#19 Postby GalvestonDuck » Fri Jul 01, 2005 9:38 am
I'm so amazed that after 20 years, certain scenes stuck with me and felt as familiar as if I'd just seen it last week. And they weren't all particulary "important" scenes either. My first sense of familiarity was when Denise was running around chasing her younger sister, Jolene. Then when Danny, the younger brother, asked the doctor, "When can I see my sister again?" since he couldn't see due to the flashburns. And the part where Steven Guttenburg's character was chasing Denise outside the family's home with the dead animals in the field -- "You can't see it. You can't smell it. And you can't taste it. But it's here! And it going through me and it's going through you. Right to your cells!" And of course, the final scene where Jason Robards character says, "Get out of my house!"
Ever see a movie that you haven't seen in years, and somehow you still remember certain scenes and lines and can repeat them as if you've seen it a gazillion times? Of course, the line that always stuck with me that I didn't even need to see the movie to recall it -- "This is Lawrence, Kansas. Is anyone there? Anybody at all?" Still chilling.
I suppose I still need to get the DVD to add TDA to my disaster flicks because I feel pretty certain TVLand edited last night's broadcast -- either for content or length (the second is most likely). It was obvious because during the blast scene, there was one part when John Cullum's character (the farm dad) was running towards the house with his son Danny in his arms and saying, "I got ya, son, I got ya." And yet, during one of the breaks, when the commentators were speaking, they showed a scene where Danny was running in a field, with his back towards the blast, and then he turned and looked. A bright red glow covered his face so we could understand how he got the flashburns to his eyes. Then his father appears and grabs him, which was probably followed by the scene where he was running inside with him. Furthermore, I could have sworn that the blast scene was much more detailed (and frighteningly so) -- wasn't there one shot of a woman just as she got radiated and blasted, frozen in fear, changing from flesh and blood to bone, in an almost X-ray type image? And then the same thing for a horse? I mean, they were quick images, but I remember that vividly.
So, I have to wonder what else they cut, even if it wasn't crucial to the movie. Nevertheless, I appreciated being able to see it again. So real and scary. And yet, like it said at the end, what was depicted was likely "less severe that what would actually occur."
Oh yeah...wait! I had seen it twice before last night...but just a few months after the original broadcast. We watched it in school to compare it to the book, "Alas, Babylon." I said back then and I'd say it now -- in the event of something that catastrophic, I think I might prefer to be at ground zero than outside the blast and have to die slowly from the radiation effects.
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