'The Day After' Was A Scary Thing That Happened 30 Years Ago Today

This was the day back in 1983 where if you were, say, an impressionable ten-year-old boy, you came home from school and watched “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” and did your spelling homework had dinner with your family and then got ready for the broadcast of a TV movie people had been talking about for weeks, the warnings about how disturbing it was going to be only fueling your ten-year-old boy interest in what there had actually been discussions in school over whether or not it should be avoided. Then you sat down and watched what would happen to America if there were a nuclear holocaust. Even though the fear of that kind of annihilation has long since been assuaged by the grim realization that we don’t need weapons of mass destruction to eradicate our species when continued overuse of air conditioning and antibiotics will manage to deliver the same result you can still remember some of the more vivid images from the show which, now that you think about it, was way too disturbing for a ten-year-old boy to watch. It was the kind of thing could scar somebody for life in odd, unpredictable ways. But this was also true of “Jennifer Slept Here,” which was also on TV that year. Somehow you worked through it.