The Day After (1983)

UNCRushFan

UNCRushFan

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I found this gem on the internets yesterday evening when I was killing time due to the rain putting my yardwork plans on hold and wanted to share.

Anyone who is GenX or around my age - a quickly ripening 53 years old - can probably starkly recall watching this film right before Thanksgiving in November of 1983. And it was all we talked about in school or pretty much anywhere else for the next several days. It still holds for the record for most-watched television movie in history, with an estimated 100 million people tuning in. It was considered to be so controversial and shocking that no advertisers bought airtime after the attack sequence occurred, so the 2nd half of the film aired de facto commercial-free.

The version of the film which aired on ABC was approximately 2 hours and had much of the most graphic depictions (on-screen or off-screen) removed. And even that version was deeply disturbing at the time.

This 3 hour workprint version of The Day After shows some of those "deleted" scenes, as well as the fates of some of the characters we previously were only left to wonder about. The quality is not great, but IMHO, it does not detract from the overall experience.

Workprint version:


Regular version:


Panel discussion which took place on ABC, live, following the airing of the movie:
 
Watched it with my church youth group then on the way home saw my first shooting star which obviously freaked us out.
 
Every few years I get this weird nuclear apocalypse obsession and will watch this along with the Threads and Testament - the latter of which I own on DVD which I bought the first time I got obsessed with the topic. All three came out in 1983. (There is also another British documentary style movie from the ‘60s.)

I do remember watching The Day After when it came out and how big of a deal it was. (I will also be 53 at the end of this month.)

Since the Ukrainian war I have thought a lot about how a modern update to these movies needs to be made. Too many people have suggested nuking Russia and I am not sure the younger generations understand just what nuclear apocalypse would look like - or that Russia has their own arsenals - which they spend a disproportionate amount of money maintaining.

Btw, Threads is truly terrifying. It goes decades into the future.
 
I'm a few years younger so missed how all-consuming the buzz was on this movie. Hard to remember when a lot of people had five or six TV channels when the networks ruled and how much a big event could encompass everybody.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
I'm a few years younger so missed how all-consuming the buzz was on this movie. Hard to remember when a lot of people had five or six TV channels when the networks ruled and how much a big event could encompass everybody.
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I do miss those nearly universally shared experiences we had when I was growing up. They are fewer and farther between these days.
 
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Definitely remember watching this during my high school years. It did receive an enormous amount of publicity - I believe that TIME or Newsweek did cover stories on it, among other print media outlets back when many people still read them. And everybody at my high school the next day was talking about it, and our English teacher even had a class discussion about it. There are several scenes that always stick out to me, but the two I remember the best and that hit me the hardest were the scene where Steve Guttenberg, dying from radioactive fallout, finds a young woman in a makeshift shelter he met earlier and she is dying from radiation sickness, and he takes off his cap to show her that all his hair has fallen out. The other scene I remember is Jason Robards as the doctor, also dying from radioactive fallout, finding the ruins of his house and knowing that his wife was vaporized, and then he sees a miserable group of squatters in what is left of the house and yells at them to leave, and one of them opens his hands to give him food, and he just breaks down and cries amid the total ruins of Kansas City. Just a devastating scene.
 
In addition to the agonizing scenes of the aftermath - when you know the days of the main characters are numbered - the scenes of panic when the air raid sirens go off and traffic out of Kansas City comes to a standstill are really unsettling.

Just remember - many, many people in many parts of Ukraine are often hearing such sirens go off multiple times per week - and sometimes multiple times on any given night - for more than 2 straight years.
 
fsclark1 said:
In addition to the agonizing scenes of the aftermath - when you know the days of the main characters are numbered - the scenes of panic when the air raid sirens go off and traffic out of Kansas City comes to a standstill are really unsettling.

Just remember - many, many people in many parts of Ukraine are often hearing such sirens go off multiple times per week - and sometimes multiple times on any given night - for more than 2 straight years.
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The Day After had what?

A week-long impact? Two weeks? A month?

It’s impact was what?
 
Zoo_View said:
The Day After had what?

A week-long impact? Two weeks? A month?

It’s impact was what?
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It seems to have impacted Reagan, as he said the film was very effective, left him very depressed, and changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a nuclear war. In 1987, Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the banning and reducing of their nuclear arsenal. In Reagan's memoirs, he drew a direct line from the film to the signing. Reagan supposedly later sent the film's director a telegram after the summit: "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."
 
fsclark1 said:
It seems to have impacted Reagan, as he said the film was very effective, left him very depressed, and changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a nuclear war. In 1987, Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the banning and reducing of their nuclear arsenal. In Reagan's memoirs, he drew a direct line from the film to the signing. Reagan supposedly later sent the film's director a telegram after the summit: "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."
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How much ability do North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel have to completely eff up the globe?

Forget the arsenals of the USA, Russia, China, France, or Great Britain.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
Every few years I get this weird nuclear apocalypse obsession and will watch this along with the Threads and Testament - the latter of which I own on DVD which I bought the first time I got obsessed with the topic. All three came out in 1983. (There is also another British documentary style movie from the ‘60s.)

I do remember watching The Day After when it came out and how big of a deal it was. (I will also be 53 at the end of this month.)

Since the Ukrainian war I have thought a lot about how a modern update to these movies needs to be made. Too many people have suggested nuking Russia and I am not sure the younger generations understand just what nuclear apocalypse would look like - or that Russia has their own arsenals - which they spend a disproportionate amount of money maintaining.

Btw, Threads is truly terrifying. It goes decades into the future.
Click to expand...
Yes as depressing as The Day After is Threads is an even darker film in the same vein.
 
Zoo_View said:
How much ability do North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel have to completely eff up the globe?

Forget the arsenals of the USA, Russia, China, France, or Great Britain.
Click to expand...
I know those other countries can do a great deal of damage to the globe too with their arsenals.

My post deals more with scenes from the movie itself that impacted me, and then reminding people that people in Ukraine constantly hear those sirens and wonder every day if it will be their last day on earth.
 
kidryancorn said:
Yes as depressing as The Day After is Threads is an even darker film in the same vein.
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Never seen Threads - a kind of British version of The Day After - but I've heard it is absolutely brutal. Far more graphic, disturbing, and depressing than The Day After, which is really saying something, as the ending of The Day After is about as grim as you'll find on American TV at that time.
 
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