Sometimes when it is a Sunday night and your girlfriend has been out all day and you have spent too long staring tensely at the cat and you are waiting for Match of the Day 2 to start and Monday is breathing down your neck like a two headed dragon, you may find yourself tumbling down the rabbit hole that is the more weird corner of the web. It is here that I discovered A Short Vision…
Amazingly broadcast in prime time on both the BBC in the UK and the Ed Sullivan Show in the US in 1956, A Short Vision is a strange animated short about the end of the world. Packing in a lot of nightmarish imagery and disorientating repetitively primitive language as well as some unsettling rudimentary animation and a screeching score, it is impossible to imagine this ever being shown on any channel at any time in this day and age, never mind when people are just sitting down to enjoy their smiley faces and turkey dinosaurs.
The message is more than simply ‘nuclear war is bad’ and I ended up watching it a few times such is the haunting nature of the subject matter. Still very much pertinent and perhaps even more shocking than when first released, A Short Vision is a good if odd way to spend six minutes of your time.
Watch it here: