Alas, Babylon

I was a high school student in North Florida when my family watched this episode of Playhouse 90. It really struck home since the location was in my state and the different bombs were exploding in locations that I had family and friends living at the time.

With the Cuban Missle Crisis and the football players of my high school being taught how to drive the school buses in case of an alert the story line took on new meaning. It was required reading in our history class.

Our Explorer Scout post was also taught a two week class by the Civil Defense leader in our town in the event we should come under such an attack. We all felt that we would survive since we were a small town and not be a target of the Russians, very much as in the Playhouse 90 episode "Alas Babylon"

A live teleplay based on the novel by Pat Frank about the ultimate horror coming to your neighborhood. Don Murray is a lawyer in a small town in rural Florida. Life is simple; slow and idyllic, until the unthinkable happens one afternoon. Done at a time when most people had black and white TV's and the Cold War was very real and very, very close,it had a stark documentary style and feel to it that terrified people. A truly remarkable event in TV history, that probably should be in the Smithsonian and/or on the AFI's preservation list if it isn't there already.

Most people you might ask (those who have some idea) would tell you that "On the Beach" starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire is the most sobering movie made about a possible civilization ending nuclear war. They would be wrong. "Alas, Babylon" will chill you even now that the threat is gone. Andrews is a military officer on the Florida panhandle talking on the phone to his brother in southern Florida. The line goes dead. He walks outside and looks up to see a giant mushroom cloud over the city where his brother was. It goes downhill from there. The anarchy. The savagery. The beastliness of a human civilization thrown immediately back to the stone age and subjected to the cold blooded kill or be kill code in what was a few days before friendly neighborhood streets. No one's politics can overcome this stark reality.

I was all of thirteen when I saw this Playhouse 90 presentation. The details escape me now, though I recall that it was chilling and scary. It still leaves an impression over a half a century later. Not sure if in this era it was presented live or whether it was done on video tape, which would have been fairly new then. It was done at CBS Television City in Los Angeles, so it might have been on tape. I recall it had the same ominous feeling as the motion picture "Fail Safe," a theatrical release about the Cold War done just a few years later in 1964, and filmed at a studio in New York City, paradoxically. My ranking compares this show to TV of that era, and it would likely stand up dramatically today, even though dated technically. Shows like this are why TV's Golden Era is called the Golden Era. In retrospect, there were only a handful of this caliber.

It is worth noting the majority of reviewers were living and viewing in Florida at the time of the Playhouse 90 broadcast. I am one of them, we had moved to Miami in 1959 from New Hampshire, and I was 11 when this program aired in 1960. To think we had been cooked for entertainment purposes was one thing, but, two years later when we were living in Satellite Beach during the Cuban Missle Crisis was another. It was real time - there were Davy Crockett missle emplacements right outside my school window. Patrick AFB had always been open, but then it was shut down, and attack aircraft taking off every 20 minutes. I walked to school (8th grade) one morning wondering if I would be alive that afternoon. The story Pat Frank wrote had currency. Those of you not around in those days, well, we have hopes you won't experience similar feelings.