What Makes Disaster Films Great

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it and it's just us today, and that's okay, because we're just going to be sitting around rapping about one of our favorite things to talk about, and that is movies. Let's go to the movies.
You had a little Katharine Hepburn thing going on there. Ethel Merman? Katharine Hepburn Hepburn.
It was Catherine Hepburn singing Ethel Merman. Okay.
That's how I took it. I'd like to see that.
Yeah. Yeah, we are going to go to the movies, Chuck, and in particular, a specific kind of movie that the more I dug into, the more I realized it was one of my favorite types of movies.
Oh, yeah? Yeah, disaster movies. I had no idea.
But remember we were talking, this whole thing was kicked off by me watching The Day After Tomorrow a couple weeks ago. Yeah, yeah.
And I was like, yeah, it's one of my favorite movies. And the reason why is because I love disaster movies.
Love them. Yeah, I like a lot of these.
It's not my favorite genre overall, but I found myself saying saying like, oh, yeah, that was pretty good. I like that.
All right. But generally, if we're in this, this is a subgenre of action movies.
And I think I prefer action movies overall more than disaster movies. OK.
All right. Well, yeah, we'll get into that because it is a subgenre of action.
And that makes a lot of sense. Disaster movies are packed with action.
And there are some that are like, okay, this is definitely a disaster film, like The Towering Inferno. Oh, yeah.
Obby. Okay.
But then there's also movies like Speed, and Speed checks off a lot of the boxes. Yeah, not a disaster movie, though.
You would not call it a disaster movie, even though it really could. If you really wedged it in there, it would qualify.
But there's just a couple of little things that are different that make it definitely an action movie. And then you have other ones like The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
Not a disaster movie to me. It ends up on lists.
It's part of the animal attack subgenre of disaster films, which is a subgenre of action. Yeah, it's interesting because I'm sure you did the same thing when reading off some of these.
It's sort of like just a gut feeling sometimes. And you can't say exactly what it is that you feel personally like doesn't count.
But someone, you know, someone else might think it counts. It's not like this is something you can say is very cut and dry, you know.
Right. And because of that, I looked everywhere on the Internet to try to cobble together this list of like basically the basic defining characteristics of disaster films.
Yeah. And it was hard.

Nobody's ever sat down and said, here they are.

Some people have kind of piecemeal,

but people don't talk that much about disaster films,

which I find sad.

Well, maybe this can be that.

And maybe you can, like, I don't know, start a website.

JoshDefinesDisaster.com.

I'll just put this article on there and that'll be that. All right, should we go through some of these? Because you did a bang up job.
Thank you. The first thing you needed in a disaster movie is a disaster.
Sure. But this can be a lot of different things.
A lot of time it's a human made thing. And that varies from climate change movies, which we've seen a lot more of lately, to like pandemics.
And sometimes like I guess some things like Towering Inferno are a bit of a mashup because you can have like the threat of a structural collapse. So that is a human made thing, but it might be brought upon by like a fire or flood or something.
Yes. There's overlap.
Nobody said you can pin down disaster movies pretty easily.

That's right.

What else?

There's like extraterrestrials, a big one.

It can be an alien attack.

It can be a comet or an asteroid headed toward Earth.

Transportation is huge.

People love screwing up like cruise ships and trains and boats and airplanes.

Love it. And then one of the other things about it, too, the disaster is ongoing, right? So it's not like the people survive a five-minute earthquake and then the rest of the movie they all go out to dinner and everything's fine.
They spend the rest of the movie negotiating all the problems that that disaster created. So they're negotiating sub- disasters.
Or it can be like an ongoing disaster, like a flood or something like that. Like that can happen the entire movie.
But one way or another, the entire movie takes place over some sort of disaster in all of its after effects. Yeah, for sure.
Impending or in what? Oh, that's a good point, too. Yeah.
Sometimes there's a lot of lead up to it. Yeah, exactly.
But what am I looking for in process, in progress? Sure. Oh, good Lord.
It's usually a pretty large disaster. And for me, this is like can be a real big differentiator in my personal opinion.

And but again, it's a gut check. Like sometimes if it's just a local thing to me, I'm like, well, that's not really a disaster movie because it has to be more big and sweeping to truly qualify.
but then sometimes it is sort of a smaller thing and I feel like it does qualify

so

like in the case of

you know, like a bridge collapse or a collapse tunnel, like Daylight, Stallone's movie about when that one of the New York tunnels was collapsing or collapsed. Like I considered that a disaster movie.
So I'm like contradicting myself, and that's what makes this all fun. Yeah.
On one end of the spectrum, the world can actually be ending. That could be the premise.
Or like you said, a little tunnel collapse. The rest of the world's just going on business as usual.
Exactly. Let them die.
Like that guy in Airplane. I don't remember that.
What happened? There was like a debate TV show like on the news or something like that. And one was like, we need to take better care of people in the FAA has to step it up.
And the other guy was presenting counterpoint. He was like, I say, let them die.
It's way funnier in the movie. Yeah.
Obviously, surviving the disaster is a big part of the plot point. We know some people won't make it out alive, but usually like most of the A-list cast will make it out alive unless they're really trying to like pull one over on you in a scream sort of way.
Yes. And you teased something just now.
Some people will definitely not survive.

