Kansas farm children respond to a nuclear missile being launched from a silo on their property.

Back in 1983, ABC aired a TV movie called The Day After, which detailed the lead-up to and the aftermath of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The school I attended (as well as many others across the country) sent a note home to parents warning them that they might not want to allow their children to watch the movie. My family didn't watch The Day After, not because it might be upsetting to my tender sensibilities, but probably because there was something better on another channel -- most likely The Exorcist was on Showtime that night.

So I never watched The Day After. The next day at school, it seemed that most of the kids who watched it were pretty freaked out. Some put on a brave face, shrugging and saying, "It was nothin'." I imagine that these kids got bored during the first hour, which consists entirely of character development, and either fell asleep or snuck off to poke through their parents' closets. Because The Day After is kinda disturbing.

The movie takes place in and around Lawrence, Kansas. All kinds of people -- Jason Robards playing a surgeon, Holling from Northern Exposure, Steve Guttenberg portraying a college kid, some black guy in the Air Force, John Lithgow -- are concerned about the fact that the USSR has stopped allowing people in and out of West Berlin (remember West Berlin?). For the next hour, this concern is played against the backdrop of typical life in Kansas. Holling's daughter is screwing some boy, and Holling hates that, but they're getting married so how can he really complain. Jason Robards' daughter, meanwhile, is moving off to Boston and he's gonna miss her. Robards' wife is reminiscing about the time they did it with the Cuban Missle Crisis on the TV in the background. You get the idea: You come to like a bunch of people, and then they get nuked.

That's where it gets crazy, because there's all this 28 Days Later-style chaos, with heavy decisions such as: Do you let Steve Guttenberg into your basement even though he has his own food or do you just blast him with your shotgun because this is World War III? That kind of thing. Meanwhile, cows and pigs and dogs and daughter's boyfriends are dead all over the place and people are dropping teeth and hair behind them everywhere they go. Yeah, it's like a zombie movie, except that back in 1983, we as kids had our teachers and principals and parents and the TV itself telling us every day that this was all real and would probably happen in our lifetime.

Sooner rather than later.

Some facts about The Day After [via IMDB and Wikipedia]

- After the movie's broadcast, ABC aired a debate between William F. Buckley and Carl Sagan about nuclear proliferation. Sagan compared the arms race to "two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five."

- Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that the film "left me greatly depressed." After Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, he sent the director, Nicholas Meyer, a telegram that said, "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."

- My favorite quote from the movie is actually a quote from Albert Einstein: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."