Jen you're not married because you can't cook? Find you a man with culinary skills, a great sense of humor and will put you on a pedestal. Worked for my wife.
In september 1983, coincidently just a few months after the release of this movie, a malfunction in the Soviet nuclear warning system showed that an American missile had been launched. If it hadn't been for duty officer Stanislav Petrov's suspicion of it being a false alarm and his decision to disobey military protocol by not reporting a nuclear attack, it's possible that his superiors would have ordered a retalitory nuclear attack against the US. There's a pretty good documentary about the incident called _The Man Who Saved the World_ if anyone's interested.
@@johnfriday5169 No, that was inspired by actual red balloons floating across the berlin wall. Look up Professor of Rock's video on 99 red balloons, really cool and informative.
I can't believe that this film is 40 years old this year! 😮It's technically a Brat Pack movie, seeing how it stars Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, two of the most prominent actors of their generation.
This film was huge at least with all the people I grew up with. Still one of my favs. Lots of movies like this in the 80s (Back to the Future, Explorers, D.A.R.Y.L., Short Circuit, Real Genius, Spacecamp, The Manhattan Project, Flight of the Navigator, etc) inspired people like me to become scientists, engineers, technicians, or computer professionals. Broderick is also great in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Lots of familiar titles there, Slammin'! Short Circuit was a classic for, like, 8-year old me lol. Was on a VHS cassette and got a lot of repeat viewings. And 99% sure Ally Sheedy was in that one?
So happy you watched this! It's an all time classic that still holds up 40 years later. For another Matthew Broderick movie I suggest Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's hilarious and came out 3 years after this.
@@janleonard3101 That's not what Joshua gained - it simply realised that the 'game' of Global Thermonuclear War has no winners no matter which variation of scenario is picked, and so the only winning move is not to play.
Hey, MoneyJenny! The most well-known movie featuring each star: Matther Broderick in _Ferris Bueller's Day Off_ (1986), and Ally Sheedy in _The Breakfast Club_ (1985). Both films are *must watch* status!
Your suggestions make me think there is a whole subset of movies Jen needs to watch. The 80's teen movie. My suggestion Ferris bueller's day off, The breakfast club, pretty in pink. All must watch classics
Fun fact, the computer voice 'Joshua' was played by the actor who played Professor Falken, just slowed down a bit. DEFCON 2 is the lowest DEFCON reached in the 60's during the Cuban missile crises (real), very nearly went to DEFCON 1. There is a great film depicting this crisis called 'Thirteen Days' a film i am sure you would love. Fantastic reaction Jen, I could see you were really into this film. Damm them 80's computers 😊😊😊😊
"Shall we play a game?" became one of those phrases that was used in every situation/other movie/ sitcom kind of like "I'll be back". Just ubiquitous with the eighties. it's also well worth digging into the Mathew Broderick rabbit hole he's done some good movies
It even came up in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. (I freaking love the idea that Natasha Romanov(a) and Steve Rogers BOTH watched this movie at some point.)
Back in the days of this movie, video arcades still required people to put coins in their machines. Thus being a good player allowed one to really get to play for a long period of time. Plus it was cheaper of course.
Yes! i could play Galaga until i got bored... on a single quarter. Joust was easily 45 min. Super Mario Brothers was a complete playthrough for one quarter! good times...
@@ronfehr7899 how is this possible?!? a game i haven't heard of! wow... i used to live in the arcades. never mind... just looked it up. i do remember that game and also remember not being good at it. damn though... i miss the 80's and video games. that's when life started making sense to me.
@spartanical It's been such a long time. I wasn't sure that I had the name right. Glad to know that I did. I did play Galaga a little but not much. Where I lived back then, the arcade didn't have many games.
@@ronfehr7899 at least there were some and you weren't completely deprived... i was kind of in your shoes for awhile. i lived nowhere near an arcade, but there was a 7 eleven within minutes that had two games. that's where i developed my Joust and Centipede skills. at that age we all just took what we could get... and i was absolutely happy for it! anyhow, thanks for the the trip down nostalgia lane
When he was doing research about the software creator, he was looking through old newspaper and magazine articles that were stored on microfiche, typically at libraries and universities and government agencies. It was basically large spools of film with the article images imprinted on it (like old school film negatives) and you put them in a scanning machine to view the film by rolling them past a camera which shows the images on the large screen you saw on that screen. Nearly everything now is stored on computers (files or the cloud).