One of the things about disaster movies is all you have to do is basically see one. And the next one, maybe you don't even need to see a second one.
You can pick out very quickly who's going to die. Yeah.
Who's going to live. And the reason why is because stereotypes are pervasive in disaster movies.
Like you have like the dumb brawny guy. Right.
Or, you know, a smart scientist. Mm-hmm.
Damsels in distress. Like to this day, disaster movies are sexist.
I could not come up with a single disaster movie where the hero was a woman. Not a single one in all the decades of disaster movies.
It's men. Most of the main characters and leads are men.
And the woman is basically there to essentially be saved and maybe help out some. Yeah.
I mean, I guess more recently they may throw you a bone with like a woman as president, but then she's like commissioning the team of men to usually solve the problem. Good point.
Right. So you know very quickly who the hero is, but there's also plenty of other people you're like, I think they're going to live.
And you can really kind of cut them into three moral categories, good, bad and redeemable. And redeemable can be like the guy's ex-wife's new boyfriend who you hate, but really he actually turns out to be a good guy.
He probably dies, but he'll die a good noble death. He could also not die and become like a sidekick.
And then there's like the shady rich people, often the people who are responsible for the disaster through like their greed or something like that. You know, they're going to die a very bad death.
And the point is, is like it's a really simplistic way of looking at humans. And I think that's one of the reassuring things about it that make them enjoyable.
Yeah, for sure. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't bring up a little bit of a prickly topic for our African-American listeners.
It has long been a movie trope in horror movies, disaster movies or whatever, where the black characters will die, almost certainly, and usually first. And that has become such a trope, it's become a joke and lampooned in, like, you know, the parody movies and stuff.
But we have to mention that. And what I'm curious about, and hopefully we'll hear from some of our listeners, if that has now become so ridiculous and crossed over to where it's now just sort of funny and expected and a movie thing and not, like, truly upsetting.
Right. So I'm curious how our African-American listeners feel about this at this point in 2025.
Yeah, there's usually about as many black characters as there are women characters in disaster movies. Yeah.
But like you said, similarly, they're often the president, like Morgan Freeman or Danny Glover or something like that. I'd vote for Morgan Freeman.
Yeah, for sure. But I heard the reason, you know, he wears those diamond studs in his ears all the time.
Yeah, he's been rocking those for a while. I heard the reason why it's an old pirates thing where you wear some sort of jewelry or whatever so that if you die away from home, you have enough currency or value or something on you to pay for your funeral.
That's why he does that? That's what I heard. That's incredible.
Yeah, it makes you want to vote for him even more, huh? I just want to hear that State of the Union. Yeah, whatever speech he's delivering, it would be really smooth.
I was going to try and bust out of Morgan Freeman, but I think I would embarrass myself. I've never tried, so it's never good to launch into your first attempt live on the air.
Well, maybe we'll workshop it off air. Well, we have to talk about the hero.
The hero most times is not like a typical hero. It's usually an everyman kind of character who just like Armageddon, for instance, they put together tumble team, you know, Dirty Dozen style.
It wasn't a bunch of like elite problem solvers. They were like oil rig guys, right? Like drillers.
Yeah. They weren't even astronauts for Pete's sake.
Yeah. They had to train them.
I only saw Armageddon once. So I'm pulling a lot of this from distant memory.
Yeah. I'm more a deep impact dude.
Oh, yeah? That's what I heard. As a matter of fact, I'm not entirely certain I've ever seen Armageddon.
Yeah, you know, it was okay. It was fairly, you know, schlocky, big budget sort of stuff.
You just described almost every single disaster movie ever made. And the response, too, your judgment of it.
Almost every single disaster movie ever made and the response to your judgment of it. Almost every single disaster movie ever made.
Like they don't get you to jump off off the couch at the end and scream Bravo or encore. You know what I mean? You just kind of like them.
They're just kind of fun. Yeah, it's a summer movie popcorn fair.
I still love these kind of movies. I think there's a place for all kinds of movies.
And I still love going to the theater and seeing these sort of big budget. Like it probably isn't a great film, but it might be a fun movie.
Right. So within these, the structure, these constrictions, people have learned over the years how to kind of play with them and make it make new forms of disaster films.
And a really good example, I think.

So we said that either a big disaster affects tons of people

or a small disaster affects a little amount of people.

Something that kind of combines the two is Leave the World Behind,

the Ethan Hawke movie.

I don't know that one.

Oh, it's great.

It was on Netflix.

Okay.

Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts.

So basically there's a cyber attack that just causes civilization to essentially collapse. But we're just following like two families who are kind of having to figure out what to do and what's going on and all that.
I like that approach. Yeah.
It was definitely worth seeing. And then other ones, rather than having kind of a schlocky humor that really started to develop in the late 70s and then kind of turned into like quips, I guess, in the 90s.
Yeah. There's some very, very serious ones, too, like The Impossible.
Oh, boy. Not a schlocky depiction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
It's incredible movie, though. It is.
It's so it's probably the most realistic film I've ever seen in my life. Yeah.
I mean, I remember I think I remember when it came out. We might have even talked about that on the air at some point when we did the tsunami episode with how they recreated that was just harrowing.

Exactly.

So that's disaster films in a nutshell.

And I feel like we could probably take a break here

and then come back and talk about the history of disaster films.

What do you think?

Let's do it. Hey, everyone.
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So, unlike some other things, disaster films are one of those things you can explore and find that there's an actual beginning.

