YMMV / The Day Called 'X'

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The narrator mentions the "missiles and man-made moons"^note artificial satellites of the Space Race that would lead to the invention of the ICBM, which would cut the time available for a city evacuation to 30 minutes or less.
  • In the film the city officials make sure everything goes like clockwork. Five years later, their response to a wind storm was less impressive; they set up in the city hall basement instead of the $670,000 civil defence shelter and lost communication when the radio tower was damaged. Two weeks later the Cuban Missile Crisis made mockery of the idea that there would be a three hour warning of nuclear attack, and in November 1962 the residents of Portland voted against further civil defence expenditure. The Kelly Butte Civil Defense Shelter was briefly used as an emergency call centre before being abandoned, vandalized, and eventually sealed up.
• Nightmare Fuel: The climax. After Jack Lowe announces that enemy bombers are over Portland, everyone in the shelter waits in silence to see what happens next. Ominous music starts to build up, and then it fades to an overhead shot of the shelter as a long Scare Chord plays, before finally fading to narrator Glenn Ford...
  "What happened after that moment, we leave you to contemplate."

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