I just finished watching the miniseries “Amerika” (about a Soviet-dominated U.S.) which premiered in 1987. I remember the hype at the time (and the spoof “Amerida” on SNL where Canada took over the U.S.), but I never saw it.
It wasn’t very good. The exact mechanism how the Soviets took over America was deliberately left vague (Wikipedia says the novelisation explains that America was crippled by a huge EMP), but it didn’t seem very plausible. There was a lot of choppy jumping between the various characters that I didn’t like.
I did think it was vaguely interesting in the sense that it seems like a right-wing fantasy: America has slouched its way into socialism and a political maverick points out that the electoral system is rigged and the media has ganged up against him, and then he inspires a group of followers to support his extremely vague plans to make America great again.
The ending wasn’t very satisfying, since it seemed like they were trying to set it up for a sequel (that never happened).
One of the reasons was it was a movie made by people with an agenda. The Right at the time was very angry with The Day after and the way it indirectly pushed for peace with the Soviet Union by dramatizing the terribleness of the alternative. They basically wanted to show a Right Wing Nightmare (that had almost no basis in reality) come to life.
As for me, at the time a kid who loved Sci Fi and thought of it only on that level at the time, I thought it would be awesome but was bored to tears in minutes and never saw the entire thing.
I liked that, instead of banishing people to Siberia, they just banished them to Nebraska. North Dakota would seem more likely… But, just the thought of people voluntarily living in Nebraska… Always amusing. (says the guy who lives in Kansas - pitiful, I know.)
That was a big problem; there wasn’t much happening for the series other than general moping. There were a few kind of chilling parts, like when the high school marching band in the Lincoln Day parade starts playing the USSR national anthem. But mostly it was moping and listening to Sam Neill talk in a Russian accent.
The most embarrassing part was when he was actually trying to speak Russian and they overdubbed a translation.
I watched bits and pieces of it but could never sit through an entire episode, it was so stupid. The US just “gave up” right in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s second term. Yeah, right! :rolleyes:
IIRC Cindy Pickett of St Elsewhere was in it. It looked to me like she was embarrassed to have ever allowed herself to be cast.
Chris Kristofferson I’ve never been able to stomach. Every time he walked into a room, it seemed like someone just left.
I was working on my degree in Russian and Soviet Studies at the time. What I found most interesting was that ABC (in what I assume was a spasm of regret for putting such dreck on the air) devoted at least one installment of Nightline to interview Soviet citizens to see what they thought. (There could well have been more than one; I don’t remember.) This was probably the only time in the history of television that a network was basically counterprogramming its own programming.
As I recall, Ted Turner didn’t think much of the series premise, and countered by having his own series as a rebuttal. That’s not the way I remember it, though. I thought that Ted aired some kind of Soviet ‘Goodwill Games’ competition, but apparently that’s not right.
And they had nothing to do with what Turner was proposing airing. I qualified it with ‘some kind of’ and was using ‘Goodwill Games’ as an adjective. I don’t recall the title of what Turner was planning to air, and I don’t know that he ever actually did air something in response.
I missed this show at the time, and that sounds like it was a good thing!
I didn’t like in V, also, how the military just sort of “gave up” as well. Yes, the show was supposed to be an alternate take on the French resistance, but even in WWII there was a regular military fighting as well.
I think I’ll have to go watch Red Dawn now! Wolverines!
Turner staged the Goodwill Games to help improve US/Soviet relations. I didn’t say they had anything to do with another program, nor do I remember another program ever being produced or aired.
The aliens just kind of came in out of nowhere and were welcomed at first. They didn’t start killing and eating people until they had thoroughly infiltrated human society.
Realistically, what can you do against beings armed with warp-driven starships, antigravs, and energy weapons, anyway?
Yeah, I remember watching the first 45 minutes or so of episode one before turning it off. It wasn’t very exciting, but mostly it was just impossible to accept the hazy backstory that the USSR had somehow actually conquered America without nuclear devastation. I remember reading in TV Guide that supposedly the Soviets used some kind of space-based orbiting magnetic field generator to fry our electrical grid and communications networks. It was sort of implying that we had become so lazy and decadent that without our MTV we’d be helpless pushovers. :rolleyes:
