Ah, yes. The Day After. The 1983 made for TV film that director Nicholas Meyer fully admitted was an attempt to sway public opinion into getting Reagan out of office.
He did make some great Star Trek films though.
The BBC 1980s “Reagan and Thatcher are going to kill us all” made for TV movie “Threads” horrified me as a kid. It ran on PBS in the US. To this day the “Protect and Survive” ‘jingle’ still freaks me out :-).
Ironically, stuff like these films swayed me towards conservatism despite coming from a family of union members. Between reading all of the junk in my dad’s “Steellabor” propaganda magazines and realizing that films like “The Day After” were nothing more than garbage to terrify the public for no logical reasons as I hit my late teens, I started to put two and two together and realized that these people were nothing more than fearmongers capitalizing on the public for political power.
I voted for Bill Clinton when I was 18 in 1992 even though I had bad feeling about him (I disliked Perot and really couldn’t stand Bush) ... that was the LAST time I ever voted Democrat in my life unless you want to count a vote for Arlen Spector ;-).
When the political discussion shifted to gays in the military 2 or 3 months after Clinton was elected, I knew I was a moron voting for the party my family had since the Great Depression.
You had the former USSR in a total state of transition. The USA had prime opportunity to heal decades of mistrust and eliminate Communist influence, but the executive branch and liberal morons benefiting from Reagan’s peace dividend decided to make a big deal about homosexuals in the military. I’m sure we’ll be paying for that ignorance over the next couple of decades. All Clinton did to work with Russia at that time was hang out for photo-ops with a drunk Boris Yeltsin and allowed them to recharge and regroup.
That whole “ozone hole” thing around that time had me scratching my head as it was wreaking havoc on a friend’s business when the mandates for refrigerant shifted away from freon. All of that nonsense about chlorofluorocarbons kicked into high gear around that time. All of that “scary, we are going to die” crap reminded me of “The Day After” :-).
“Climate change”, a computer simulation that shows we are going to kill everything, reeks of “The Day After” meets “Wargames”. It takes hundreds of engineers to develop rather complex software to simulate magnetic fields and electric circuits and other branches of physics that have far fewer variables than the overall climate of a planet. Those tools are not perfect, yet I’m supposed to believe teams of scientists are Godlike programmers and make perfect models of our climate system ... perfect enough to deem us all dead unless we go back to the stone age.
I’m sure I’ll vote for Democrats when I’m dead and gone, but so long as I breathe, I will never pull a lever for those fearmongering, dishonest morons. The GOPe seems to have adopted their tactics to keep their pockets lined, but they’re rank amateurs compared to the scummy 1960s Marxist remnants that are in power right now.
Sorry for the ramble ... that film brings back memories of a transitional time for myself :-). Needless to say, the director’s intent had the exact opposite effect on me, and I thank him for that! :-)
I never voted Democrat, although I also recognized the manipulation of society through fearmongering campaigns. I was seeing some of it in school in the Sixties. I remember ‘the population bomb’, where we were all going to be standing nude, packed shoulder to shoulder from coast to coast by 1980.
1980 was the first election I was eligible to vote in. I didn’t vote. I wanted to. In California, the General Election ballot has dozens of offices and lots of ballot propositions on it. I was an eighteen year old kid. I read my ballot and realized that I HAD NO IDEA who almost any of these people were or what a sane, responsible position would be on the issues. I also didn’t know that you didn’t HAVE to vote on every candidate or issue. I saw my vote as a solemn responsibility and a great power, as if I were deciding the whole thing. I couldn’t in good conscience walk into the booth and guess my way through it, why I might pick a *disaster* of a Vice-Deputy Assessor for Congressional District 8!
I was very pro-Reagan. I was glad when he won.
“Threads” made “The Day After” look like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Horrifyingly real.
I was in high school at the time and too remember all of that.I thought that the missile shot scenes in “The Day After” were really cool, but the rest of it was nothing more than a big bash on Reagan and Thatcher. “Threads” was even more obnoxious.
And the “Ozone Hole” hysteria (people seem to have forgotten that) was just as big a scam as “Climate Chnage” today.