Is it just me or does anyone else appericate the quality of commercials back then. Like they feel authentic and relatable while the TV commercials today feel uncomfortable and un relatable while selling the point too hard and just feel soulless
These commercials always seemed more down to earth and, for lack of better words, human than everything produced today. These commercials seem like something people would create whereas the stuff they produce today seems so sterile, artificial, and calculated that it lacks the heart of classic 80 commercials.
That drinking and driving ad actually sells you on being the change, whereas nowadays ads use the threats of the police to deter it. The former was a call to action and inspires, the latter is a reminder of the punishment and reaffirms my negative feelings about authority, and probably does nothing in reality. How far we've fallen.
If a nuke is coming in, I’m grabbing a beer and my lawn chair and I’m going to enjoy my last moments. Not even bothering to try and escape. I wouldn’t want to live in the aftermath.
Well done. This was the absolute first EAS scenario I ever watched. They yanked it off RU-vid for some reason and I'm glad to see it's back and redone. Good job. Keep it up.
Neat re-edition of an all-time classic! I especially like the fact that the moment at the 13:19 mark definitely gives off a "death is imminent, repent your sins" feeling by hearing the faint sounds of a ICBM detonation in the background.
@Brandon Taylor right you are. It is basically a way of saying "gather with your friends/family during these last moments," just like they say in most apocalyptic EAS scenarios.
Thanks and good eye! I was originally just going to use more commercials to fill in the gaps, but I felt I had already done enough of that and thought some scenes from Countdown to Looking Glass might work well towards the end of the video. Turns out I was right and had made the right choice.
I also like the fact that they played a brief clip from The Day After and talked about it. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” J. Robert Oppenheimer
Surprised to see Countdown to Looking Glass here. It's one of my favourite TV movies ever! Also glad that Jakob Hill's original scenario was recreated here as it's the first EAS scenario I watched. Thank you.
The last broadcast is great too. And if you like "EAS" scenarios, try fictionalized BBC report ( or smth like that). It covers more recent events though
Excellent presentation of the subject matter. I was a child of the atomic age remember my parents worry during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a way, I grew up with the constant fear of the mushroom cloud appearing on the horizon. You painted a really compelling narrative with the escalating EBS broadcasts and the absurdity of the regularly scheduled programming. Very powerful.
In October 1962, was in the Littleton (Denver) area in the first grade. My dad worked for Martin-Marrieta, part of the crews that tested Minuteman II missiles. Scary times.
If I heard for real that "several hundred nuclear missiles are headed toward America", I would probably have a heart attack and that would be it. Better way to go than to face the hell a nuclear attack would bring.
GenXer feeling that familiar old lump in my stomach. I saw the live broadcast of The Day After when I was 11, and boy did it make an impression, even knowing it was downplaying the severity of a real exchange. I'll never forget a classmate's dad who worked at Pentagon visiting our social studies class, writing Mutually Assured Destruction on the blackboard with no self-awareness of those three letters: MAD. I kept asking him in different ways, trying to pry an answer that made sense from this grownup we were supposed to trust, who spoke for those who had the power of life and death over us: if we already have enough nukes to destroy the world, each other, and ruin all life on the planet, why do we need to keep building more? And he kept telling us we had to build more, because as long as we had more, Russia would be afraid to attack. M.A.D. MAD. Someone underlined it after he left, and I can't even remember if it was me. Two years later, in 8th grade, we read 1984 in the real 1984 for English class. GenXers... some of us still have nightmares of nuclear war. We look at Ukraine and we see you all. Millennials fearing climate change and the shortsightedness of those in power, we see you all. They forget we exist. They always have. We're tired, and we ache, and this isn't the world we wanted to give you, but we're still trying to fight the madness. And you know the worst part? It turns out some of the money I use now to donate to causes like homeless shelters, environmental activism, renewables, and all that other good stuff... earned by my rocket scientist dad.... his company wasn't just building the commercial rockets that put weather and telecommunications satellites and NASA probes and the space shuttles into space. I should've known: NASA's budget was never enough to contract out and make commercial aerospace profitable, and even satellite TV couldn't offset the cost. What did? That company also built rockets to carry nukes stored in missile silos, the very ones giving me nightmares. I didn't find out until he became one of the nuclear inspectors at the end of the Cold War … thank you, Gorbachev …sent over to Russia to see they upheld their part of the treaty in dismantling some of their nukes, as we dismantled some of ours. We didn't have money for schools, infrastructure, and so much else because military spending, especially the budget to build more nukes, always took the lion's share without question. Same thing in Russia … that plus Chernobyl led to the USSR's collapse. And yet what has killed almost as many americans in the past 3 years as every war combined since the Revolutionary war? a fucking virus. Priorities. But we MUST pour billions of dollars into our military we could otherwise spend on science, on schools, on healthcare, on natural disaster preparedness and recovery, on infrastructure, on so much else everyday Americans could benefit from instead. We HAVE to have a bigger military than anyone else, right? That's the best use of taxpayer dollars, far and away. it stands to reason! M.A.D. MAD. Mutually assured Dumbfuckery hasn't changed much in the 40 years since.
As someone once joked: "One day, Russia is gonna find out why we can't afford welfare or healthcare" and it's equally chilling, humorous, and truthful.
Thanks for reuploading this great scenario. Loved the nod to The Day After (my favorite hate-watch, though I actually do find it pretty scary at times).
