MovieChat Forums > Duck and Cover (1952) Discussion > Questions for kids who saw this at the t...

Questions for kids who saw this at the time

posted 14 years ago by tmaj48
4 replies | jump to latest

Did you practice falling down onto the sidewalk off your bike, throwing
yourself to the sidewalks against walls of buildings, etc., after you saw
this film? Watching it makes me wonder if kids wound up hurting themselves
by instinctively ducking and covering if they heard a sudden loud noise or
a quick flash of lightning.

And the reassuring tone of the narrator when he describes how children in
the classroom can keep themselves safe by following the the teachers'
instructions, remaining calm, etc.--did any of you have any "rogue" teachers
who may have dropped some fatalistic comments about the drills? ("Look, kids,
seriously, who do they think they're kidding? The bomb drops, that's it...."
and things of that sort).

Do you still have dreams about this stuff?

I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!

[–] Alek_Hidell 14 years ago

This movie was made two years before I was born, so I was in grade school in the very early 60's. We didn't throw ourselves against walls, but I do remember practicing ducking under our desks, and evacuating the rooms to sit in the hallway with our head between our legs. Yes, it was a very scary time, especially around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was 8 then, and my dad made a small shelter in the corner of the basement "just in case". We were pretty much told by everyone that it wasn't "if" it happened, but "when" it happened.

------------------
I'm just a patsy!

[–] cinegraphic 14 years ago

As a child in the 50s (I was born in 1950), I participated in what were then called "air raid drills" in my nyc public school.

In 1st & 2nd grade, we practiced getting down on our knees & elbows on the floor under our school desks, with our hands clasped behind our necks. We stayed silent for several minutes while teachers and school officials made the rounds to see if we were doing it right.

When I reached the 4th grade, we stopped ducking under our classroom desks, and instead moved out of the classrooms and into the hallways, where we practiced a similar 'duck & cover' position facing the hallway lockers.

Years later, I wondered what took the officials so long realizing that the walls of glass windows in the classrooms were not as safe as the walls of metal lockers in the hallways.

By the time I reach the 6th grade, the duck & cover drills became a thing of the past. Perhaps by that time, school officials realized just how pointless such drills would be for any kids in a new york city school.

[–] Molly-31 14 years ago

I grew up in the 1950s, but we were not shown this film in class. Instead, we had storm drills. Same thing but it was supposed to be in case of a tornado. We had a lot more tornadoes and violent storms than nuclear attacks.

I did see this and many other films on nuclear annihilation on television, but I figured we could just go into the basement the way we did for storms, that's why it's called a storm cellar.

Did you notice when the flash comes and they duck and cover, their suburban environment is completely untouched? The guy on the tractor didn't even turn off the tractor before leaping off.

Let's just say that God doesn't believe in me.

[–] jtyroler 12 years ago

I'm glad you had fewer nuclear attacks than tornados and violent storms.

I wasn't born until 1959 and living fairly close to an AFB with a large contingent of ICBMs, we were told a few things that we could do if we survived the initial blast and winds. The one thing I remember was that the water in the toilet tank was safe to drink (before the introduction of Ty-D-Bowl, which put a stop to drinking from the toilet tank).