Mostly right. But the spools were called microfilm, microfiche was similar but with images recorded on film cards. Typically many rows and columns of images on a single card, with each image being a single page. Also the viewing systems for both microfilm and microfiche weren't really cameras, they were simple projection systems. To the extent that such formats are still used it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they are read using a camera tied to a viewing screen, but back then a digital camera (if you could find one at all) would be very expensive, large, and low resolution.
I remember microfiche! It felt like spy gadget stuff, straight out of a Bond movie, seeing all those articles come up i n the viewer off of some tiny piece of film!
Synthesizer sounds ruled the early eighties. Nerd sounds imprinted on me from childhood, Howard Jones; Flock of Seagulls and the like. Couldn’t get away from the sounds and now I look back fondly at that era. Damn, I’m old.
This is one of my favorite movies from the 1980s, which is unfortunately so underrated. How can you get more tense than *Global Thermonuclear War* ?!? I'm so glad you enjoyed it! 😁
Yes the payphone trick really worked. We had one in my junior high school lobby that you just had to put a straightened out paperclip 📎 in the middle hole of the handset and the keyhole of the coin box and then dial your number, or you could use electrical box punch outs, or small washers as coins of similar size to quarters and nickels for electrical box punch outs, and washers for dimes. You could also annoy people in the office that was about 20' away by using the paperclip technique to call the number of the phone and hang up causing it to keep ringing until someone answered it. Not that I ever did that, I was a good kid and never annoying. There was also a soda machine that you could hold down certain numbers on the keypad to put it into test mode and get free drinks, and a snack machine that you could put clear packaging tape on the edge of a dollar bill, let the machine take it in and as soon as it registered pull it back out and get free snacks, or if you wanted ones on the bottom row just reach in the drop area and pull the flap down and grab them, or so I heard, because I would never do that either 😂.
Yes. That payphone trick worked on ground start phones, but when the phone company changed to loop start, it no longer worked, so people who tried the trick later thought it was BS, not realizing in it's time, that it actually worked.
In the DVD commentary they say the method depicted in the movie was intentionally portrayed so as to NOT work in real life. It was definitely possible to hack 80s payphones, just not how the movie portrays it. Steve Wozniak is famous for having developed a tone generating box that tricked payphones to thinking you dropped a coin in. He'd prank call the Vatican among other fun things.
Thanks for doing this. Back in the 80's we were all learning computers. PC's were now being sold at RadioShack for the homes. This movies is just great and one of my favorites at that time. It was on cable so I probabl;y watched it dozens of times. It fit so perfectly into our daily lives. Super fun!
I believe the DEFCON rating system came about out of the Cuba Missile Crisis, as well as the 'Red Phone' - the direct phone line from the White House to the Kremlin... believe it or not, the only communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the CMC was through diplomatic channels, taking as long as 11 hours...
My father use to guard the missile silos in late 70s up in north America, Wyoming and North Dakota, He was air force Police. He had some interesting stories. Love this movie. One if my favorite growing up
@@TheTitandog70 Well... In reference to the new UAP- Glasnost by the US- government, such things should be discussed open, shouldn't they...? Greeds from Europe...
I was serving as a USAF missile SP in Montana beginning in 83 - the same year as this movie and the chilling TV movie “The Day After” which is about nuclear war.
You know, Jen, whilst you're on a bit of a "World War III"/Nuclear War theme, you might want to check out "Thirteen Days". Its a drama based on the actual Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Manchurian Candidate is a Cold War must film.. The original with Frank Sinatra and Angels Landsbury.. Although the remake with Denzel and Meryl Streep is pretty good, too..
"Wargames", "Ferris Bueller", and "Real Genius" - the three movies that influenced me the most as a teenager." "Real Genius", with Val Kilmer, would be a good followup to having seen the other two. Then I'd probably recommend "Sneakers", with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, and River Phoenix, from the 1990's.
