Ha! I remember that movie as a kid... scared the Sh*t out of me...... watched it recently on youtube.
I remember churches and schools having “discussion” groups about it.
Having people on the front lines and in holes all over the west, I knew better. Reagan did as well.
Bunch of drama queens.
I remember it, but even though I was young, I didn’t get any more uptight over it than reruns of Twilight Zone.
I have The Day After on DVD. It is pretty depressing.
Another one to watch for is Special Bulletin. I have that one also.
And there is Testament starring Jane Alexander and William Defoe.
These are all scary as chit!
Agit prop from one of the major networks, pure anti-Reagan propaganda. Do you really need a TV movie to know that nuclear war would be a bad thing?! Almost forty years later and the propaganda has only gotten worse. Recently we’ve had movies to tell us slavery was bad. Really?! We only fought a four year bloody civil war to get rid of it!
I remember that. What about the “The day after tomorrow” that came out 16 years ago, global warming will kill us all.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/
Also remember in 2006 Ass Gore said in ten years we will be past the point of no return. 10 years ago came and went 4 years ago.
They should make a movie called “4 years after” about what the country and world would be like after 4 years of Joe Biden.
I remember that ‘movie’..........It was done in a video tape style and fake ‘live’ broadcast like it was ‘news’.......
We, the general American public, were very easy to scare back then. It was still during the Cold War with the Soviets, where theoretically, a Nuke could be dropped AT ANY MOMENT.
So much is different today.
If a country as radically Muslim as Pakistan can hold on to it’s Nukes, then there is hope for peace via Mutual Assured Destruction. The Pakis surprised me. I was certain someone in that kicked hornet’s nest of a government would have attacked India by now.
A well-made film that simply furthered the no-nukes, anti-Reagan hysteria of the period.
We’ve seen ALL these movies before.
Doomies are always wrong.
But some of them get rich off their bullshit.
When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not harm thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.
Compared to “Threads”, “The Day After” was a comedy.
The Day After is the best of the nuclear holocaust trio, the other two are Threads and Testament.
Threads is a British take on nuclear war. It has one element that is interesting in the last 20 minutes or so, in which it jumps about a hundred years into the future and shows a devolved humanity living a bleak, starved existence.
Testament as I recall, doesn’t have any immediate devastation, as it shows a small town gradually get radiation/fallout sickness and die off. It’s all around a rather cheap production.
If you want to be terrified, I recommend The Atomic Bomb Movie.
I vaguely remember the special effect of people’s skeletons lighting up in the Flash, and it reminded me of Wile E. Coyote...and I did the UNTHINKABLE.
I LAUGHED.
Then there was the early 60s classic “Fail-Safe” which I stumbled into one night in the wee hours on WGN. It has a happy ending - New York City gets nuked.
But the amazing thing to me was watching top comic actors like Walter Matthau, Dom DeLouise and Larry Hagman - before they were famous - playing serious supporting roles. They were not playing for laughs.
If you’ve never heard of Fail-Safe, it is probably because it came out at roughly the same time as “Dr. Strangelove” which took much of the same premise only made it a true comedy with Peter Sellers, Slim Pickens and George C. Scott. The comedy drew far larger crowds and forced the well-made “Fail-Safe” into rapid obscurity.
“Nicholas Meyer’s made-for-television film The Day After”
Shocking that Mr. Meyer would make such a subversive piece of propaganda. That really made him unique among the Hollywood people.
When the Wind Blows was pretty damn depressing, too b
There are a fair number of lunatics who promote the idea of winnable nuclear war. Reagan was surrounded with them. It’s fantasy coming from armchair warriors. A major nuclear exchange is likely to simply wipe out everything more advanced than a bacteria. And most of them.
The key thing that I learned from “The Day After” was that in the event of a nuclear attack, bad acting will break out everywhere.
I always wanted to go around the neighborhood letting off old-fashioned photographic flashbulbs outside people’s windows during the movie...