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Canada's Apocalyptic Made-For-TV Mockumentary Stuck It to America and the Soviet Union in 1984

The best part: "Countdown to Looking Glass" premiered on American television. Because ratings?

The best part? Countdown to Looking Glass first aired on HBO.

It would later air on CTV, of course. But, to think! The messaging behind the 86-minute fictional doom piece, which had the US and Russia locking horns over the Strait of Hormuz, the main port of entry to the Persian Gulf, before a banking collapse inevitably triggers the two powers to volley nukes, was apparently so lost on American ratings hounds that it first went out over our airwaves, anyway.

And while it did very clearly feature two mere-moral protagonists, Bob Calhoun and Dorian Waldorf, in drawn-out and hang-wrung drama, Countdown to Looking Glass is part and parcel of film genre that relied heavily, at times exclusively, on simulated newscasts. In that sense, it can sit right alonside something like Special Bulletin (1983), the US's entry in Cold War-era fictional bomb-doom-newsroom cinema.

Whether or not Countdown to Looking Glass was in some way a response to Special Bulletin is anyone's guess. All we're left with is this announcement from the Emergency Broadcast System: (screeching tone).

@thebanderson