Hey Jen, - The two actors in the bunker in the first scene are both famous. The older, higher-ranked one is the late John Spencer who gained fame in his role as White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry on the series 'The West Wing'. Spencer actually passed away as the series was in its final season. The younger one with dark hair is Michael Madsen who has been in a lot of films including Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs' as Mr. Blonde, and 'Kill Bill' Volumes 1 & 2 as Bud. And, as a heads up, appears as a CIA boss in the last Brosnan Bond film 'Die Another Day'. - Matthew Broderick movies: 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', 'Biloxi Blues', 'Project X', 'Glory', 'The Freshman', 'LadyHawke', and 'The Producers'. In both 'The Producers' and 'Biloxi Blues' he reprises roles he played on Broadway. He won a Tony for playing Eugene Morris Jerome in 'Biloxi Blues' and was nominated for one for 'The Producers' (but lost to his co-star Nathan Lane, who also is in the film). And, yes, Matthew was in 'Election'. - 15:35 - The voice of Joshua/WOPR was created using the actor who played Stephen Falken, John Wood. From what I remember, he had to read the lines in a variety of ways, then they ran the sound of his voice through a synthesizer, and cut together different readings to give the voice an artificial sound...almost like the voice synthesizer used by the late Dr. Stephen Hawking.
OMG... YEARS of watching this movie without realizing the other guy in the bunker is a young Michael Madsen!!! I recognized John Spencer and all this time have been so focused on him during that scene that I hardly even looked at the other guy!!!
Im so glad you got to this gem. This was a massive box office success and later, as video rental locations were exploding onto the scene, it was massively popular in homes everywhere.
The movie is loosely based on the events of 9 November 1979, but it wasn't from an outside source. In NORAD/Cheyenne Mountain, exercise data was inadvertently routed to the various watch centers, but not tagged as exercise data. I was working in the mountain a few years later (~1985) on a program called SPADOC, and as a result of the 9 November 1979 event, we had to have two-person control on our test message media (big two-foot diameter disks) at all times. It was a major PITA. BTW, the tour thing is accurate too. Prior to 9/11 at least, there were always a couple of tours a day. We would always have to suspend tests because of the unclassified tours.
Seconded! Just be careful to look up the *1987* 'Project X' -- there's a 2012 film of the same name but is NOT at all related or the same thing. ;) Loved watching that one as a kid, and even have it on Blu-ray today. Often overrated, but IMHO a classic '80s/Broderick film that shouldn't be missed. (Then again, what do I know: I still enjoy the nostalgia rides of films like 'Space Camp' and 'Iron Eagle', so... ha.)
@@Fozzik 100% to all of those! Man, the childhood memories just from Barrett Oliver and Dabney Coleman alone, ha. I was so excited to see that Gary Whitta had pitched a 'Last Starfighter' sequel a few years ago; sadly it hasn't been picked up by anyone yet, but the teaser reel for it is still a blast to watch now & then, if for no other reason than the awesome music.
@@joshridderhoff2050 I wore out a VHS TV recording of Iron Eagle as a kid lol. That was my jam. The USAF answer to Top Gun lol. And Project X was a good film too, think that was the first time I ever saw Helen Hunt in anything.
The Godzilla movie with "the Puff Daddy song" happens to star..... Matthew Broderick. I think you have to watch it now. I'm in the minority that actually enjoys that movie. It's VERY 90's.
Happy you enjoyed this, that was lots of nostalgic fun and the ending is still very tense! High five for DEFCON 5. 🥰💜 Great Native promo! 👍👍 4:06 - 4.14 I hadn't seen this film in decades, wasn't previously aware that Michael Madsen was in the opening scene. This film is 10 years before Reservoir Dogs, but I see he's still quick to go all 'Mr. Blonde' in a tense situation. 😐 The director of Wargames, John Badham, directed a great cop/buddy/comedy/action film called 'Stakeout' (1987). I think you would enjoy it a lot. Two great male leads as the cops, a very charming and charismatic leading lady who you have seen recently and a great actor playing the villain. The film '13 Days' (2000) is the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the USA and USSR came to the brink of nuclear war. For realsies. :/ An unmissable Matthew Broderick film is 'The Freshman' (1990) - a crime comedy. The plot revolves around a young, somewhat naive, New York film student's entanglement with organized crime in an illicit business of offering exotic and endangered animals as speciality food items, including his being tasked with delivering a Komodo dragon for this purpose. You'll love the casting, they'll give you a performance you can't refuse. Other top Broderick picks are; Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) Comedy Biloxi Blues (1988) Military dramady Glory (1989) US Civil War drama The Cable Guy (1996) Psychological thriller comedy. Dir by Ben Stiller
"Would you like to play a game?" The synthesized voice they chose to use for the WOPR was the actor, John Wood, who played the AI's creator, Doctor Falken.
Great reaction, Jen! I'm glad you had fun with this one. I just realized that this came out in 1983, and the Terminator in 1984. So both Joshua and Skynet were planning humanity's demise at almost the same time! And speaking of AI, maybe I'm evil, but if I created an AI today, I'd name it Skynet, and I'd program it to tell anyone that asked why it was called that "I wanted a name of a fictional AI that I could be proud to emulate," just to freak people out.
"I'd program it" "just to freak people out." Some guy named Vedal made and AI vtuber called Neuro-sama. She kinda does just that, unintentionally of course. She can also sing and play rhythm games. I think people love her streams because of the 'kids/AI say the damnedest things' moments that happen with chat or other vtubers she collabs with. So many TOS rules so much of it is left ambiguous just by saying [filtered] and sometimes that makes it funnier leaving it up to the imagination. I was just listening to them sing Careless Whisper when looking them up. She might glitch on Take Me On or do that GLaDOS song well but nothing close to being good as vocaloid stuff. SO don't expect too much from the singing.
Thank you for another incredible reaction! I was a junior in high school in 1983 when it came out. Loved it then and still do. Had such a crush on Ally Sheedy.❤
Mathew Broderick is part of a star studded cast in the Civil War movie "Glory" (historical drama) where he is one of the leads. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (comedy) is probably his best known movie
Another AMAZING reaction, Jen! I had SO much fun watching this. From the dog to the 80s love I had the best time! I've missed your last few because of work life but I'll be binging the stuff I missed this weekend. Keep it up, Jen! You're still the best!
I loved how tense you got, you were so focused on what was happening and what was at stake. A lot of people that are used to today's technology don't experience how real this seemed to us back when it came out. I was in college studying computer science and even back then AIR was a major topic of discussion in the computer world. Another tense underrated movie with Mathew Broderick is The Freshman. The only prerequisite for watching it is watching The Godfather, which I know you've seen. I think you would really enjoy the twisted Web of events in that movie.
Great movie. I think this movie was an inspiration on the computer security terms like Backdoor and Firewall and change allot in computer industry . You should also see Mathew in Lady Hawk and Ferries Buller day off. Two other great hacking movies are Hackers 1995 and Sneakers 1992. Also see Alley Shadey in Short Circute
Yeah, no. The technology, techniques and terminology used in the movie were already well-known by the nerds and geeks of the time. The one exception is “war dialing”. Prior to this film, the technique of automatically dialing every number in a telephone exchange was known as “demon dialing” or “hammer dialing”.
@@markhamstra1083 And the trick of using a whistle for free phone calls worked. Large parts of the telephone network back then depended on control tones for special operations, and the sound of a whistle from a box of Captain Crunch cereal was close enough to fool the network.
man I love watching my childhood favourites with Jen - she makes them new again. I'm going camping now for 3 days and I have about 16 more of her videos on my phone so I have options.
i was 14 when this came out, and it seemed very real, the news was full of the possibility of war at any moment. lots of teachers trying to educate us on how to survive, hide under the kitchen table and you will be fine!! but it is still a favorite despite the remembered feelings. it felt real at the time. glad you enjoyed it. :) Matthew Broderick was the up and coming star of the time. quite relevant i suppose considering the rise of AI. love the reactions as always. the novel, i think based on the film, was a lot more tense
I remember in kindergarten, we'd go stand in the hallway for air raid drills. Id always ask the teacher what that meant, none of us kids understood the term. But I remember overhearing two if the teachers saying to each other, annoyed, about what a pointless waste if time it all was. A few years later, I saw a miniseries called "The Day After", (everyone saw it, there were only 3 networks then, and it was event programming.) That was when I understood what the teachers meant. That miniseries shook up everyone, even Reagan, who saw it and completely changed his tone and posture toward the Soviets. Reagan had another reason, though, about the same time a NATO military exercise called "Able Archer" was carried out, and inadvertently brought the world to within 4 hours of russia launching a full strike. This wasn't declassified until like 10 years ago, but the world nearly ended that day.
the highest DEFCON in real life was DEFCON 2. once on January 15, 1991, in the opening phase of Operation Desert Storm, and once during the Cuban Missile Crisis on October 24, 1962 (but only the Strategic Air Command (SAC), while the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces remained at DEFCON 3)
Matthew Broderick was the lead actor in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Godzilla", which were probably his biggest films. I highly recommend both. He is still making movies.
