The end of WarGames

Stitch · Jun 6, 2012

Does anyone remember Amerika?

Bubbler · Jun 6, 2012

TheHacker said:

Bubbler said:

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.
Click to expand...

I know how you feel. I'm that age and I felt that way too. Until The Day After aired. I remember it was on ABC, and right after it ended the network went into a special edition of Nightline, where there was a panel discussion about nuclear war. One of the people on the panel was Carl Sagan. The first thing Ted Koppel asked him was whether the film accurately depicted the aftermath of a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. If you've seen the film, you know it was pretty awful ... people dying of radiation burns, thousands showing up at the only hospital they could get to, overwhelming the staff, virtually every building destroyed, farmers talking about scraping the top layer of soil off the ground and hoping something would grow in the soil underneath. It was awful.

Sagan -- in that monotone yet emphatic way of speaking that he had -- bluntly said, "No, actually, it would be much worse that what we saw in the film."

As an overly optimistic elementary school kid, I listened to that -- and I knew who Carl Sagan was, because I had watched Cosmos -- and somehow I decided that I didn't need to be afraid of a nuclear holocaust. Somehow I decided that if our leaders and the Soviet leaders knew how awful it would be, they wouldn't let it happen. But Bubbler is correct. The threat of nuclear war was something constant that loomed over you as a child in the 1980s.
Click to expand...

I remember that after-show, or I remember that aftermath of it, and I remember Sagan's comments were newsworthy.

What we didn't know was that our fears were very real and very justified. As mentioned earlier here, the Soviets came within a whisker of accidentally launching nukes in 1983. When I saw a documentary on that nearly 25 years later, it sent a chill up my spine. We really were THAT close.

The Day After was a REALLY BIG DEAL when it aired. One of the last great moments of network television before cable really took hold.

Armchair_QB · Jun 6, 2012

Bubbler said:

TheHacker said:

Bubbler said:

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.
Click to expand...

I know how you feel. I'm that age and I felt that way too. Until The Day After aired. I remember it was on ABC, and right after it ended the network went into a special edition of Nightline, where there was a panel discussion about nuclear war. One of the people on the panel was Carl Sagan. The first thing Ted Koppel asked him was whether the film accurately depicted the aftermath of a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. If you've seen the film, you know it was pretty awful ... people dying of radiation burns, thousands showing up at the only hospital they could get to, overwhelming the staff, virtually every building destroyed, farmers talking about scraping the top layer of soil off the ground and hoping something would grow in the soil underneath. It was awful.

Sagan -- in that monotone yet emphatic way of speaking that he had -- bluntly said, "No, actually, it would be much worse that what we saw in the film."

As an overly optimistic elementary school kid, I listened to that -- and I knew who Carl Sagan was, because I had watched Cosmos -- and somehow I decided that I didn't need to be afraid of a nuclear holocaust. Somehow I decided that if our leaders and the Soviet leaders knew how awful it would be, they wouldn't let it happen. But Bubbler is correct. The threat of nuclear war was something constant that loomed over you as a child in the 1980s.
Click to expand...

I remember that after-show, or I remember that aftermath of it, and I remember Sagan's comments were newsworthy.

What we didn't know was that our fears were very real and very justified. As mentioned earlier here, the Soviets came within a whisker of accidentally launching nukes in 1983. When I saw a documentary on that nearly 25 years later, it sent a chill up my spine. We really were THAT close.

The Day After was a REALLY BIG DEAL when it aired. One of the last great moments of network television before cable really took hold.
Click to expand...

"This is Lawrence, Kansas. Is there anybody out there? Anybody at all?"

As a high schooler it creeped me out too.

TowelWaver · Jun 7, 2012

As it happens, Barry Corbin's character of General Beringer was based on a real person, General Hartinger who was commander of NORAD at the time. My dad was in the Air Force and worked for him prior to that, when he was commander of Bergstrom AFB in Austin. From all the stories I've heard, the real general was every bit as much of a character as portrayed in the movie, and then some.

Dyno · Jun 7, 2012

On the first school day after "The Day After" aired, my friend Susan and I overheard another classmate, Holly, tell her friend that she was now extra scared of a nuclear war and that she didn't want to die a virgin (I think we were in 9th grade.). So now, nuclear war and the loss of one's virginity are connected in my head.

Mystery Meat II · Jun 7, 2012

Dyno said:

On the first school day after "The Day After" aired, my friend Susan and I overheard another classmate, Holly, tell her friend that she was now extra scared of a nuclear war and that she didn't want to die a virgin (I think we were in 9th grade.). So now, nuclear war and the loss of one's virginity are connected in my head.
Click to expand...

Did anyone tell her about the ICBM in their pants and what she has to do to prevent it from exploding all over the place?

DanOregon · Jun 7, 2012

Armchair_QB said:

Bubbler said:

TheHacker said:

Bubbler said:

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.
Click to expand...