And it's not like this thing developed over time. There were disaster films because there's these definitions, these characteristics that you have to have.
There were films along the way that just happened to have those. And the first one was Deluge from 1933, where if you watch it, there's several minutes of New York City being destroyed by a tsunami.
And it's pretty impressive for 1933. Yeah, for sure.
And it also sort of, as we'll see, and usually they're the schlockier ones, but you get a lot of these one word title disaster movies, especially in the 70s, but then again, as we'll see in the 90s resurgent, things like

tornado, flood, stuff like that.

Yeah, you put an exclamation point at the end of a natural disaster or a force of nature

in your set.

So I didn't know any of these early, early ones, but one from 1936, it was called San

Francisco, right?

Yep.

And it was made 30 years after the 1906 earthquake and about that earthquake. Yes, but it's also, apparently people break into song in it here or there, so it's sometimes listed as a musical drama.
Yeah. There's another one called Old Chicago about the 1871 Chicago fire that came in 1938.
Titanic apparently was a favorite subject of early disaster films and actually stayed that way over time. But it wasn't until nuclear anxieties really started to develop as the Cold War picked up and it was reflected in movies that people started imagining what would happen if all these nuclear weapons went off.
And that actually kind of created the first crop of what you could really point to as the earliest disaster films. Yeah, kind of like the ones as we know it.
In the early 60s, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was one in 61 when a nuke-powered sub that was radiation fire coming from space. They were going to bomb that radiation fire from below.

Like anytime you're using a nuclear bomb to, you know, launch it into a disaster, like I feel like that's happened a couple of times at least. Sure, for sure.
What else? There's the day the Earth caught fire. Not a good day.
No. That kind of wondered what would happen if a couple of nuclear bomb tests that happened to be carried out simultaneously by the U.S.
and the Soviet Union, what would happen? And they said, oh, well, probably the Earth's axis would be shifted and we would be knocked out of orbit and we would start heading toward the sun. That is cut and dry disaster plot.
Yeah, for sure. Also in the 60s, we had Crack in the World.
And for me, one of the great movie titles of all time, Panic in Year Zero. Such a great title.
It is a great title. And then, of course, The Birds, an undisputed disaster film.
Yeah, I take issue with that. The Night of the Living Dead is listed.
That is not a disaster movie. Well, that's a great question because is a zombie apocalypse that a handful of survivors have to survive and negotiate?

That's an ongoing disaster.

You have a group of people from different walks of life, sometimes stereotype coming together.

Their lives intersect through this disaster.

And then they have to survive.

Some people do.

Some people don't.

There's a hero.

I mean, in that sense, Night of the Living Dead definitely qualifies. World War Z would qualify.
No. Yeah, I think that there's like a, I mean, there's room for debate there.
Like those could also be horror monster movies too. Yeah, I consider those subgenres.
I think as soon as you add any zombie, it becomes something else. Something else entirely.
That's, again, these are all just my dumb opinions. Did you see Godzilla Minus One? No, but I've heard a lot about it.
Is it garbage or great? No, it's great. It has a great plot, great acting, great dialogue, and then the action sequences are unbelievable.
I've got to check that out then. It's a really good movie.
Again, is it a disaster movie? If you add Godzilla, I don't know. Could make it a monster movie.
Let's see what Chuck says. Chuck? Monster movie.
Okay. It is officially a monster movie.
Well, you know, I did host a movie show for a couple of years. I know you did.
That's why I deferred to you. That makes me an expert.
The 70s is when really things start get cooking with all manner of disaster movies from things like The Andromeda Strain in 1971.

You know, a Michael Crichton novel.

So one of his early novels, it was adapted.

I tried to watch that the other day.

And the animal torture, I could not get past, man.

That's when they just didn't care about depicting that stuff with any kind of tenderness at all, you know? Well, I stopped the movie and went and looked it up. Like, did they actually kill this monkey and these rats? Did they? And no.
Luckily, they did not. And the ASPCA was on hand and signed off on it.
But what they did was they suffocated it with carbon dioxide until it passed out. And then the moment it passed out, they cut and then they revived it.
But that monkey was still suffering from asphyxiation during those moments where they filmed it. It's awful.
Did someone do mouth the monkey resuscitation? Well, when the monkey monkey dies, if you look closely before they cut, there's a shadow of somebody moving toward it already.

Are you serious?

So I think they used a little tiny oxygen mask to revive it.

Oh, God.

But it's, yeah, I mean, that makes it a little better in that they didn't kill him, but they still tortured him.

So I couldn't finish that movie.

Yeah, I don't blame you.

