Cinema Misfits

In the mid fifties, a Civil Defense short was created to address what can only be called The Tidiness Gap. Since the film was intended for the outlying suburbs and towns not immediately in the kill zone of a ground zero explosion, the whole issue of large metropolitan areas being vaporized is discretely sidestepped. The short also tends to focus on the atomic heat or “thermal wave” from a nuclear explosion, and doesn’t have a great deal to offer on the other affects from the blast like… well, for one thing, radiation.
All these years later, it comes as something of a surprise to realize that Hazel might have been our first line of defense against nuclear attack. Perhaps the Civil Defense seal should have been replaced by The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.