RE: That Day will come as a trap on all the world
September 24, 2014 at 10:40 pm
(This post was last modified: September 24, 2014 at 10:52 pm by Cyberman.)
Ok, well since we're all going to be killing each other for cans of beans within twenty-four hours, I'll reveal the answer.
The line was from a 1982 dark comedy miniseries called "Whoops Apocalypse", later turned into a moderately successful film starring Peter Cook and Loretta Swit.
It had a fairly typical sitcom plot:
Unpopular US President and former movie star Johnny Cyclops, aided by his ultra-right-wing adviser the Deacon, arrange for the fake assassination of the deposed Shah of Iran as a prelude to smuggling him into Britain. They plan to arm him with a newly developed nuclear weapon, the Johnny Cyclops Bomb, so he can reclaim his throne. (Cyclops objects to his name being used on a WMD and insists it be changed to Quark Bomb. Thereafter, it's referred to in news reports as "The Quark Bomb - formerly known as The Johnny Cyclops Bomb, after the President of the same name"). However, they can't simply hand it over to a foreign power, so they steal one from a depot and give it to a terrorist named Lacrobat to transport it for them. Lacrobat, not being told who he's working for, promptly disappears with the bomb.
Meanwhile, the Shah and his permanently and religiously blindfolded manservant Abdab are held on a cross-Channel ferry, which immediately falls foul of a national seamans' strike and stopped mid-Channel indefinitely. From then on he repeatedly fails in his attempts to escape the ferry. Even a raid by the SAS to capture him fails, during which they machine gun one of their own to death.
In Britain, the sitting Tory Government loses the election and the newly elected Labour PM, Kevin Pork, takes office and immediately bans the Shah from entering the country. His Foreign and Home Secretaries are alarmed when Pork reveals his secret identity as Superman and they realise they have to keep the press from finding out that a lunatic has become Prime Minister by a landslide. During a visit to Moscow, the Foreign Secretary learns that the decrepit Soviet Premier, Dubienkin, with a habit of dying and being replaced by an identical clone, has obtained secret recordings of Pork and his Secretaries discussing the Shah still being alive. In order to avoid a scandal, Britain ends up joining the Warsaw Pact.
Meanwhile, KGB Commisar Solzhenitsyn (no relation) is holding two American tourists, Jonathan and Martha Hopper, on the charge of being CIA agents. Eventuially they are revealed to actually be CIA agents and escape, only to be crushed to death by two marines in a helicopter sent to rescue them.
At this point, things get complicated. Cyclops is shot during a live TV broadcast by the best marksman in the CIA, in a desperate attempt to boost his flagging popularity which is ten points below Charles Manson. Unfortunately, the ambulance speeding him to hospital kills his vastly more popular political opponent and the public turn against him even more. Lacrobat loses the Quark Bomb, disguised as a large coffin and recovered by US troops who mistake it for the casket of a General who was recently blown up in his bed by terrorists (two 18-year-old Marines were also killed). He learns that the General is to be cremated and tracks down the crematorium where the bomb explodes, wiping out the entire US army who were only recently sent there on a peacekeeping exercise. With the world on full alert, the Shah is secretly smuggled aboard the space shuttle and launched into orbit to keep him out of the way. He and Abdab cause a fire which de-orbits the shuttle. With Soviet missiles on the way in retaliation, Cyclops now has to convince the Russians that the object hurtling towards Moscow is not a missile.
There's tons I've left out involving a message sent using the Shah's parrot and a lie detector implanted into Cyclops' brain by the Russians, but those are the bones of it. Some of my favourite lines come from Ed Bishop's news anchorman, Jay Garrick (no relation to the Flash):
"A woman who, twenty years ago, secured a lock of Frank Sinatra's hair has today sold it back to him for an undisclosed sum."
"The missing Quark Bomb has at last been traced. It was seen going off approximately twenty minutes ago, in the middle of what used to be Israel."
The line was from a 1982 dark comedy miniseries called "Whoops Apocalypse", later turned into a moderately successful film starring Peter Cook and Loretta Swit.
It had a fairly typical sitcom plot:
Unpopular US President and former movie star Johnny Cyclops, aided by his ultra-right-wing adviser the Deacon, arrange for the fake assassination of the deposed Shah of Iran as a prelude to smuggling him into Britain. They plan to arm him with a newly developed nuclear weapon, the Johnny Cyclops Bomb, so he can reclaim his throne. (Cyclops objects to his name being used on a WMD and insists it be changed to Quark Bomb. Thereafter, it's referred to in news reports as "The Quark Bomb - formerly known as The Johnny Cyclops Bomb, after the President of the same name"). However, they can't simply hand it over to a foreign power, so they steal one from a depot and give it to a terrorist named Lacrobat to transport it for them. Lacrobat, not being told who he's working for, promptly disappears with the bomb.
Meanwhile, the Shah and his permanently and religiously blindfolded manservant Abdab are held on a cross-Channel ferry, which immediately falls foul of a national seamans' strike and stopped mid-Channel indefinitely. From then on he repeatedly fails in his attempts to escape the ferry. Even a raid by the SAS to capture him fails, during which they machine gun one of their own to death.
In Britain, the sitting Tory Government loses the election and the newly elected Labour PM, Kevin Pork, takes office and immediately bans the Shah from entering the country. His Foreign and Home Secretaries are alarmed when Pork reveals his secret identity as Superman and they realise they have to keep the press from finding out that a lunatic has become Prime Minister by a landslide. During a visit to Moscow, the Foreign Secretary learns that the decrepit Soviet Premier, Dubienkin, with a habit of dying and being replaced by an identical clone, has obtained secret recordings of Pork and his Secretaries discussing the Shah still being alive. In order to avoid a scandal, Britain ends up joining the Warsaw Pact.
Meanwhile, KGB Commisar Solzhenitsyn (no relation) is holding two American tourists, Jonathan and Martha Hopper, on the charge of being CIA agents. Eventuially they are revealed to actually be CIA agents and escape, only to be crushed to death by two marines in a helicopter sent to rescue them.
At this point, things get complicated. Cyclops is shot during a live TV broadcast by the best marksman in the CIA, in a desperate attempt to boost his flagging popularity which is ten points below Charles Manson. Unfortunately, the ambulance speeding him to hospital kills his vastly more popular political opponent and the public turn against him even more. Lacrobat loses the Quark Bomb, disguised as a large coffin and recovered by US troops who mistake it for the casket of a General who was recently blown up in his bed by terrorists (two 18-year-old Marines were also killed). He learns that the General is to be cremated and tracks down the crematorium where the bomb explodes, wiping out the entire US army who were only recently sent there on a peacekeeping exercise. With the world on full alert, the Shah is secretly smuggled aboard the space shuttle and launched into orbit to keep him out of the way. He and Abdab cause a fire which de-orbits the shuttle. With Soviet missiles on the way in retaliation, Cyclops now has to convince the Russians that the object hurtling towards Moscow is not a missile.
There's tons I've left out involving a message sent using the Shah's parrot and a lie detector implanted into Cyclops' brain by the Russians, but those are the bones of it. Some of my favourite lines come from Ed Bishop's news anchorman, Jay Garrick (no relation to the Flash):
"A woman who, twenty years ago, secured a lock of Frank Sinatra's hair has today sold it back to him for an undisclosed sum."
"The missing Quark Bomb has at last been traced. It was seen going off approximately twenty minutes ago, in the middle of what used to be Israel."
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'