I never saw it, but I remember that kind of as a holdover, you know, came out the year I was born. So but I remember it just being a thing.
Yeah. So, OK, yes, you said we started off with Androma Strain, right? Yeah.
I mean, Airport was in 1970. And that's the one that, you know, kicked off a huge, I mean, it had sequels.
It led to Airport 75, Airport 77, and then Concorde colon Airport 79. Yeah.
Which all eventually led to Airplane as, I mean, that had to be the first spoof, right? Like disaster spoof? That's as far as I could tell, unless I would qualify or include Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as a disaster spoof. And I'm not sure if that came out before or after Airplane.
I think it was before. But Airport was a very lauded film.
It got 10 Oscar nods. It actually won.
Helen Hayes won for Supporting Actress. And this is something that we'll see over and over again.
Most of these movies, they make a huge, huge return on, even if they cost a lot to make. Like that cost $10 million in 1970, which was a lot.
But it brought in $100 million in 1970. Yeah.
And so that really caught the attention of the studio bosses. They're like, let's do that again.
And like you said, there were three sequels to it. This is probably one of my favorite movie franchises.
I would make the case that the sequels, at least the first two sequels, are better than the original. I didn't see any of these.
They're so great. I watched 77 and 79 in the last 24 hours.
Oh, really? I love them so much. And Airport 75 is probably the best of the bunch.
All right, I'll check that out. And Airport 77, of course, brings in the Bermuda Triangle because I think 1977 was peak Bermuda Triangle paranoia.
Yeah, for sure. And then the Concord, the Airport 79, the Concord, it's people keep shooting missiles at it.
They have to take like evasive action. And you're like, OK, this is definitely when the genre really started to die or died.
It had already started. But one of the, one of the big things that airport kicked off in addition to eye popping box office returns was that huge cast of like where you recognize every single person.
Uh, especially, I mean, if you were alive at the time and an adult at the time, you would recognize everybody in there. Sometimes there are cameos.
And what they were following, Airport was based on a novel by Arthur Haley, and he had written Hotel. One of his things was a ton of different characters whose lives kind of intersect in this issue or this problem or this disaster.
So basically, Arthur Haley, the novelist, inadvertently invented the disaster film through like his format. Yeah.
the building on fire. But then at the top or the bottom, they would literally just have frames of people's faces of the cast just tagged on there.
Look at all the star power. Right.
And as time went on, the stars got a little schlockier. In Concord, Charo makes a hilarious one-minute cameo.
Okay. J.J is one of the major minor characters.
I love it. And she smokes grass the whole time.
Okay. I think in Earthquake, which we'll talk about in a second, Walter Matthau makes this inexplicable cameo a few times where he's dressed like a 70s pimp with a curly wig and everything, and he's drunk out of his mind.
Wow. That's his character.
That's interesting. They were definitely known for cameos.
But yeah, those sweeping huge casts of generally A-list and then former A-list stars, that was a big hallmark of disaster films that came around in the 70s. Yeah, they're trying to appeal to a broad demographic, so they would definitely bring back, like, some of the stars from, like, the golden age of Hollywood when they were in their later years would be in these, like, Fred Astaire was in one of them, right? Yes, he, I can't remember, I think he might have been in The Towering Inferno.
Yeah, so, you know, they're clearly trying to appeal to all age groups. Another thing a lot of these had in common, at least in the 1970s, was a man named Erwin Allen, the master of disaster.
He came up in the 1950s, but he really hit his stride in the 70s with things like Poseidon Adventure, aforementioned Towering Inferno. Each of those was the top box office hit of their respective years.
Poseidon Adventure very famously was about an ocean liner

that flips upside down and sinks, basically.

That's such a good movie, too.

So everybody is upside down on this boat,

on this ship, trying to get out while they're underwater.

Pretty great.

Yep, and it's a bunch of different people

who are stereotypes from different walks of life,

who are led out to safety by an everyman,

in this case a priest named Gene Hackman. That's not the character's name.
That's the actor's name.

That'd be pretty coincidental that Gene Hackman played a character named Gene Hackman.

Such a brutal, tragic, very upsetting end for such a wonderful person.

Yeah. Upsetting is definitely a good word for it.

Yeah. God.
Can't stop thinking about it sometimes. You should probably try to.
I think that would be for the best. I know.
Towering Inferno, of course, you know, we mentioned there was a fire. If you don't know this movie, you should check it out for sure.
It's one of the good ones. But faulty wiring, of course, makes it catch fire.
People are trapped at the top. But you've also got, you know, sometimes they can work in other many disasters within it.
And that's the case here where there's a flood scene because they're trying to douse the fire. And then all of a sudden you've got a flood to reckon with.
That's like a prestige disaster film. They played it straight ahead.
There's no schlock to it. The cast was just amazing.
And they did something that would be picked up again in like the 90s and then today's disaster films where they had two heroes who kind of had to work together. One was Paul Newman, who played the architect of this 135 floor skyscraper.
Yeah. Just totally fictional at the time, especially.
Yeah. And then Steve McQueen was this fire chief and they had to work together to figure out how to get the people out of this building and quench the fire.
Man, McQueen and Paul Newman, does it get any better than that? Not really. Maybe Paul Newman and Robert Redford? Yeah, that's been done too.
Weren't they Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid? Oh, yeah, that was great. Okay, so yes, if you see one disaster movie, see The Towering Inferno.
Yeah. Agreed.
If you want to see one that's kind of super schlocky, if you want to go down that avenue, you could start with Earthquake from 1974. Yeah.
Old Charlton Heston was in that one. People are, in this case, again, trapped in a skyscraper once again.

But this time it's an earthquake.

A lot of, you know, when you see these earthquake movies, they're always shaking the camera.

But what's funny is if you ever see them being shot, obviously nothing is moving except the camera. So the people are all just going, whoa, on just, you know, solid ground.

It's always fun.

