Where can I find old civil defense films?

Factual Questions
1

I am looking for the campy cartoons that had the duck&cover thing going, or anything like that. Any ideas for places online, or what to look for on file-transfer programs?

I am also looking for movies of atomic blasts.

Thanks!

2

Heh. I love the Internet. Google, “cold war civil defense films”.

Hit #1.
http://www.wps.com/products/films.html

Hit #5.
http://www.conelrad.com/conelrad100/short_subjects.html

Enjoy! :smiley:

3

There’s a movie/documentary thing called The Atomic Cafe that has a lot of such things. Look for it at your video store.

4

I’d definitely check out the Atomic Cafe documentary that Max Torque suggested - it’s great.

If you want stuff on the bomb itself, may i suggest a documentary entitled “Trinity and Beyond”, which looks at the US atomic weapons project from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. It has some amazing footage of a whole heap of tests, including those in Nevada in the early days, and those in the Pacific. The latter have incredible shots of old US warships being purposely blown-up. Much of this old footage has been converted from B+W to colour, and looks spectacular. This site gives you more details on the film.

And the original soundtrack is great.

5

Not to take away from an otherwise dead-on post (The documentary is truly stunning in it’s detail and overall thoroughness), but I believe that above comment is wrong.

I saw the behind the scenes on the making of this documentary (I’m still waiting for the behind the scenes of the making of the behind the scenes of the original. It’s coming, I’m sure) and it doesn’t say a thing about taking black and white footage and turning it into color.

What is does talk about is the lengths the producers of this documentary went in obtaining and cleaning up the color footage already in existence for this film. Some of it was classified, and some of it was already out there and been seen by millions before. But none of it, for all I know, has been altered that dramatically- it’s original in content.

Again, it’s an amazing piece of work- it’s along the lines of the breathtaking ‘For All Mankind’ in its scope and execution, and is definitely worth seeing- but I doubt it resorted to colorization of black and white footage to get it’s point, and beauty, across… it didn’t need to.

*Just a slight nit-pick, but an important one to note.

6

Whooooooops…

CnoteChris is exactly right, and i didn’t read the website closely enough. The colour was restored and not added to the film.