You mentionned the music a few times, if you want the same composer and same director with another technology related movie check out "Blue Thunder" from 1983. It stars Roy Scheider who was the police chief in Jaws and Daniel Stern who was one of the two "wet bandits" from Home Alone. For a nuclear theme movie you may want to check out "Miracle Mile" from 1988 it's a love story. It stars Anthony Edwards (Goose in Top Gun).
Blue Thunder is a classic! And I haven't seen Miracle Mile mentioned anywhere online I think ever lol. I haven't seen that in decades, but that was a very good film.
Added notes: Matthew Broderick was in “Glory” a must react to movie for all. Of note: I worked in a secure facility similar to NORAD back in late 80s-early 90s called Site Raven Rock (Site-R). Of course there were No public tours, not would one find a recoding device of any kind (tape player, camera etc) inside. Security was mega tight with multiple Id/badge swaps and areas only those (not me) with the highest clearances & need to know could enter.
Matthew Broderick actually stars in the 1998 Godzilla, which had the Puff Daddy song you mentioned. It's a cheesey movie, but kinda fun at the same time. Broderick is incredible in Ferris Bueller's Day off. If you've never seen that, you absolutely should.
The type of program that David used to dial every number in Sunnyvale (looking for Protovision's computer) later came to be called a War Dialer, in honor of this movie. Yeah, those floppy disks are HUGE. I never used one that size (8 inches); I used the 5-1/8 inch size and then diskettes (the hard shell ones).
@senku 5300 Sure. "Jaws" (1975), "Close Encounter of the Third Kind" (1977), and "Aliens" (1986, though you might want to watch the first one, "Alien" from 1979, first). Those are just three really good ones off the top of my head.
A television series called Macgyver had the main character doing what David did to escape dangerous situations with limited time to avoid a catastrophe or certain death with only a pocket knife and duct tape.
I saw this in a theater in Seattle when I was 16. We all cheered when they showed the Seattle skyline at the beginning. It was almost a decade before the music scene put the town on the map and Seattle was really not well known for anything at that time. You’re right about “The Election”. Also.. Ferris Beuller’s Day Off Glory Biloxi Blues Project X
I subscribe to over 400 channels and Jen is easily at the top of the list as the most talented creator and all around super nice person of them all! What a great shtick she's created here. A delight to look forward to every time. Thanks Jen!❤😍
Best line of the movie? "You're listening to a machine. Do the world a favor and don't act like one." More Matty B to check out: Ferris Bueller's Day Off(1986) is the easy answer but there's also Glory(1989), The Road to Wellville(1994), yes Election(1999) is great, Godzilla(1998)[the same one you made reference to here], The Cable Guy(1996) is a two-hander with Jim Carrey, and The Producers(2005).
After this movie Broderick starred in Ferris Bueller's Day Off another '80s classic. The '80s were full of nuclear death and destruction movies. it was basically peak Cold War with movies like Day After Tomorrow, First Strike, and Threads among others which show the aftermath of nuclear war in varying degrees of graphic detail which scared the crap out of the populace at the time.
I love it when I look back at these old movies and then I recognize somebody that I didn’t know at the time. The guy in the beginning was Leo on the West Wing.
If you are looking for another movie involving nukes then watch The Peacemaker, 1997, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. It is highly underrated and I don't think I've ever seen anyone react to it. Since you like Bond and Bourne I think you'd really enjoy it.
Falken: Joshua’s trying to find the right code so he can launch the missiles himself Jen: Noo! Joshua, you bastard! 🤣🤣 Jen, you REALLY get into the movies. Love it! 🤣🤣
"Greetings Professor Murray"😄 W.O.P.R has the best computer voice ever. That was another fun reaction Jen. Mathew Broderick movies I suggest "Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Glory (1989) and The Freshmen (1990) In wargames Jennifer is actress Alley Sheedy 3 movies I suggest with her are The Breakfast Club (1985) Short Circuit (1986) and Only the Lonely a romantic comedy (1991) It also stars deeply missed fellow Canadian 🇨🇦 John Candy.
