"The House in the Middle"

[BigFitz]

Make sure to keep your house painted and your yard and living room spotless. A film from the '50's showing what could happen to your home if you don't tidy up and keep your home painted in the event of a nuclear attack.

http://www.archive.org/details/Houseint1954

 

[scotrace]

Wow. The dumbest of all the dumb Cold War films. Gotta be. Tortured logic for "time to paint the house, Ralph."

 

[scottyrocks]

Sponsored by the 'National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association' (1954). What else would one expect?

 

[JimWagner]

Notice the sponsors:

Producer: National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association
Sponsor: National Clean Up-Paint Up-Fix Up Bureau. Produced with the cooperation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration.

Guess my house would just melt since it's covered in vinyl siding.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A logical descendant of the "Save The Surface And You Save All" campaign of the twenties. Those paint boys were nothing if not opportunistic.

 

[Connery]

I will have the nicest house on the block and approximately six weeks to enjoy it before I am dead.lol I better cleanup and paint up.......NOW!

 

[rue]

So that's where people got the idea to have plastic on their furniture.....

Good thing my house is stucco

 

[LizzieMaine]

If you bought a stucco house, under the law that makes you the stuck-ee.

 

[rue]

lol

 

[sheeplady]

So it's all the lead and VOCs in the paint that's protecting us? Better bring back the oil-based lead paint!

(Sponsered by an upset person who can only buy oil-based paint in quarts.)

 

[scottyrocks]

If you bought a stucco house, under the law that makes you the stuck-ee.

Is the person who applied the stucco the stuck-er?

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

[video=youtube;uEphsqDIF4Q]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEphsqDIF4Q&feature=related[/video]

 

[DNO]

Gee whiz...guess I'm lucky my house is double brick. That way I won't have to worry about a fire in those few milliseconds between the flash and the blast...and I wasted all that money on fire extinguishers.

 

[rue]

Gee whiz...guess I'm lucky my house is double brick. That way I won't have to worry about a fire in those few milliseconds between the flash and the blast...and I wasted all the money on fire extinguishers.

But do you have plastic on your furniture?? and have you picked up your newspapers???

 

[Retro_GI_Jane]

Gotta love vintage propaganda. Your house may be standing after the blast, but never mind the fallout! lol And wow, their idea of clutter is a phone book and a newspaper on the end table. By their standards, I'm the worst housewife in the world.

 

[DNO]

But do you have plastic on your furniture?? and have you picked up your newspapers???

No...fool that I am. My tabletops are not particularly tidy and the plastic...if only I'd known!

 

[rue]

Gotta love vintage propaganda. Your house may be standing after the blast, but never mind the fallout! lol And wow, their idea of clutter is a phone book and a newspaper on the end table. By their standards, I'm the worst housewife in the world.

I thought the same thing lol

No...fool that I am. My tabletops are not particularly tidy and the plastic...if only I'd known!

Well, see now it's too late.... shakeshead

 

[scottyrocks]

Hey. Just keep the house freshly painted.

Get to work.

 

[LizzieMaine]

An awful lot of the campy cold-war stuff you see on the Internet is fake, cooked up by smirking hipsters anxious to point out how stupid their grandparents were.

This, however, is not such a fake. Flobar was real, advertised in all the best publications, and was eventually put out of business by the Federal Trade Commission.

 

[DNO]

There may be fakery out there but I remember "duck and cover". I also have a very clear memory of the near panic caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember people talking about building backyard fallout shelters. I remember diagrams of the 'blast radius' of an 'x' kiloton nuclear bomb. There was a very real fear of nuclear war...I grew up with it. I suspect that the authorities, faced with the fact that a nuclear war would bring unimaginable destruction, had to come up with some way of making the people feel that they could do something to survive. Hence, the Flobar...and duck and cover. The end of the cold war brought enormous relief.