Wanna See Something REALLY Scary? A Short Vision
“Wanna see something REALLY scary?”
To horror fans who came of age in the 1980s, the line above instantly evokes memories of Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks in the opening scene from Twilight Zone: The Movie. Now, on a bi-monthly basis, I’ll be asking, “Wanna see something REALLY scary?” with the goal of shocking you with chilling footage plumbed from the darkest corners of YouTube.
The Ed Sullivan Show is considered one of the greatest TV series of all time; the CBS variety show hosted by entertainment columnist Ed Sullivan ran on Sundays from 1948 until 1971, leaving an indelible stamp on national popular culture.
When you’re on TV for as long as Sullivan was, you’re bound to court controversy from time to time; infamous episodes of The Ed Sullivan Show include: An episode on mental illness in 1958, an appearance by Bo Diddly in 1955, an episode in 1964 during which Jackie Mason gave Sullivan the finger—and who can forget the infamous appearance by The Doors in 1967 (immortalized in film by Oliver Stone) when Jim Morrison refused to be censored?
But there’s another infamous episode of the Ed Sullivan show that was so shocking, its traumatic effect left a lasting scar on the American psyche; the date was May 27, 1956. Unbelievable, you won’t find a description of this broadcast on Wikipedia and information on the internet is scant. It’s almost as if there’s been a deliberate effort to erase this broadcast from the memory of history.
Per DangerousMinds.com:
In 1952, the first successful hydrogen bomb was detonated, and it was over 450 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Horrified at such potential for destruction, Hungarian-British animator Peter Foldes and his wife, Joan, began working on a short cartoon in their kitchen, and in 1956, a short version was aired on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan attempted to prepare his audience for the horror of the film, but his introduction stopped short of warning viewers they were about to watch an interpretation of the nuclear holocaust, completed with bloody melting faces.
Sullivan: “Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers, I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the livingroom tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated—but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they call A Short Vision in which they wonder what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped… It is grim, but I think we can all stand to realize that in war there is no winner.”
Wanna see something REALLY scary?
Check out A Short Vision in its entirety below, and try not to think about the fact that the current sociopolitical climate means a nuclear war may be more likely today than at any other point in history.
Got an idea for a future installment of “Wanna See Something REALLY Scary?” Hit me up on Twitter @josh_millican!
Categorized:News
