Was ABC's 1987 miniseries AMERIKA a 14 hour $40 million shitpost? -

[ln18]

In 1983 ABC aired a nuclear scare movie The Day After and Ben Stein wrote a column suggesting a miniseries of a Soviet takeover.

“In particular, since my dear friends at ABC have made a TV movie very rightly describing the terror of an atomic attack on America, perhaps they might consider something else. Perhaps they might make a TV movie about why the people of the United States face such a dreadful risk. They might make a movie about what life in the United States would be like if we lived under Soviet domination.”
--Ben Stein Column, October 31, 1983

ABC paid Stein a fee and produced one of the most pointless and expensive boondoggles in TV history, Amerika, set 10 years after America pussed out because of an EMP and gave control of the country to the USSR. 7 nights, no one cared, it was a laughingstock and pissed off all sides politically. The right were given a weak America that totally surrendered without any fighting and commie Kris Kristofferson as the "patriot hero leader" who looked like a bum moped around and always failed. The left were given demonic terrorist UN murdertroops and evil Communists. The rest were given 14 hours of nothing.

One highlight: all of Congress is murdered after they refuse to disband (the Soviet guy who orders this, to prevent a nuclear strike against US cities, kills himself after he wanders around all the dead bodies):

Letterman making fun of it:

SNL making fun of it (sketch after the monologue, Phil Hartman plays a father pissed off about Canada taking over the US and his family being OK aboot it)

Saturday Night Live- February 14, 1987 (S12 E11, partial) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Here is approximately the first two-thirds of an episode of SNL from Valentine's Night of 1987, with Bronson Pinchot of Perfect Strangers this week's host and...

archive.org

Was it all just a massive shitpost to stir a reaction?

 

[RA-5C Vigilante]

I would say more of trying to tap into the public fears at the time.

Of course The Day After did it better. The only improvement is Kris Kristofferson, and that might be more of a disadvantage depending on your personal taste.

 

[ditto]

You forgot the best part: Sam Neil as an evil commie doing a passable Russian accent, specifying about how weak the American psychology is.

The Day After because it was quick, emotional, to the point. Amerika dragged on and on and was so ridiculous and implausible.

There's one episode with a small town parade that goes for about 15 minutes - and right at the end, shock horror! - someone carrying a portrait of Lenin and Lincoln side-by-side.

Something it got right is some goddamn boring life must have been like in eastern bloc countries..

 

[Xarpho]

The rest were given 14 hours of nothing.

So, basically a particularly shitty Netflix Original. Nothing to see here.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Christine Lahti was in this?!

 

[inexplicable ethos]

The left were given demonic terrorist UN murdertroops and evil Communists.

So basically reality? Well, it is true that the left tends to hate reality.

 

[JosephStalin]

For some reason, and I have no fucking idea whatsoever, in the 1984-86 time frame some people were worried the Russians would take over the USA. The biggest movie from that time was "Red Dawn", in which Commies of all types were killed by the bushel by teenage resistance fighters in Colorado. A major book from that period was "Warday", describing a USA five years after a limited nuclear war between the USSR and the USA. Two reporters from a Dallas newspaper take a trip across the country, or basically two countries - the untouched West Coast and the slowly recovering rest of the country, with a heavy British and Japanese presence intended to keep the USA behind them for good.

"Amerika" was shown during early 1987. By that time, everyone had woke up, said to themselves, "The Russians take US over? No fucking way! What a laugh!", had a good laugh, and the thought vanished from everyone's mind, never to return. So nobody could take the show seriously, unless you just wanted to get pissed off for no reason. "Amerika" was never rebroadcast. Don't think it even went to cable. Some years back bought "Amerika" on VHS for shits and grins. Once I started watching it, I remembered why I couldn't fucking stand it. Rewound the tape and put the set away. Still available on Amazon, videotape and DVD - but who WANTS to buy it?

Then in 1989 the Iron Curtain started to fall, largely peacefully, without the loss of one American soldier. We were astounded to realize just how weak the USSR and Warsaw Pact really were. Then at the end of 1991 the Soviet Union died, not with a bang, but a whimper.

A plug for Gorbachev - to his eternal credit, during the last hours of the Soviet Union, he left his "nuclear football" alone and didn't order a nuclear strike on the USA. I am most grateful; at the time my kids were 8 and 3 years old. At least my children wouldn't need to worry about a Soviet ICBM attack. That little girl and little boy got a chance to grow up, just like millions of other little American children. I assure you a Stalin would have pushed that button. But don't believe Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko would have pushed that button, either. They knew what war was really like.