So earthquake did not really mean to be schlocky. It just kind of ended up being schlocky.
They did a great job of doing it unintentionally. And it wasn't the film that like led to the end of the 70s boom, but it was definitely one of the early signals that this is not, this party's not going to last forever.
And it's a good movie. I watched it last night.
No, I watched it early this morning. Oh, man.
And Charlton Heston, who's a regular in these disaster movies, he did great. Everyone did really good in it.
It was just some of the premises and then also some of the special effects. Like, there's a scene where the earthquake tremors are rocking the street in L.A.
Yeah. And they're just pushing over the facades.
So you can see that it's just this cardboard facade coming down, stuff like that. And then there's a very famous elevator scene where it drops like all the way down, killing everyone inside.
But the way they show the impact is they just freeze the frame

and then some animated blood splatters

across the screen for some reason.

Yeah, it looks really, really bad

and is so abrupt and jarring and weird.

But it's, like I said, that part is on YouTube

if you just, you know, type in earthquake movie,

elevator scene.

There you go.

It's so, you know, it's a good scene if someone has taken the time to clip it out and put it on YouTube. Right.
Yeah, it is definitely worth seeing. But, okay, you want to take a break now and come back and talk about the end of the 70s or push on through until the 90s? Yeah, let's maybe push on and then we'll stop at the 90s.
Okay, sounds good. So, like I said, it was kind of clear fairly early on that this wasn't going to last forever.
And it definitely did not make it out of the decade. It really kind of came to an ugly end starting around 1978.
Yeah, and you know, one person's great disaster movie is another person's schlock. It all kind of depends because because some of the ones listed here as sort of being the lazier versions.
Avalanche and Meteor, that's not one movie. That would be pretty great, though, actually.
Sure. It'd be Meteor, then Avalanche, probably.
But those are two different movies. The Hindenburg, I thought that was okay, from being a kid and watching it.
I didn't see that one. I haven't revisited.
But then Roller Coaster, I, as a child, loved, loved that movie about a terrorist. Oh, I've not seen it.
It's, you know, again, I don't know if it holds up, but it's about a terrorist that's going to blow up a roller coaster. You know, he's targeting amusement parks.
Are the people on the roller coaster, like, having to go on it or stay on it over and over again? Like it can't stop or something like that? I don't think so. But like there's the bombers in the park and I just, you know, I'm having these fleeting memories.
It's probably terrible. But, you know, as a 10 or 11 year old, it was great.
Yeah, I got you. And then there's Flood with an exclamation point.
Shout out to Laura who helped us with this, who came up with this list of lazily named disaster movies, kind of like they were phoning it in. Yeah, Roller Coaster isn't the best name.
I'll admit that. All right.
I'm going to watch that one, though. All right.
But a lot of people who think about this kind of stuff point to The Swarm from 1978 as the one that was like, yeah, this is over. Not only was this over, but Erwin Allen's career was over because he had not one, not two, but three disaster film flops from 1978 to 1980.
And that really ended the boom. Yeah, that was pretty much it.
The Swarm kind of, I don't know if Nicolas Cage, if they were referencing or paying homage to that with the bees thing later in The Wicker Man. It became a very popular meme, the bees.
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, from Nicolas Cage.
But in this movie, in The Swarm, there's a pilot that yells, bees, bees, millions of bees. Right.
And the bees helicopter of course they do and the way that they're overcome is somebody figures out how i think it's michael cain leading the the cast he's the hero um he figures out that they can lead these bees out to an oil slick in the ocean and then set the oil slick on fire and no more bees that's's, hey, I think that's a pretty decent, you know, disaster movie solution. Okay, fair enough.
But I was reading a criticism of that movie by Tyler Sage, I think on a site called Ultimate Classic Rock, of all things. And Tyler Sage says that the cast seems either faintly embarrassed by the proceedings or confused about what's supposed to be actually happening.

That's all you need to know.

Like, that's not supposed to happen in a movie, you know?

No, it's not.

So Alan had a black mark on his record with that, with the swarm.

And then beyond the Poseidon adventure, they tried to recapture that magic in 1979.

A movie released seven years later, even though it took place the very next day of the original movie. Yeah.
And that was Michael Caine, too. But also Sally Field, Telly Savalas, Peter Boyle.
And like if your cast like that can't keep a movie. Yeah.
Like make it good. Then there's something really wrong with it.
Oh, I thought you were about to say afloat. I almost did.
And then I was like, no, Josh, do not say that. He did produce perhaps one of the worst entries, Irwin Allen did, of the genre.
I don't think it was his swan song, but it was definitely the end. In 1980, a movie called When Time Ran Out that did have Paul Newman.
It was about a volcano at an island resort, but he was very much forced into this movie because of his contract. I don't think he at all wanted to make it.
They cut the budget, Warner Brothers did, so they didn't even have the money to make it look okay, and it was really bad. There's a pretty good quote in here too, right? Yeah, the eruption, when it finally comes, is a wonderfully cheesy amalgam of wobbly back projection, bathtub tidal wave and scared expressions from the cast.
Oh, man. So then because of all this, because these movies just got worse and worse, but then also like the high drama that was played straight, it was just ripe for parody.
And like you said, Airplane was the one that you really don't need to mention any other parody. It's it as far as disaster film parodies go.
It just completely captured it perfectly. Yeah, and that movie holds up pretty well, I have to say.
It's still a fun watch. For sure.
Okay, I think we've made it to the end of the 70s. The first real disaster boom has come and gone, and things quiet down

throughout the 80s, and we'll let you think about this quietly through this ad break.

