What The Actual – Wait!! Is That Pancakes I Hear?
Anyone besides me remember those days in grade school when you were kids, and the teacher said something like “we’re having our atomic bomb drill today”, so you were supposed to hide under your desk, get next to the nearest windows and squat down on the floor, or all go down to the school’s basement (if it had one: ours didn’t)? Remember that? And then we got it all straightened out with the Soviets, and then the USSR disintegrated and was no more, but that was after the Tsar Bomba had its first (and only) test on a barren island up in the Arctic Circle on October 31, 1961. That bomb had a 51-megaton yield, an impressive statistic at the time.
So in view of the downsizing of the use of nukes and what we were genuinely concerned with so long ago, when I ran across this video a short while ago, I was trying to figure out just who or WHAT would prompt anyone to do anything so ridiculous as put out a sloppily composed and mostly useless warning about a nuke strike on New York. And why would it be only one US city? Why not whack Chicago at the same time? And Los Angeles, San Fran (Pelosi’s home port) Miami, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and even – dare I say it? – Washington, DC?
See, that’s why the NYC video doesn’t make amu sense. If you got those films in boot camp, like the stuff the Navy showed us I the mid-1960s – well, gee whiz, people, we all knew we were toast because those nuke test films in the South Pacific were enough to scare the hair off a cat, anyway, weren’t they?
This video is an odd thing, from someone questioning why a PSA (Public Service Announcement) for the denizens of New York was made available online. It is in regard to what would/will happen, should some idiot with a hair up his backside decide to drop a nuke on NYC. Since I’ve been seeing online references to a nuke attack online lately, I wondered what the source was, and this video discussing the NYC PSA video could be that source. The fact that the narrator does try to dismiss NYC’s PSA as being dumbed down and wrong in a good part of its content is to his credit, but you still have to ask what was the point to doing this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qZlMopYqFE
That it contains old footage from the 1950s about a nuke attack is, oddly enough, relevant today, because the Cold War is gone, ended some time ago, and isn’t a real issue any more. Every ding-dang lowball dorkwad government either has a nuke or two, or has access to them. Iran, for instance, trades with China, using nuclear fuel as a bargaining chip, and China subsequently gives Iran electronic parts for its missiles. I brought this up about 2 years ago.
So what was the point to the very amateurish New York PSA, which is full of errors, in the first place?
Oh, wait! Is that a dog whistle I’m hearing?
Category: "Teh Stoopid", 2020 Election, YGBSM!!
Boom. Big bada boom
TCM was showing those black and white duck and cover Civilian Defense PSA’s movies and I remember them all.
I remember when in HS in Germany 82-85 we had to deal with Bomb Threats being called into the schools. In fact we had more Bomb Threats, than Fire Drills.
With the IRA/Baader Meinhof Gang etc being active at the time it was a real concern.
I remember the STOP, DROP, and COVER from elementary school. I also ran the NCB/CBR drills when I ran the DC Shop. Both was pretty much a complete waste of time.
You were getting an opportunity to kiss your tooshie goodbye.
Some things NEVER change.
This 1951 Black and White Cartoon titled “Duck and Cover: Bert The Turtle” was made with the help of schoolchildren from NEW YORK CITY and Astoria, NY.
Am speculating that is what our very own Jeff was addressing. Am trying to remember if we watched this in our schools in the early 1960s, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Film is only 9 minutes long. Well worth the entertainment.
“Duck and Cover staring Bert the Turtle is a 1951 Civil Defense Film”
“Written by Raymond J. Mauer and directed by Anthony Rizzo of Archer Productions and made with the help of schoolchildren from New York City and Astoria, New York, it was shown in schools as the cornerstone of the government’s “duck and cover” public awareness campaign”
“It was seen by millions of schoolchildren in the 1950s”
Anyone else remember this being posted in their schools?
😉 😎
Uh-huh👍
Oh, yeah.
I remember crawling under Miss Pratts desk and looking
up her dress…
Yup
Omigod, I do remember that. The school janitor had it on his “office” door. Ironically, the thing that made my hometown a target city was a soybean and corn processing plant (there are two there now), plus a Firestone tire factory and a Caterpillar plant, and a huge freight railyard.
I kind of miss those days. They almost made sense.
When I was in the third, fourth, and fifth grade, we were doing duck and cover out in the hallway, as we had no basement and thus no fallout shelter. I went back many years later to my grade school and found it had been torn down. But my house in Ontario, CA was still there, even though built in about 1950
That’s it ninja. I started grade school (K) I believe in 1950 and remember watching those videos at home when they came out later on and like rgr769 mentions in his comment, we did the duck and cover in the hallways/classroom desks and didn’t use the schools basement. When I did Fire Inspections for the Village of East rockaway Nassau County NY, we were in the basement of an apartment house and came across a door blocked by a cabinet and after sliding the cabinet out of the way, the door was opened and revealed a Civil Defense storeroom with medical supplies and cans of drinking water. Of course the building that old still had the fallout shelter sign on the building. along with the air raid siren. I grew up in Laurelton Queens NYC and remember their were a couple of families that had underground shelters built in their back yards
Hmmmm..
