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Was the seventies a disaster? We like to think so. Carter was in office. Oil Embargos were happening. Nuclear power plants were being protested. Disco was on the rise. Hollywood must have assumed it was the end times and found a love of the disaster film. So we grabbed a few for the show. We kick it off with a large block buster affair. The Towering Inferno(1974).
A brand new skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles is about to open. It’s super advanced and the safest tower ever built. Until Paul Newman finds that some of the wiring was not up to his spec as a sub-contractor cut corners to take kick backs. A fire starts on a floor just a bit below the inaugural party. Which kicks off rescue and escape attempts galore.
Weltall then talks about The China Syndrome(1979). A movie that gets lumped in as a disaster movie but doesn’t really fit the bill. There’s a nuclear plant that has some weird vibrations going on. A camera man at a local new station investigates and finds secret problems covered up by a contractor. A series of events occur that are fairly prosaic but might make this movie responsible for holding back nuclear power more than any protest in US history.
Tim has Meteor(1979). Sean Connery is busy racing a yacht in the ocean when NASA comes and picks him up. Turns out there was some unusual comet that comes barreling through our solar system that hits a rock in the asteroid belt. This sends a large hunk hurtling towards earth and could be an extinction event. So the US and the USSR have to come to an agreement to launch nuclear weapons to blow up the threat