I have the same sentiment about the movie. Although The Day After has changed my life in many ways, I watch it on and off again several times in a given year, and it is easily one of my favorite movies, I still struggle to, and generally cannot, watch the attack scene even to this day. That being said, I always try to work little nods to it in anything I do with this edit being a prime example.
@@peaceisourprofession3677 The Day After is a great film; there is a reason regular people remember it 40 years on. With that said, The War Game does an even better job of portraying nuclear war with its documentary style and frank appraisal of a nuclear exchange; per Wikipedia, the film was not aired on BBC out of fear it would drive people to kill themselves, and this was before scientists theorized the probability of nuclear winter in the event of a nuclear exchange. Still, the king of all films in the nuclear genre is Threads. Threads is the most horrifying film I've ever seen, with its terrifying and grotesque imagery, depictions of suffering in the face of societal\cultural collapse, and unforgiving analysis of the effects of a full-scale war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. I watched it alone the first time I ever saw it, and you'd better believe I finished my bottle of bourbon I was saving for graduation by the end of it. It (along with fervent study of several subjects the film dealt with) changed the way I saw war, postmodern culture, sabre rattling, and geopolitics.
Dang I miss Certs. And I was really disappointed the EAS didn't get used on 9/11, I thought for sure that was the perfect opportunity to finally use it for real.
The reason why the Emergency Alert System wasn't activated during the attacks of September 11, 2001 is because the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center complex at 8:46 AM Eastern time; this is when the three major national morning news programs were still on the air: "Good Morning America" on ABC, the "Today" show on NBC, and "The Early Show" on CBS.
It was just revealed this year eas wasn't used due to lack of reliable communication aboard AF1. Satellite live eas broadcast ability from AF1 now exists. That's why Bush landed briefly at Barksdale
The fact that this is set in May 1984 would keep an ad for a movie shown in October (not November as the ad stated, lol) 1983 from showing up. On the other hand, you have this taking place while "Countdown to Looking Glass" is airing, which is hilariously ironic! All we need is the Q*Bert ad and the video for "99 Red Balloons" from the original version and this would be truly awesome!
Robo voices are way too good for 1984, in fact very few were installed. IIRC LA, NYC, Chicago, Miami, and Seattle were the only one to have them in 1984, and that was in the last quarter. The voices would have been human in the DC BWI area. Also there was an EBS title card. The digital EAM message where the attack warning didn't exist back then.
This video was made in a time before we had great AI voiceovers. The EAS Mock community is only now getting voice actors. It's a product of its time and its acceptable enough. DECtalk was on the market but wasn't in deployment anywhere for NOAA or EBS until 1989.
I grew up with these commercials back in the ‘80s/‘90s, backin the days (‘70s to ‘90s) commercials had a different *feel*, happy, optimistic, upbeat, catchy, and funny (with a few obvious exceptions). Commercials now are …darker, more cynical, more clinical, the sense of fun is gone. The changeover (in my view) was 9/11/2001, the days after the attack, the overall feel of the American experience became darker, more cynical, with an undertone of stress and anger (for obvious reasons)
It’s looking more and more likely that this is only like 40 years off. All you need is a leader of a nuclear power that doesn’t care about life itself and I’m afraid this is what we may have now
You mean like Putin? He does not care about human life. Look at what he is doing to Ukraine. He doesn’t care if he hits innocent civilians. But, he said that he will only use nukes if his country’s survival is threatened. And we just lost Gorbachev who agreed with the United States to reduce the USSR’s nuclear arsenal around 1990. Now, Putin broke the treaty with the US.
Pro tip for creators. EBS and EAS Presidential messages require audio talk up. Always been that way. So even after PEP stations in the Reagan Era interrupted local programming, Potus message wouldn't begin for about 2 minutes minimum.
During this time I was in my initial assignment as a newly commissioned USAF Officer. I was an Instructor Minuteman II ICBM nuclear certified Instructor Crew Commander assigned to the 341st Strategic Missile Wing, Malmstrom AFB MT. During this time in the Cold War , we constantly practiced, exercised, were evaluated on our readiness to fight a nuclear with the Soviet Union.
Could have been better. But good enough to be companioned with "The Last Broadcast [Complete]" which is the Canadian side reporting the events. What's good is that both of these are on RU-vid.
For accuracy, include 2 minutes of talk up after the local station interrupt and switch to federal EBS network. 'This is the United States EBS. Stand by for a Presidential Message in 2 minutes.' Repeat the talk up and countdown.
"News" Segments of this are from "Countdown to Looking Glass" which aired on HBO in October 1984. Let's give credit where it is due. "Countdown to Looking Glass" was the only one of these "Doomsday" films that ever gave me genuine chills. I have watched it once and a while since and it still chilling to me.
The main problem I have with this is that it does not really give instructions directly, like an actual emergency alert would. I notice it goes like "this message is transmitted by [...]" etc. An alert would normally just say "This is not a drill. Seek shelter immediately", time is essential. Other than that, I will admit it's not bad!
Well here we go its jan 20 th 2022, and we in this again. Putin gave USA 48 hour warning, at 19 th at like 7 pm. He asked us to stop sending weapons to Ukraine. We moving to this chess game again. Right close to cuban missile crisis all over again.
With the so-called roads and the crappy infrastructure that we have nowadays, how in the world would we be able to evacuate major cities in the United States? How would we have time before Armageddon?
We wouldn't. Doesn't even matter whether infrastructure is good. The speed in which modern ICBMs can travel would not allow us enough time for evacuation.
![[EAS] "1984": A Realistic Nuclear Attack Scenario (Reuploaded With Commercials & News Segments)](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