I know how you feel. I'm that age and I felt that way too. Until The Day After aired. I remember it was on ABC, and right after it ended the network went into a special edition of Nightline, where there was a panel discussion about nuclear war. One of the people on the panel was Carl Sagan. The first thing Ted Koppel asked him was whether the film accurately depicted the aftermath of a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. If you've seen the film, you know it was pretty awful ... people dying of radiation burns, thousands showing up at the only hospital they could get to, overwhelming the staff, virtually every building destroyed, farmers talking about scraping the top layer of soil off the ground and hoping something would grow in the soil underneath. It was awful.

Sagan -- in that monotone yet emphatic way of speaking that he had -- bluntly said, "No, actually, it would be much worse that what we saw in the film."

As an overly optimistic elementary school kid, I listened to that -- and I knew who Carl Sagan was, because I had watched Cosmos -- and somehow I decided that I didn't need to be afraid of a nuclear holocaust. Somehow I decided that if our leaders and the Soviet leaders knew how awful it would be, they wouldn't let it happen. But Bubbler is correct. The threat of nuclear war was something constant that loomed over you as a child in the 1980s.
Click to expand...

I remember that after-show, or I remember that aftermath of it, and I remember Sagan's comments were newsworthy.

What we didn't know was that our fears were very real and very justified. As mentioned earlier here, the Soviets came within a whisker of accidentally launching nukes in 1983. When I saw a documentary on that nearly 25 years later, it sent a chill up my spine. We really were THAT close.

The Day After was a REALLY BIG DEAL when it aired. One of the last great moments of network television before cable really took hold.
Click to expand...

"This is Lawrence, Kansas. Is there anybody out there? Anybody at all?"

As a high schooler it creeped me out too.
Click to expand...

I remember the night it aired - Nov. 20, 1983, might have been one of the last huge nights in Broadcast history in that The Day After was airing on ABC (100 million viewers alone), NBC had a Kennedy mini-series starring Martin Sheen and I think CBS was premiering a feature movie for the first time on TV.
What freaked me out the most - considering all of the talk about the airing of the movie ahead of time - was our cable went out about 10 minutes in. I figured we were goners for sure.

Ace · Jun 7, 2012

I don't get the Jonesing for Ally Sheedy. She has a crooked tooth.

Batman · Jun 7, 2012

I was 7 when "The Day After" aired. My parents wouldn't let me watch it. They made me go to bed at 7 p.m., and it was still light outside.
Finally watched it about 30 years later when it was randomly aired on SyFy some Saturday night. It seemed pretty realistic in the depiction of the aftermath -- showing that not everyone would die in the immediate strike, like you're ingrained to think -- but I wasn't overly creeped out by it. Not sure what I would have thought as a 7-year-old who had already seen the original "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" movies.

Batman · Jun 7, 2012

Does anyone remember an HBO movie from the early 1990s called "By Dawn's Early Light"?
It was in the vein of "The Day After," in that it depicted the aftermath of the start of a nuclear war, but focused on a B-52 crew heading to Russia to drop bombs in a secondary strike and some drama on Air Force One after the Secretary of the Interior (as the last cabinet member alive and available) becomes president.
It wasn't a bad flick. Probably saw it 100 times when it was in heavy rotation after it first aired, and then not since about 1992.

pressmurphy · Jun 7, 2012

Batman said:

Does anyone remember an HBO movie from the early 1990s called "By Dawn's Early Light"?
It was in the vein of "The Day After," in that it depicted the aftermath of the start of a nuclear war, but focused on a B-52 crew heading to Russia to drop bombs in a secondary strike and some drama on Air Force One after the Secretary of the Interior (as the last cabinet member alive and available) becomes president.
It wasn't a bad flick. Probably saw it 100 times when it was in heavy rotation after it first aired, and then not since about 1992.
Click to expand...

I saw it maybe a week after seeing "Fail-Safe" for the first time. Not a bad twinbill.

Batman · Jun 7, 2012

pressmurphy said:

Batman said:

Does anyone remember an HBO movie from the early 1990s called "By Dawn's Early Light"?
It was in the vein of "The Day After," in that it depicted the aftermath of the start of a nuclear war, but focused on a B-52 crew heading to Russia to drop bombs in a secondary strike and some drama on Air Force One after the Secretary of the Interior (as the last cabinet member alive and available) becomes president.
It wasn't a bad flick. Probably saw it 100 times when it was in heavy rotation after it first aired, and then not since about 1992.
Click to expand...

I saw it maybe a week after seeing "Fail-Safe" for the first time. Not a bad twinbill.
Click to expand...

Ooh, good pull. The original "Fail-Safe" is one my all-time favorites. Incredible tension, all leading up to an inevitable ending.

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The end of WarGames

Stitch Active Member

Bubbler Well-Known Member

Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

TowelWaver Well-Known Member

Dyno Well-Known Member

Mystery Meat II Well-Known Member

DanOregon Well-Known Member

Ace Well-Known Member

Batman Well-Known Member

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pressmurphy Member

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The end of WarGames

Stitch Active Member

Bubbler Well-Known Member

Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

TowelWaver Well-Known Member

Dyno Well-Known Member

Mystery Meat II Well-Known Member

DanOregon Well-Known Member

Ace Well-Known Member

Batman Well-Known Member

Batman Well-Known Member

pressmurphy Member

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