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That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash S-Y-S-K code S-Y-S-K for 20% off your first purchase. All right, we're back and we're going to talk about the resurgence of disaster movies in the 1990s.
And I may have mentioned it on this show before. I'm not sure, but this is one of my legendary predictions, my friend.
I can't remember it, but it was one of the very, very, very early 90s disaster flicks came out. I wish I could have pinpointed which one it was.
But I remember very distinctly at the time in college telling my friends, I was like, you watch. I was like, they're going to start making all of these movies again, just like they did in the 70s.
And there's going to be a ton of disaster movies. And it literally happened like starting that year.
Man, did you hear that from the ghost standing in the middle of the street? No, no, no, no. She whispered it to you? It's probably pre-ghost, but yes.
Sharknado, Jared from Subway, Hugh Jackman, and disaster movies. The only four things I've ever predicted.
I don't know. I think some more are going to come to the fore over the coming years.
Chuck Stradamus. It could only have been one of just a few movies because...
I can't remember what it was. Yeah.
This whole, this 90s disaster boom started and peaked within a two-year period. And it got started off, you could say in retrospect it was started off by Outbreak, which came out in 1995.
It's an epidemic disaster movie. Yeah, that counts, I think.
Most people don't point to that and say that kicked it off. It's more like they say Twister or Independence Day in 1996 kicked it off, and then, yes, you would definitely lump Outbreak into it.
But it was probably one of

those two movies. Yeah, it's there was a movie called Avalanche in 1994.
So they were dabbling in that world, but it was not a big movie at all. As far as like capturing attention, I think Twister for sure.
And that may have been the one actually where I was like, oh, man, you because that is what I think of as like typical disaster. I don't I know this is controversial, but I'm not sure I put Independence Day in disaster movies.
There's something about when you add like zombies or aliens and stuff. It just tweaks it slightly for me from classic disaster.
But again, just my opinion. Well, okay, so even if you accept, not with an A, but an EX, Independence Day from this list, then you still have Twister.
I think it was Twister. I remember the entire country was talking about Twister.
Yeah. I famously said, Emily's favorite movies of all time are every independent film ever made in Twister.
Yeah. And I mean, it's a really good movie.
Bill Paxton's amazing in it. Helen Hunt does great too.
Like, it's a good movie. And one of the reasons I think that it did kick off that second boom in disaster movies was that you could take the disaster formula, but then apply emerging CGI, computer-assisted special effects

that were at the time, it was like,

holy cow, we can do this now?

Like the White House being blown up

by the alien ship in Independence Day.

Like, you just had not seen stuff like that before.

This was all very new.

And they were using it sparingly enough, too,

that it didn't look fake.

Yeah, for sure. It was like, those are really great special effects at the time.
Twister looked really, really good. We should also mention, too, I know we didn't go over this, but it's just now occurring to me, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Twister is also a kind of a classic disaster movie trope character, which is sort of a side character to the guy in the chair.
You ever heard that? Like the computer expert that just literally sits in a chair the entire movie and figures stuff out? Yeah, and usually has a smart mouth. Always.
This is sort of an adjacent thing, though, Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, which is sort of, he's not in a chair, but it's the wisecracking, irreverent kind of, you know, he's wearing the Hawaiian shirt when everyone else has on like tactical gear. Right.
That's, you know, but super smart and figuring stuff out. I'm not sure what they call that in disaster movies, but it's their version of guy in the chair.
I don't think people have written enough about disaster movies for anyone to name it. So call them what you want.

A Hoffman.

There you go.

He was the Hoffman of the movie and maybe one of the first.

We got to talk about Titanic.

It's a disaster movie,

but it's got so much story and romance.

It's definitely a sub-genre within it, I think.

Bill Paxton was in that, too.

Yeah. R.I.P., man.
What a great guy. Oh, I forgot he was gone.
That was so sad. Yeah, it was sad.
So one of the other things, too, that fueled this 90s resurgence of the disaster boom is that these movies, some of them, Titanic, Independence Day, Twister, they're among the highest grossing films of all time. So just like in the 70s, studios were like, we can spend lavishly in a production, but we're still going to make back 10 times or more what we put into it.
So they're like, good, let's start making disaster films. And very quickly after some of these really creative original disaster films, you could see in theaters virtually at the same time, disaster films.
And very quickly after some of these really creative original disaster films, you could see in theaters virtually at the same time, disaster films about the exact same topic. Yeah, that was the thing for a little while.
I think I was still getting Premier Magazine at the time. And I remember they started writing about, you know, these productions being kind of out trying to outrace one another to get to the box office first, maybe to their disadvantage as a production.
But very famously, the two biggest examples, or I guess four, are Armageddon and Deep Impact, about a meteor striking the earth, you know, to basically wipe out humanity. Right.
And then Dante's Peak and Volcano. Neither of those were that great.
No, they weren't. I don't, was Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones?

Is that the one?

Yeah, and Anne Hesch.

Yeah.

R.I.P. again.

Yeah, and Dante's Peak was Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.

Oh, Linda Hamilton, that's right.

