Shall We Play A Game?

I saw War Games the other night.  What a riot.  It's the 25th anniversary of the movie, in fact. What a classic film!  A few scenes really stuck out for me.  There is one scene where Broderick puts a floppy disk into the computer that must have been 6 inches x 6 inches.  It was huge!  And yes, children, computers used to require those huge things.  When I first sat at a computer in elementary school, we had to use floppy disks.  It would have been around the time War Games came out.  The computers back then couldn't do a damn thing and you had to tell the computer everything you wanted it to do.  My family got an Apple IIe when they first came out a thousand years ago and besides me playing Spy Hunter and Castle Wolfenstein, it just sat there.

There was another scene where Broderick is doing research on Falken and he's using the card catalog at the library.  How many of you children remember the Dewey Decimal System?  That's right, before computers people had to look up books using this archaic card catalog and then grab these heavy ass books off of shelves and read through them and then make copies of the information.  I was still doing this in college.  Writing papers was a bitch because it took some serious leg work at the library.  These days you can cut and paste and do research online and never even have to get up to finish a paper of any number of pages.  Too easy?

The third scene that popped out was more of a reference than a particular scene.  When talking about Russia and nuclear war, the general made a reference to Eastern Germany.  That's right children, Eastern Germany.  There used to be this big ass wall running through Germany.  And the eastern side was the bad side.  And then in the late 80's, the wall came down and Germany was unified.  And the Cold War was over.  Most of you little kiddies don't remember living day to day in a constant fear of the big, bad Russians and the threat of nuclear war.  It wasn't like we ran from bunker to bunker and always had a pantry full of canned goods.  Normal life went on quite safe and normal.  But the Russians were out there.  And anything could happen at any time.  And a lot of our movies were about that.

Which brings me to my next thought.  The top 3 best Cold War movies of all time:

1) Red Dawn

2) War Games

3) Rocky 4

Any of you youngsters want to get a good handle on what I'm talking about, watch those 3 movies and then we'll talk.  Besides the fear of nuclear war and the Russians, you'll get a good glimpse of 80's nostalgia- floppy disks et al.

Greetings Professor Falken.  Shall We Play A Game?