Oh yes they were HUGE on that in 2016.. hell one of the Blu Ray companies put out The Day After on BR in 2018 just in time for the mid terms and they got Jobeth Williams to come on for an interview where she went all TDS and made a fool of herself about the BS nuke claims:
"This movie's even more relevant now because of the person we put in the white house. I'm so scared!" I never laughed my ass off so hard in my life watching that; what a out of touch loon.
That movie terrified me as a kid. I remember having nightmares about the Soviets for weeks afterward.
I watched it again as an adult and I have to say it didn't hold up at all. It's almost goofy how softly it treats the aftermath of a nuclear war, but I guess they had to do that in order to get the networks to show it at all.
I Disagree 100% on that.. it doesn't treat the aftermath soft at all. ABC did force some cliched 80's TV movie tropes in sure in the first hour before the nukes dropped but the movie still is damn freighting now. The scene where the farmer played by John Collum gets killed's one of the most random and effed up things I've seen in a movie; it doesn't show what happens but it's pretty much implied his wife and daughter have awful things happen to them after. The son's blinded for life and Guttenburg and the older daughter likely die before they make it home; ugh that's brutal as hell. Just one of the main storylines too.. the black solider falls apart before our eyes, all the doctors start to go crazy, and then Robards more or less wills himself to die out in the open along with that freaky birth scene at the end that just shows everyone depressed as hell.. yeah it's pretty dark despite what they held back.
The workprint version was on YT last year sadly copyrights took it down.. it's such an interesting watch. More or less the attack scene was the same but it shows people's deaths so much more brutally. Robards's daughter runs around on fire and you can hear her screaming really savagely; I was surprised at how dark that was for 80's era TV if they had allowed it. It also gave more characterization to everyone. Shame they made them trim it. It's honestly quite amazing to see the attack scenes in both cuts considering how much ABC cut their budgets in terms of what all they did. Quite impressive.
Williams's interview was god awful and super aloof, why they asked her I have no clue. She knew little about anything it was just a political hitpiece designed as a lame retrospective interview. But I really liked what Meyer had to say in his piece; he was classy as hell and well spoken. He went through a lot of hell making it.. more or less had a mental breakdown due to both the pressure from ABC and just how dire the subject was. The movie lost a good 75% of it's advertisers due to grandstanding then ABC tried to trim his time and budget down. He finally got pissed off and stood his ground and they left him alone. Glad he did; regardless of if it's universally popular or not it helped make the USSR nuke talks start. It's a shame he never had a bigger career he was a great hand with the camera.
I might have to see if I can find the workprint version and maybe give the movie another shot. It's possible I thought it didn't age well because since seeing this I've seen other harsher and "grittier" depictions of a hypothetical nuclear war. That, and the first time I saw it the possibility of an exchange with the Soviets was a real threat and the second time I saw it nuclear war was more of a bad memory we were trying to keep in the past.
By now the only parts I remember very clearly are the girl being upset she was losing her hair until the boy showed he was losing his, too, and the nuke sequences themselves. The one part I remember that I do still find haunting is the scene of some airmen or farmers watching the first salvo of missiles take off and they have a brief conversation about how if we're launching our missiles the Soviets must be about to launch theirs if they haven't already done so.
I don't remember a freaky birth scene, though. I'm not sure if maybe you're remembering the scene from Threads, or if the birth scene from that was messed up enough that it overwrote my memory of a similar scene in Day After. If you haven't seen Threads, think of it as the British version of The Day After. I've heard people say it's "scarier" and I do seem to remember it having a bleaker outlook, but it didn't scar me the way Day After did. Probably because I saw Day After during the cold war and saw Threads in the mid 2000s or 2010s.
Oh yes they were HUGE on that in 2016.. hell one of the Blu Ray companies put out The Day After on BR in 2018 just in time for the mid terms and they got Jobeth Williams to come on for an interview where she went all TDS and made a fool of herself about the BS nuke claims:
"This movie's even more relevant now because of the person we put in the white house. I'm so scared!" I never laughed my ass off so hard in my life watching that; what a out of touch loon.
That movie terrified me as a kid. I remember having nightmares about the Soviets for weeks afterward.
I watched it again as an adult and I have to say it didn't hold up at all. It's almost goofy how softly it treats the aftermath of a nuclear war, but I guess they had to do that in order to get the networks to show it at all.
I Disagree 100% on that.. it doesn't treat the aftermath soft at all. ABC did force some cliched 80's TV movie tropes in sure in the first hour before the nukes dropped but the movie still is damn freighting now. The scene where the farmer played by John Collum gets killed's one of the most random and effed up things I've seen in a movie; it doesn't show what happens but it's pretty much implied his wife and daughter have awful things happen to them after. The son's blinded for life and Guttenburg and the older daughter likely die before they make it home; ugh that's brutal as hell. Just one of the main storylines too.. the black solider falls apart before our eyes, all the doctors start to go crazy, and then Robards more or less wills himself to die out in the open along with that freaky birth scene at the end that just shows everyone depressed as hell.. yeah it's pretty dark despite what they held back.
The workprint version was on YT last year sadly copyrights took it down.. it's such an interesting watch. More or less the attack scene was the same but it shows people's deaths so much more brutally. Robards's daughter runs around on fire and you can hear her screaming really savagely; I was surprised at how dark that was for 80's era TV if they had allowed it. It also gave more characterization to everyone. Shame they made them trim it. It's honestly quite amazing to see the attack scenes in both cuts considering how much ABC cut their budgets in terms of what all they did. Quite impressive.
Williams's interview was god awful and super aloof, why they asked her I have no clue. She knew little about anything it was just a political hitpiece designed as a lame retrospective interview. But I really liked what Meyer had to say in his piece; he was classy as hell and well spoken. He went through a lot of hell making it.. more or less had a mental breakdown due to both the pressure from ABC and just how dire the subject was. The movie lost a good 75% of it's advertisers due to grandstanding then ABC tried to trim his time and budget down. He finally got pissed off and stood his ground and they left him alone. Glad he did; regardless of if it's universally popular or not it helped make the USSR nuke talks start. It's a shame he never had a bigger career he was a great hand with the camera.
I might have to see if I can find the workprint version and maybe give the movie another shot. It's possible I thought it didn't age well because since seeing this I've seen other harsher and "grittier" depictions of a hypothetical nuclear war. That, and the first time I saw it the possibility of an exchange with the Soviets was a real threat and the second time I saw it nuclear war was more of a bad memory we were trying to keep in the past.
By now the only parts I remember very clearly are the girl being upset she was losing her hair until the boy showed he was losing his, too, and the nuke sequences themselves. The one part I remember that I do still find haunting is the scene of some airmen or farmers watching the first salvo of missiles take off and they have a brief conversation about how if we're launching our missiles the Soviets must be about to launch theirs if they haven't already done so.
I don't remember a freaky birth scene, though. I'm not sure if maybe you're remembering the scene from Threads, or if the birth scene from that was messed up enough that it overwrote my memory of a similar scene in Day After. If you haven't seen Threads, think of it as the British version of The Day After. I've heard people say it's "scarier" and I do seem to remember it having a bleaker outlook, but it didn't scar me the way Day After did. Probably because I saw Day After during the cold war and saw Threads in the mid 2000s or 2010s.