And that's a really good example of like,

just how disaster films like minimize women and their contributions. Linda Hamilton was well known by this time as a female action star.
Yeah. Like she was in the Terminator movie.
She was a total B.A. Yeah.
Sarah Connor. Right.
And in this movie, apparently she's like a single mom who's totally dependent on Pierce Brosnan to help her and her kids. She's like, she whimp times.
Like, yeah, that's just one of the big problems with the genre. Like if you can just kind of hold your nose and make it through stuff like that, then you're, you can enjoy them.
But if you focus on things like that, you're probably not going to like disaster films. Yeah.
Agreed. What a waste of Linda Hamilton.
What a shame. Uh, I got to shout out a few more that weren't listed here from the 90s.
Hard Rain. Remember that one, Christian Slater and Minnie Driver? No.
It was a flood movie. You know what it was about? It was about a very hard rain.
Okay. Just won't stop raining.
Shout out. Friend of the show, Minnie Driver.
Listen to her wonderful podcast on her own network, Minnie Questions. Very nice.
I don't know if you remember this one, Firestorm with NFL legend Howie Long. No.
Yeah, that was one of the bad ones. I think he was like a forest fire, like a fire jumper kind of guy.
So far, these ones you're shouting out sound like Riff Trex candidates. They probably are.
And then also some of the one word titles. There was a movie called Tornado.
There was a TV movie called Tornado Warning that starred Gerald McCraney from Simon and Simon. Nice.
I love that guy. There was another movie called Flood, a second movie called Flood.
And then there was one from 1999, which is sort of when things started to peter out, called Storm with Luke Perry and Martin Sheen. Wow.
That's some 90s casting. It's a mini driver in Christian Slater.
That screams 90s pretty hard, too. Yeah, for sure.
But like you said, there's one other thing. The 90s definitely contributed to the hero scientist, where it wasn't necessarily some, you know, tough dude.
It was the guy who had the smarts to figure out how to deal with this or knew what was coming. That's another trope from disaster films, especially now.
Usually the hero is the only one who can see the impending disaster. disaster.
No one would believe him. And then he ends up having to save everybody else's

took us because no one believed him and didn't take any measures to thwart the disaster from happening. And once again, you were saying he because all of these movies failed the Bechdel test.
For sure. A hundred percent.
And there's also a thing that popped up in the 90s, which was the rival scientist. If there was a hero scientist, a lot of times there was an – well, not anti-hero because that's still a hero.
Just the anti-scientist who was still a scientist. I'm clumsily working my way through this.
But they thwart the hero. It's usually a government scientist or something or maybe an official.
And they dismiss everything like the hero scientist is saying. Right.
It can also be a government official very frequently. They get their comeuppance pretty commonly in 90s on disaster movies.
Yeah. What do you call like Die Hard? That's not a disaster movie, is it? I've seen it listed.
Yeah, I guess it could be. To me, it's just a straight ahead action film.
I totally agree. But it does.
Slash Christmas movie. Like you would say all the people in Nakatomi Plaza, that's a disaster to them.
Yeah. The world's going about its business as usual, but to them inside, they're in the midst of a disaster.
They have to survive.

I don't know.

I think just, I don't know. I think, so the same thing with Speed.
In Speed, Keanu Reeves, the hero, was a SWAT member. Right.
Not an every person. Right.
Die Hard, John McClane, he's a cop. Even though he's off his beat, he's still a cop.
Like the hero has to be some sort of every man who may or may not possess some special sort of skills or knowledge that help him, um, overcome this problem. And then his metal that he may not even have known that was there, um, is tapped and he leads other people to safety.
Yeah, for sure. Uh, but you know, as the nin wore on with things like Luke Perry's movie, R.I.P., once again, in 99, things really kind of stopped in the wake of 9-11.
It just wasn't something that people wanted to see for a little while. So there was a lull.
You knew it would come back. Early 2000s had a few of them here and there.
There was one called the core in 2003 where the inner core of the Earth ceases to rotate. And scientists, once again, have to bomb it to get that thing kick-started, just like using the paddles in the ER.
Right. Clear! Yep.
What was that, 2003? So, yeah, the very next year was The Day After Tomorrow. And that, to me, is the bridge between the 90s disaster films and the ones that kicked off in the 2010s.
Agreed. It is awesome.
It's got a great cast. The scientists are the heroes.
There's a bunch of different stuff going on. The world is being threatened.
There's amazing special effects of things just going

haywire. There's wolves.
There's wolves. Yep.
And then that scene of the tsunami flooding New York. There's a shot that's the exact same shot of in Deluge of the tsunami coming to New York.
So I've read that it was probably an homage to that. Oh, that's kind of cool.
Yeah, I thought so too.

2009, it was a pretty big year.

This one. Probably an homage to that.
Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah, I thought so too.
2009, it was a pretty big year. This is when they really started to come back, you know, pre-2010s with the movie, the Mayan calendar anxiety movie, 2012 came out.
Do you remember that? Yeah, that was Roland Emmerich, right? Yes. No, but I mean, do you remember living in that time where people were actually like a little nervous about it? It was like Y2K Lite.
Yeah. I mean, we did a podcast on it.
We totally did. Yeah.
Yeah. And if I remember correctly, we told everybody it's totally fine.
The Maya calendar doesn't actually say the world's going to end because a new calendar starts. That's right.
And we're all here right now. So thankfully that came true.

