TESTAMENT and THE DAY AFTER owe THE WAR GAME big time!

I saw THE WAR GAME as a university screening in 1978 with Peter Watkins in attendence. Oooooooooooh man...... I'd never seen such a bleak but original film before.

Now skip ahead a few years. At the height of Ronnie Raygun's "I Want to Start WW3" mania, PBS and ABC both aired cautionary tales of just what a nuclear war might really mean to the survivors. ABC's THE DAY AFTER is the better known of the two, with its all-star, big budget production. PBS' TESTAMENT was closer to THE WAR GAME in spirit and execution, with its concentration on decaying conditions in a small Californian town in the years following the nuclear war.

But both shows were clearly influenced by THE WAR GAME, so much so that had Watkins or the BBC been interested, a plagiarism suit would have been an easy win. Nicholas Meyer, the man behind THE DAY AFTER, attended the same university I did (Univerity of Iowa in the mid-70s) and could easily have seen film there.