The end of WarGames

NoOneLikesUs · Jun 2, 2012

You know they made a sequel, right?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/

JakeandElwood · Jun 2, 2012

How about a nice game of chess?

Starman · Jun 2, 2012

NoOneLikesUs said:

You know they made a sequel, right?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/
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I read somewhere they also plan a reboot -- the original story reset in present day.

Bubbler · Jun 2, 2012

Starman said:

NoOneLikesUs said:

You know they made a sequel, right?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/
Click to expand...

I read somewhere they also plan a reboot -- the original story reset in present day.
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Like I said earlier in thread, they'll turn the fear/paranoid factor to Defcon-1.

DanOregon · Jun 2, 2012

Mystery Meat II said:

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.
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How some of those war scenarios haven't become popular band names amazes me.

Tom Petty · Jun 2, 2012

BTExpress said:

It needed some Ally Sheedy nudity.
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I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would get her to show something.
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NSFW

http://barehollywood.blogspot.com/2008/11/famous-for.html?zx=1bf3b2e9bb244f29

Colton · Jun 3, 2012

Tom Petty said:

BTExpress said:

It needed some Ally Sheedy nudity.
Click to expand...

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

NSFW

http://barehollywood.blogspot.com/2008/11/famous-for.html?zx=1bf3b2e9bb244f29
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TP: You beat me to it! The "your new defense system sucks" and the "piss on a sparkplug" lines are my favorites from this one.

And Ally Sheedy? Yowza.

The Big Ragu · Jun 3, 2012

I don't have to take that, you pig-eyed sack of shit.

Colton · Jun 3, 2012

The Big Ragu said:

I don't have to take that, you pig-eyed sack of shit.
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I had forgotten that line! Just realized the actor who portrayed the general in that movie was Barry Corbin, whom I always thought was Ben Johnson, who was a great supporting actor for so many of John Wayne's films (not to mention grandfather of Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey in "Red Dawn"). Speaking of "Red Dawn," is the remake ever going to be released? I know they redid it, substituting North Korea for China as the protagonist as not to piss off China.

Steak Snabler · Dec 15, 2014

Barry Corbin was also the wheelchair-bound ex-deputy in "No Country For Old Men," the one uttered what is in my opinion the film's signature line:

"You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you."

Brian · Jun 3, 2012

Bubbler said:

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.
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That singular paranoia was kind of replaced with a multitude of fears in the early 2000s, real, imagined and overblown alike. We felt like we needed something to fear, so we found it in the warnings of Y2K, mailed anthrax, suitcase bombs, highway snipers, school shootings, color-coded terror threats, crop dusters of doom, global warming and illegal immigrants.

Don't worry. We'll find, invent or overstate something to keep our children in constant fear. It's become as American as apple pie.

This is why if society has to come to an end catastrophically, I hope it has nothing to do with anything we ever imagined. Something cosmic, just to remind us of our place in things.

Herbert Anchovy · Jun 3, 2012

rmanfredi said:

Was that nerdy guy the nerdy guy in EVERY movie made in the late 1970s through mid 1980s? How was he not in "Revenge of the Nerds"?!?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Deezen
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0214430/
http://www.eddiedeezen.com/

This guy took playing an alpha nerd to peak levels. He's even done nerd voice work.

The most gifted nerd actor of his times. That voice would be recognizable anywhere on Earth.

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The end of WarGames

NoOneLikesUs Active Member

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The end of WarGames

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