2012 was not a great movie, but it did because of the scope of like just the world ending. They could be like, hey, let's just do any disaster we want anywhere all across the world.
Not a great movie. I watched that one yesterday too.
I didn't think it was very good. Oh, I liked it a lot.
I think to me, and I know you know this, but to me, 2012 is basically up there with the towering inferno as far as best examples of a disaster film go. Okay.
Here you go. My favorite disaster film is not listed here, but it is from the 2010s.
As far as being an actual great, great film is Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion. Yeah, that is a good one.
It is. I mean, it's a disaster movie, but it doesn't play like one because it is so realistically scary and doesn't have that sort of summer movie kind of schlocky appeal.
But it's a disaster movie for sure. Did you, like me, detect a note of hostility when the medical examiner pulls Gwyneth Paltrow's face like roughly off of her skull during her autopsy? I don't remember that part.
It seemed like that was gratuitous. Like Soderbergh had a problem with Gwyneth Paltrow.
Gwyneth Paltrow? Oh, maybe so. Yeah.
That was a really good movie, too. And that would be an example of some of the highbrow ones that started to come out in 2010.
Like we said, The Impossible. There was a Korean one called Pandora that came out in 2007 about a nuclear meltdown.
Sully, about Captain Chelsea Sullenberger's landing in the Hudson River where not one person died. I didn't see that one.
A plane, I should say, landed a plane. Yeah, that was Hank's, right? Yeah.
Yeah, he was in every single movie that was out at one point, I think. Yeah, he went through a string of playing real-life characters here and there.
That's right. Some of those weren't great, but I did like the one about the Somali pirates, Captain whatever his name was.
Captain Hoffman. Yeah, that was it.
So one of the other things that the 2010 onward disaster films did was at the very least the studios figured out like, hey, these are kind of like easily translated internationally. And we don't mean the dialogues translated easily, although it definitely is.
Yeah, for sure. And because everything's so morally cut and dried, people anywhere can get what they're seeing, even though it's an American-made film about Americans.
But also in these movies that are like a worldwide catastrophe, you have the opportunity to take down landmarks all over the world. So in France, they can see like the Eiffel Tower going down.
They're like, woo, France, you know? And then one of the other things, too, is because of these huge all-star casts, you can easily cast foreign actors or actors who are really big in the

country they hail from, and that'll up the box office too in that country.

Yeah.

It's all a formula.

The Rock started being in a lot of these.

There was one of the few movies I've ever walked out on was San Andreas in 2015 with

Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

I did not think it was very good at all. He followed that a few years later.
You liked it? I didn't see it in theaters, though. I think if I had paid 20 bucks to see it, I probably would have been upset.
Yeah. And then he was in Skyscraper, not to be outdone by San Andreas, another not so great movie, a few years later in 2018.
But again, some people love all the Rock's stuff.

Sure.

Which is my dumb opinion. I had an idea or a thought that I wanted to share, Chuck.
Let's hear it. About the 2010s boom.
It didn't burn out in one decade. It's still, they're still making straight ahead 2010 style disaster films.
and I was thinking that the reason why is because there's so many more studios now

putting out so many different types of movies that it hasn't become a glut of so-so movies. Or even if there are so-so disaster movies, there's still room to make other good ones rather than just three or four studios going all in on disaster films for the same few years.
Right. Yeah, just spacing them out as, you know, like just something you can return to that's a pretty dependable release, but not like, hey, let's release nine of these in the next two years.
Exactly. There's a wider variety, so it's been allowed to just kind of continue on.
And in my opinion, it's gotten better. Like Leave the World Behind was really good.
The Wave, a Norwegian one that came out in 2016, was like highly acclaimed. Don't Look Up, did you see that, the satire from Adam McKay? Yes, I did.
It was pretty good, actually. I liked it a lot, but it satirizes government and people not taking climate change seriously.
And it's a disaster film, but it's not a parody of disaster films. Right.
It uses disaster films to satirize that stuff. Yeah, which is, that's an interesting take for sure, you know.
You got anything else? No, I feel like I need to watch more. I didn't actually watch any full disaster films again in preparation like you did.
So this has inspired me to go back and watch some of those from the 70s that I never saw. Definitely watch Earthquake and watch Airport 75.
75. And I still haven't seen Towering Inferno.
Oh, definitely see that too. Yeah.
All right. Done.
Okay, great. Well, since Chuck agreed to see some movies that I thought he should see, we've unlocked Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this follow-up to Morgana the Kissing Bandit.

Hey, Chuck and Josh and all that help make your show awesome.

My wife and I are longtime listeners but first-time writers.

My wife Jennifer and I love having you entertain and educate us,

especially on long-distance trips with the family.

You help keep us awake and focused with a pleasant side effect of putting our 5-year-old Ben and seven-year-old Eleanor asleep. That's great.
I love it when we can lull children to sleep. We live to give.
We are on spring break traveling to my in-law's house right now, and during the drive, one of our episodes we listened to was Morgana the Kissing Bandit. When we arrived at our destination, I asked my father-in-law if he remembers her since he is the biggest sports enthusiast I know.
Get this dude. He said, of course, he sees her all the time because she lives down the street.
What? You ended your podcast with a mention that you didn't know she was still alive and what happened to her. And we wanted to let you know she's still alive and enjoying retirement with a full life.
That is awesome.

And cherry on top.

This is written to us by John Ritter.

Wow.

My mind is coming apart at the seams right now, Chuck.

Maybe best listener mail ever.

So big hello to John Ritter and your wife, Jennifer, and Ben and Eleanor.

Yes.

Hello.

And happy travels to you guys. And hats off to your dad, too, for knowing Morgana the Kissing Bandit.
Yeah. And hats off to Morgana.
I'm glad you're I'm glad you're doing great. Hopefully this message gets to you.
Yes. This message brought to you by John Ritter.
If you want to be like John and get in touch with us, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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