I appreciate butter, and I have used the technique in the movie to butter my corn several times, having learned from this film. Matthew is the lead actor in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where he also hacks into the school computers. He's also in Tower Heist (2011), which is set during a Thanksgiving time frame. That's not as well-known, but you like heists; he isn't the lead character, though, Ben Stiller is. His girlfriend in this film is in The Breakfast Club, among other films.
Matthew Broderick also headlines "Ladyhawke" (Richard Donner, 1985), in which he reunites with John Wood, and which also stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Rutger Hauer, and Leo McKern (if you ever saw "The Blue Lagoon.") Soundtrack is hit or miss. "Chariots of Fire" came out a few years earlier, and showed how "modern" music can fit in a period film. Ladyhawke tried to do something similar, and it ended up dating the score. But yeah, if you want more Broderick, check out "Ladyhawke."
When I was little, this was on cable all the time - I absolutely love this film. One of the cool little things about it is that the director (John Badham) managed to deliver this AND Blue Thunder in the same year. Blue Thunder is a great "companion" to this film, by the way - another cautionary tale of technology.
I think that the reason that Professor Falkin wouldn't make the phone call was because he didn't have a phone. That was why Joshua called David at his home, because the computer assumed that David was Professor Falkin.
Love this movie. Saw it in theaters with my older brother way back when. When this came out, Nuclear War was a huge scare for years. Red Dawn and Day after Tomorrow(mid 80s tv version) didn't help. Check OOWT Weird Science, if you haven't already. Also, Real Genius
@@alanmackie7012 It's called 'The Day After Tomorrow', but i've never heard anything else with that name, so leaving out the 'the' was intentional, as it really makes no difference.
Hi, Jen! The 80's were the era of nuclear war paranoia. Apart from this film, there was also "The Day After" and the NBC mockumentary "Special Bulletin".
The young guy in the silo was Michael Madsen, star of Reservoir Dogs, and many other films. The guy in green trying to open the door after David jams it, is Judge Reinhold, one of the stars of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dialing every number in an area to see which ones have computers was an actual thing that some people did. After this movie, it became known as "war dialing". However, it couldn't have worked as shown in the movie. David was using an "acoustical" modem, and while it COULD have dialed the phone by playing the tones for the numbers into the mic (that still works with landline phones to this day), it would have no way to hang up the line after each call. You needed a modem that you could directly plug the phone line into for it to be able to do what was shown. Yes, pay phone hacking was a thing. People also discovered special tones that would make the phone/company think that you had deposited coins and all sorts of other stuff. I had programs for my Commodore 64 to generate the different tones, but I never actually tried them out. The ending where the WOPR tries to guess the launch codes was badly written. The launch code was ten characters long. Typically, you have to enter the entire code for a computer to accept it and it would take even a super-computer a VERY long time to run through every possible combination made up of ten characters. However, it was shown that it could guess them one character at a time. Doing it this way should have taken about 2 seconds. With ten numbers and 26 letters, each character in the code only has 36 possibilities. Multiply that by ten characters and that's only 360 codes it needs to try. Even an 80s home computer could guess a ten character code that way in just a few seconds.
Yes, the urination sign not only indicates it's happened multiple time, but also that there are other areas of the facility where it would not result in automatic dismissal.
Hey Hey there Jen Murray. Yup, Wargames was a pretty big movie back then. The Cold War was a pretty depressing time. There have been a few times when we were really close to launching. I enjoyed your reaction, as always. Hope you have a perfect evening. 😉👌
For later Broderick I strongly recommend 2005's The Producers, with Nathan Lane. A pure giggle fest, silly and perfect. You deserve a treat after the nail-biting tension of War Games. I love that play so much I even saw a touring company do it live. The whole theater was mouthing the lines along with the actors.
The movie I would recommend is "Thirteen Days", a 2000 film starring Kevin Costner and Bruce Greenwood. It also involves nuclear tension, but it is also an historical movie which answers your question about the highest our DefCon setting has ever been. The 13 days covered by this movie are the closest we have ever come to playing the game which cannot be won and must never be played...
You're the first RU-vidr I've seen reacting to this great movie. Lots of people have never heard of it so it's was great to watch your reaction! This film is such a time piece as there are so many relics from the early 80's. For instance the modem he was using was one of the first ones so it was interesting to see how you had to place your phone on it (early version of dial up internet). Also all the green screen computer monitors from that time.
