know about nuclear war. I recall the scene when it showed B-52 crews scrambling for their aircraft: I was shouting “GO! GO!” because I knew they only had a few minutes to get airborne.
Let us thank God – and SAC and the Navy – that “The Day After” never actually happened.
Anybody remember the miniseries “World War III”? It was pretty good.
Cobra,
You do know the taliban did not emerge until 1994, and actually started in Pakistan, correct?
I saw “Threads” as a high school freshman. Two years later, my high school history teacher decided to enlighten us to what would happen if a nuclear missile detonated over the city of Boston. When i had to attend mass in High school I would think about if a nuclear blast did happen, we’d all be crushed to death because the roof would fall on us. I toured the A-Bomb museum in Hiroshima. As you can tell, whenever this topic comes up, and I get to searching about end of the world movies I get terrified.
SCSIwuzzy,
I never mentioned the Taliban, but you’re correct.
I never saw the original and i dont attend to see the new version its probibly too liberal and too left-wing for me
Agreed RedBeard – Remember George C. Scott, “But Mr. President, they’ll see the big board.” Busts me up every time. And then later the ‘commie’ ambassador secretly photographs the ‘big board’.
Oh, and then there was the ‘mineshaft gap’ because we had to construct underground mines where all the beautiful, alluring, sexy young women would be taken and, naturally the most ‘important and intelligent’ among us. That was Dr. Strangelove’s survival idea, let’s all go underground and party, party, party.
Cobra, you pointed out how much changed since Rambo. The Russians out, the taliban in, the mujahadeen either absorbed or killed… that’s alot of change.
I never could watch the Rambo movies. Watching a draft dodger play a vietnam hero always disgusted me.
No, you don’t need to have served to play a soldier, but if you run to Canada because you won’t fight in a war, you ought not to make millions of dollars off the men who did
Loved Red Dawn, didn’t care for the Day After, altho it did give me the heebie-jeebies. I was already in the USAF and quite aware of the artistic liberties in that film and War Games (good flick tho). Ah, to think what if blogging had been around in the 80s, we’d have lots of fun with pop culture — new wave music, big hair-do’s, brat pack & anti-nuke flicks.
I think that the movie The Day After is worth seeing, at least from a cultural and historical perspective. It was a movie that did a good job of reflecting the political paranoia of the early 1980s. Back then, it was widely believed by some (mostly in Hollywood and the MSM) that nuclear war was imminent, and that American military and political leaders couldn’t wait to “push the button” and incinerate us all. Anyone who took issue with that piece of conventional wisdom, who even hinted that the Soviet Union might actually be up to no good, was obviously as a nuclear warmonger and a Republican.
Today of course things are very different. We’re not afraid of nuclear winter anymore, but now we will all probably die soon from global warming. Or from seeing the 10 Commandments etched on a building. We live in a country where the DNC and the MSM are occupied with finding homophobes under every bed and gulags in every back yard. Now that’s progress!
For whatever reason, I never saw The Day After when it aired. However, shortly after it aired, a local affiliate ran a British miniseries called “Threads” that (I believe) The Day After was based on. Did anyone see that one? Extremely creepy.
Mwalimu, you’ve said it!
“Wasn’t “Red Dawn†a movie about teenagers leading an insurgency against an overwhelming force occupying their homeland?”
Yup! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087985/
docjim505, I do remember “World War III.” Rock Hudson and Brian Keith. And the poignant ending, right, where the people all over the Earth grow silent and look up as the bombers fly overhead? or is that a different movie?
One of the Clancy novels, can’t remember which, had the mujahadeen fighting the Soviets. Our people were arming them for their struggle.
I saw “Threads”. freshman in high school, and the Gulf War 1 had taken place the year before. It was creepy and we had to fill out a questionnarie about the movie. and Laura that book is “cardinal of the kremlin”.
I recall Ted Koppel saying immediately after “The Day After” that if you look outside, everything is as it was. The weird thing is, he nailed exactly how we all felt! I was 18 at the time and viewed it with my girlfriend. We were, in a word(s), scared crapless.
BTW, I didn’t see anyone comment about “Fail Safe.” Now THAT was a suspenseful, scary flick about an [accidental] nuclear strike.
Recently, George Clooney and other big stars did a live TV remake of it. Stick w/the original, however!
The first movie I ever saw with Michelle Pfeiffer was “Grease 2″
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084021/
I’ve been a fan of hers ever since.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure it was Goose who spoke the line, in a bomb shelter (g).
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