 

[ln18]

I would say more of trying to tap into the public fears at the time.

Of course The Day After did it better. The only improvement is Kris Kristofferson, and that might be more of a disadvantage depending on your personal taste.

I love Kristofferson. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is one of my favorite movies. He's given nothing to do in this mess, aside from mope and be ineffective.

 

[Travoltron]

I just have vague memories of TV miniseries being all the rage when I was a small child, and I found them extremely boring.
My dad tells this story of me watching Shogun with them and really hating it. When Richard Chamberlain's love interest dies and he's crying, I allegedly said, "Why is he so upset? They all look alike and he can just get another one"

 

[Dom Cruise]

That's what's funny about people's modern nostalgia for the 1980s is they look at it as all dayglo clothing, retro arcade games and crazy hair, but at the time the threat of nuclear annihilation was very real and at that time if a nuclear war had happened, with the number of missiles the US and Soviets had, it would have meant extinction for the human race.

 

[millais]

It's an entire genre of fiction that goes in and out of style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literature

When the great power or superpower is at the top of the heap for too long, its people develop a kind of paranoia about what will happen when it is one day eclipsed by an even greater power, so the societal anxiety finds a cathartic outlet of expression in fiction.

 

[LordofTendons]

For some reason, and I have no fucking idea whatsoever, in the 1984-86 time frame some people were worried the Russians would take over the USA. The biggest movie from that time was "Red Dawn", in which Commies of all types were killed by the bushel by teenage resistance fighters in Colorado. A major book from that period was "Warday", describing a USA five years after a limited nuclear war between the USSR and the USA. Two reporters from a Dallas newspaper take a trip across the country, or basically two countries - the untouched West Coast and the slowly recovering rest of the country, with a heavy British and Japanese presence intended to keep the USA behind them for good.

"Amerika" was shown during early 1987. By that time, everyone had woke up, said to themselves, "The Russians take US over? No fucking way! What a laugh!", had a good laugh, and the thought vanished from everyone's mind, never to return. So nobody could take the show seriously, unless you just wanted to get pissed off for no reason. "Amerika" was never rebroadcast. Don't think it even went to cable. Some years back bought "Amerika" on VHS for shits and grins. Once I started watching it, I remembered why I couldn't fucking stand it. Rewound the tape and put the set away. Still available on Amazon, videotape and DVD - but who WANTS to buy it?

Then in 1989 the Iron Curtain started to fall, largely peacefully, without the loss of one American soldier. We were astounded to realize just how weak the USSR and Warsaw Pact really were. Then at the end of 1991 the Soviet Union died, not with a bang, but a whimper.

A plug for Gorbachev - to his eternal credit, during the last hours of the Soviet Union, he left his "nuclear football" alone and didn't order a nuclear strike on the USA. I am most grateful; at the time my kids were 8 and 3 years old. At least my children wouldn't need to worry about a Soviet ICBM attack. That little girl and little boy got a chance to grow up, just like millions of other little American children. I assure you a Stalin would have pushed that button. But don't believe Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko would have pushed that button, either. They knew what war was really like.

I couldn't sit through Amerika. It was just so bleeding boring and after the mind-numbing idiocy of Red Dawn, I just couldn't do it. The basic premise of most of these books and movies were either just as dumb as The Handmaid's Tale, or they would veer off into fantasy territory. War Day did that when it mentioned the kid that had been born with special powers or something-- it's been a long time since I read that, but you only get special powers from nuclear radiation if you're in a Marvel comic book. I'm sorry, but when you pull that stuff, I'm out. The one book I read that got scary and stayed scary was Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. There was one called Threads shown in America on PBS, and that was just misery porn, not really a red scare sort of thing. But yes, some people were in hysterics about the mainlaind invasion stuff, especially after Red Dawn.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Meh, even an ailing entity like the USSR can destroy a super power if the super power just agrees to die meekly in a corner. Although that was more a Carter era fear.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I wish we had just one good book, movie, or something else about a conventional WW3. Red Storm Rising doesn't count because it's shit. Each decade has its own qualities, but I think that the 1960s or 1970s would be the best time period for an interesting scenario.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to write any sort of scenario with any amount of realism where the United States is invaded. The appeal of Cold War WW3 is the idea of the United States having a World War-style massive battle for the landscape, of D-Day on the beaches of California, Stalingrad in Chicago, Kursk in Iowa, etc.

But, our enemies have never been in any kind of position to even consider threatening the US mainland.