But the first countdown I have identified was in the late 1950s. The first ball dropped on the roof of One Times Square to mark the arrival of 1908, and in the 1930s and 1940s, commercial radio broadcasts heralded the arrival of the new year to rural and urban audiences alike at midnight. Americans celebrated New Year’s Eve publicly in various ways beginning in the 1890s, including with the ringing of bells (mostly at churches) at midnight. The apocalyptic and the genesis countdowns eventually made way for the ultimate celebratory countdown: the one to the new year. 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 analogue clock, reminiscent of the Doomsday Clock, hangs over the show’s set. In the long-running British gameshow 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 through 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.
New years eve countdowns movie#
A 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.
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