In this iteration, the show’s triumphant contestants demonstrate that the race against time can be won-that is, that disaster can be averted. A very large analog clock, reminiscent of the Doomsday Clock, hangs over the show’s set. In the long-running British game show “ Countdown,” for example, contestants try to complete number and word problems in a set amount of time. Their terrain was not time, but rather “the top” or “the most popular,” organized sequentially and leading not to “zero” but to “number one.” Other kinds of countdown programs amplified the race against time. By counting down to the latest greatest hit, these shows slowed the rush of time and demarcated the recent past. The popular Australian music show “ Countdown,” which debuted in 1974, inspired similar shows in the United States and Europe. The elements of the genesis countdown as we know it today were etched in history on July 16, 1969, when at least 500 million people around the world tuned in to hear a loud and clear countdown give way to an exciting, daring and transformative objective.ĭuring the 1970s, the countdown moved beyond atomic test sites and space missions and onto radio and television shows-and away from the nihilism of a bomb blast toward the triumph of a rocket launch.
With each televised rocket launch during the 1960s, the countdown accumulated more and more positive associations with the public, building up to the historic countdown and liftoff of Apollo 11, the spaceship that took a crew of three men to the moon. One of the advisors on the film was early space travel enthusiast Willy Ley, who later immigrated to the United States, where he worked for NASA, orchestrating its rocket launches. The lavish science fiction multi-reel film had an outsized impact on Germany’s rocket scientists, who after World War II became central to the American space program. No one had ever heard of or seen anything like the launch before-or the countdown. The countdown associated with rocket launches had its origins in the Weimar Republic, where Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Woman in the Moon featured an extended countdown to a moon rocket launch. The blast-off was followed by astronaut Alan Shepard saying, “Roger, liftoff and the clock has started.” Time did not end, as apocalyptic countdowns had threatened instead, a new clock began. Some 45 million Americans watching the national nightly news heard the countdown to the successful launch of America’s first manned space flight. The televised countdowns of the 1950s, whether real or fictional, were frightening temporal experiences in which time was distended and stretched, and then extinguished.īut on May 5, 1961, the countdown got its first major positive association.
#MAKING COUNTDOWNS MOVIE#
At the very end he intones ‘minus 10 seconds, minus 5 seconds and minus 4 seconds’ and so on down to the moment of the explosion.”Ī few years later, Alfred Hitchcock domesticated the atomic countdown in the 1957 made-for-television movie Four O’Clock, transplanting it into the basement of a suburban home wired with explosives in the minutes and seconds before the eponymous time. A 1953 San Francisco Examiner article reported on an atomic bomb test in the nearby Nevada desert: “ designated official on a loudspeaker and short-wave radio hookup announces at intervals the time remaining before the explosion. In the years that followed, these same scientists were the ones who brought the term “count down” to the American lexicon.
Notably, in 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists introduced the Doomsday Clock, which to this day provides a visual reckoning of just how close we are to apocalypse. Though disaster has always been a part of American life, the threat of nuclear annihilation introduced pervasive existential fears. Both of these countdown types took form during the Atomic Age. Today, we wonder how much time we have until the next Covid-19 variant, natural disaster or terrorist attack. But there are also “apocalyptic countdowns,” in which after time runs out, disaster ensues. The wait for the new year-with its predictions, resolutions and parties-is typically generative, optimistic and hopeful. The New Year’s Eve countdown might be characterized as a “genesis countdown”: After time runs out, it starts over again. How, then, did countdowns go from almost nonexistent to ubiquitous in the latter half of the 20th century? And why are we so drawn to them now, especially to mark one year’s end and another’s beginning?Ĭountdowns as we know them today serve many purposes. Celebrations and midnight kisses on December 31, of course. Few people counted down to anything until the 1960s and 1970s-and yes, that included the new year.
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