The end of WarGames

Whenever I'm on a conference call, I want to yell "Yeah, we're still here! We're still HERE!!!" in a youngish "country" accent.

Oh, and:

Kiss your Saturday afternoon goodbye.

 

I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would get her to show something.

 

The line that always kills me in that movie is when the tic-tac-toe game comes up and the soldier yells, "Put X in the center square!"

and of course:

"Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks."

 

Valid points, Bubs, but I pretty much gave up on realism when they were giving tours of Cheyenne Mountain days after a catastrophic security breach that left them at DEFCON 4 even with Broderick in custody1.

To say nothing of the theoretical nuclear strategies WOPR ran through. The Gabon Surprise? The Venezuelan Sudden? The Cambodian Heavy? THE CANADIAN THRUST? So help me God, if we experience nuclear armageddon due to a Canuck orgy ...

A few months ago while spending a sleepless night on YouTube, I had the misfortune of stumbling upon a bunch of fake Emergency Action Notifications (these are the Emergency Alert System messages the president sends when the world is minutes away from ending). A few hours of fake EAS alerts and movies later, I was convinced that Russia could still hit the button at any moment, reason and logic and upcoming World Cup be damned.

So I've been on a nuke kick the last few months, and damned if the 80's didn't pump out its fair share of uranium-enriched nightmare fuel. The Day After speaks for itself. Threads is like a British The Day After, only way scarier (though it did have a woman peeing herself and what appears to be ET ablaze in nuclear fire, so it had its lighthearted moments). Countdown to Looking Glass might be the most realistic in that Newt Gingrich has a cameo, and end-of-days scenarios that involve Newt are immediately credible. Plus it's mostly set in the news studio of a network that evolved into a 24-hour news channel by the end. When The Wind Blows is sadder because it's a British cartoon about a pair of loveable if somewhat daft coots who try to survive the aftermath of the global exchange. It also easily has the best music for a nuclear war movie (David Bowie did the theme song, and Genesis and Squeeze are on the soundtrack as well).

But the scariest of them all isn't even a movie. It's Protect and Survive, the British Civil Defense program for when shit's about to hit the fan. When the government is convinced that nuclear war is a likely outcome, they publish pamphlets on how to shelter in place during the attack, and the networks start showing a series of 20 public information films that tell you what to do when you hear the warning sirens, what you need in your shelter and how to deal with casualties.

And those films, holy shit. Where do you even begin? For starters, if you see them on your TV in 1983 England, you're already fucked. The animation is stark, the words in unyielding Helvetica, the narration clear and unemotional.

The advice they give you is often laughably ineffective. You are to build a fort in your safe room made of luggage and doors to keep the nuclear stuff out. If fallout comes, it will make a loud electronic noise and come down like emo confetti, so you'll know when to take cover. There's a chance the explosion might take off a bit of your roof, so do be aware of that. If you're caught out of doors during an attack, put newspaper over your head because radiation doesn't like to read. And when the warnings come, make sure to close the curtains, otherwise the nuclear bomb might see your naughty bits.

And just when you think you're well and truly freaked out, the film ends with a musical signature that I submit is the most horrible man-made noise ever. Yes, even worse than the one the Canadians are making during their world-endangering orgy.

All of this drama is available on YouTube, in case you have some weird Cold War nostalgia going. That'll wash it out in a real god damn hurry.

1 -- SPEAKING of computer-simulated nuclear war and 80s crapola, did you know that the first indirect reference to the Internet was on, of all things, an episode of BENSON? Seems one episode they were part of a national drill for nuclear attack preparedness based on a scenario disseminated on the predecessor to the Internet. Of course, this series also posited that Benson and Kraus could be the only people to survive a drive-by from Halley's Comet because apparently they were in the only comet-proof basement in the known world. Strangely, all the buildings survived and all the utilities were fully functional. However, all the people were gone. Perhaps the original script had this as the Rapture. Truth be told, it'd be a lot more believable if Benson and Kraus were the only people left behind to face the Antichrist. Robert Guillaume, of course, went to work on SportsNight, James Noble was a judge once on a Law and Order, and Missy Gold is presumably giving handy j's at the Flying J for Arby's2

2 -- which she only does for research, as she is apparently a psychologist in Maine.

 

Just to point something out, Broderick wasn't trying to hack into the DoD - he thought he was hacking into a private company's computer.

It's kind of like jumping over a fence - not knowing that The White House is on the other side.

 

Granted, but from the other side, I don't know that I'd want to be giving citizens the nickel tour of the facility that hosts the Button so soon after some punk ass fringe Brat Packer got them to believing the Reds were delivering thousands of nuclear bouquets.

Another logic flaw, thinking back to that opening scene: If a significant percentage of silo workers refuse to turn the key with a valid authentication and confirmation that it was not a drill, and it's implied that pulling a gun is part of the emergency protocol, then isn't it reasonable to assume they had to cart some dead bodies out of the missile fields? And what if the other guy pulls the trigger, then gets told "psych, it was just a test, we wanted to see if you had the cajones to do it"? Imagine explaining that to the COC. We wanted to see if our men could launch their missiles in a DEFCON 1 situation, and, well, we have 15 dead and 10 wounded, so can we install a fail-deadly system that isn't so wussy?

ALSO: There was a sequel released in 2008. Direct to DVD, as you'd imagine.

 

They came all the way from Birmingham. Can't cancel the visit; the press would have started asking questions.

 

You'd hope, even in furlough-ravaged 2012, that the press would have asked why the hell we were at DEFCON 4 with no obvious international triggers. Or just taken the tour, since they basically came clean to a tourist.

And the whole idea of using Starfleet Command as a tourist destination is peculiar as well. Do they market themselves as the Bombiest Place on Earth? Do they sell a glowing "I Survived Simulated Global Thermonclear War And All I Got Was This Irradiated T-Shirt"?

I could imagine the conversation that morning:

Sir, we have that group from Birmingham coming in today.
Hell's bells, someone take Birmingham off the strike list for now.

 

The line that kills me is when Joshua is searching for the codes and the officers can't stop it, Jennifer tells David, "I told you not to start playing games with that thing."

First of all, this is NOT the time for an "I told you so!"

Second, you told him no such thing. You told him not to change your grade. And you mentioned that he could get into trouble by getting around paying long distance for the numbers his computer was dialing.

But at no time did you tell him to stop playing games with the WOPR. You even suggested Vegas as the first target and were cackling right along as the game was progressing.

 

Yes!

I think they wrote her as an idiot.

"He wasn't that old."

"He was pretty old. He was 41."

"Was he? Oh, that's old."

 

Of course she was an idiot. She got a D!

 

The movie is quaint in its way. Really, it treats a nuclear holocaust in such an off-handed, non-panicky way. I mean, yes, there's legitimate concern that we're going to blow ourselves up, but there's never an overt sense of panic, etc.

Make WarGames today and I guarantee the threat matrix, or panic matrix, or whatever, would be dialed up to 1,000.

Broderick's character is also oddly un-self-aware too. He cares more than he isn't going to learn how to swim instead of, you know, killing himself with guilt that he's about to blow up everyone in the world so he could play an enhanced version of Missile Command.

I wonder how hard it is for people who are younger to understand how fearful people my age (40) and older were when they were kids of a nuclear holocaust? It hung over us, it was dreaded. I thought about a LOT around the time WarGames was out.

In the back of my mind, I still fear it, much more so than I do any terrorist attack, etc.