Culture  /  Media Criticism

Neutron Sunday

In 1956, Ed Sullivan showed America what nuclear war looks like. We were never the same again.

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On May 21, 1956, a B-52 bomber dropped a 3.8-megaton hydrogen bomb over Namu Island in the Bikini Atoll. This was the first “airdrop” of a thermonuclear device, and the first time the press was invited to observe a nuclear detonation.*

The following Sunday night, Ed Sullivan, whose weekly variety show was then a national institution, decided to mark the event by presenting an animated film called A Short Vision, a scary imagining of what a nuclear apocalypse might look like. The six-minute film, created by artists Joan and Peter Foldes, had been screened for Sullivan on a trip to London. Although not in the habit of presenting experimental art pieces, Ed must have been excited by the idea of combining an act of social conscience with a sensational atomic horror show. After trotting out the standard guests (portly singer Kate Smith, ventriloquist Señor Wences), Sullivan introduced the film, advising parents to tell the “youngsters in the living room … not to be alarmed.” “It is grim,” he warned, “but I think we can all stand it to realize that, in war, there is no winner.” As it turned out, Ed underestimated the traumatic effect the film would have on children across the nation.

Narrated by British actor James McKechnie and with a chilling sci-fi score by Mátyás Seiber, A Short Vision starts out with scenes of forest animals—a leopard, a deer, an owl, a rat—scrambling for cover after spying a UFO hovering in the night sky. As the ship flies over the city, we zoom in on an ordinary family sound asleep in their beds. We see the lined faces of elder statesmen. The narrator explains: “ … their leaders looked up; and their wise men looked up … but it was too late.”

Above the city, we see a huge explosion, a fireball, a mushroom cloud. And one by one, the faces of the people below begin to change. First, the mouth opens in a silent scream. Eyes open wide just before they liquify and trickle down the cheeks. Then the face melts away, layer by layer, until only the shrieking skull is left. Finally, the skull itself shatters and breaks apart, leaving nothing. The expressionistic, no-frills style of the animation somehow amplifies the horror.