“Duck and Cover” Black and White film was made/produced around 1951 when Harry Truman was President.
He also was President in August 1945.
Fast foward with our relationship with the Soviet Union…by 1949, the Soviets had developed their own atomic weapons.
Hollywood also took advantage of those atomic bomb threats.
Anyone remember the movie “Them” with James Arness and those Giant Ants? Or “Beginning Of The End” with Peter Graves (James’ brother) and those Giant Grasshoppers? Or “Tarantula” with Leo G. Carroll (“Man From U.N.C.L.E”) and John Agar (Shirley Temples Ex-Husband) about those Giant Tarantulas?
😉😎
“Them” was on one afternoon when I was 5 or 6, scared the shit out of me.
“THEM!” featured Leonard Nimoy (“Star Trek”), Fess Parker (“Daniel Boone”) , Dick York (“Bewitched”), James Arness (Gunsmoke), James Whitmore (Too Many TV and Movie roles).
Nimoy, Parker, Arness and Whitmore served in the Military.
SFC D: We can still hear those ant’s screeching noises. We still remember James Whitmore getting killed at the end by the giant ant mandibles as well as the scene where a giant ant threw away a skeleton when cleaning a nest.
Well, as I found out some time back, ninja, anything that has a waxy outer shell (like ants, spiders and stinging insects) can be quickly and easily disposed of by a blast of Formula 409 or any other grease-cutting kitchen cleanser.
Really superb at killing flies, too….
I saw it in a movie theater. It was scarier in the dark of the theater.
“Them!” Yes, how could I forget that!!! And “The Thing”, “It Came From Beyond The Moon”, and “The Blob”.
After seeing a re release of Frankenstein in the movie theater, I had night mares. They usually showed a horror flick first and then a non horror flick after so that was too features plus cartoons and usually a re released three Stooges short for .25cents.
I was too scared to watch The Thing from what friends told me at the time. I watched all the others though and I believe the Flying praying Mantis was the one ninja mentioned. Those were the days. Now all those flicks you can now see on TV. Svengoolie shows a lot of 50’s and during the 50’s, The John Zacherly show had that stuff on TV.
The Day After (83 or 84) scared the crap out of me. I was a freshman in HS and some of the images stick with me to this day.
Come to think of it, wasn’t Dr. Strangelove just a documentary type movie to prepare the way?
Those drills are to reenforce the natural instinct of protecting ones head and eyes from flying debris. A good thing.
I actually appreciate the PSA and would like to see some limited reinstatement of shelters and Civil Defense/Preparedness protocols (CD and/or CP), supply allocations.
Unfortunately there is a good amount of people that have not taken steps to protect themselves and if we’re hit we’ll need warm bodies to protect and rebuild. Plus we’ve gotten more dumberer as a society… fear is a thing)
IMHO, JFK and McNamara had the math right about CD: because of the suburbanization of the US and the low cost of building supplies, home shelters were the best cost/benefit ratio. Unfortunately building supplies (lumber, cement block, etc) have gone up faster than wages (and people forget), too many do not have adequate fallout protection.
I’m a believer: The Good News About Nuclear Destruction
(And if your not, that’c cool too)
Left out of all the films and brochures on how to prepare for atomic attack, in addition to duck and cover, was the final step I was taught in ROTC: Now bend over and kiss your a$$ goodbye.
Got sent to the Principle’s Office when I told the teacher how ridiculous the duck and cover drills were for our location. RAFB was only about 6 air miles away and everybody knew that those SAC B52s were a primary target. And the whole air space above the school was criss crossed with the trajectories of the Nike/Herc Missile bases that were built to defend the Air Base. When the bombers were scrambled for an alert it was almost as if you could reach up and touch the bottom of it. Almost as much fun as trying to catch the droplets coming from the sprayers of the C-130 flying over spraying DDT on the fire ants. Good Times!
The Air Force used to run practice B-58 missions over St. Louis, supposedly because from the air it looked similar to Moscow and a couple of keythings like the airport were in apprximately similar locations. Used to hear multiple sonic booms some days. Too, I remember when six-shooters were cool toys and girls were girls. I’m really old.
I remember when men were men and women were glad of it.
I remember playing “Cops and Robbers” as well as “Cowboys and Indians” during recess at school, two things that these days will get a kid thrown into a shrink’s office and medicated beyond belief in the name of “safety”!