Remember MAD?

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 2001)

When I was seven Gorbachev was newly installed in the USSR, CND logos were everywhere, and to a highly impressionable young boy who read a lot, every high altitude roar could be the ICBMs and death was a matter of minutes away. We weren't sure if it would take 15 or 30 minutes for humanity to be annihilated and how many times over they could blow the world up. I was among the last people born for whom worldwide nuclear apocalypse was a possibility, the ultimate childhood bogeyman.
Dr Strangelove may seem dated to many, but two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis it was a prescient as they come. The blackest of black comedies, Sellers' triple performance, Sterling Hayden as General Jack D Ripper ("Women sense my power, and they seek out the life force... I don't fear women Mandrake, but I deny them my essence" - there's a line for Copperface Jacks), Slim Pickens' cowboy/B52 pilot Major Kong (famously yee-hawing his plunge on the back of a nuclear missile) and the demented eponymous doctor are all still hilarious. The US military insisted on a disclaimer at the start describing the film as a work of fiction bearing no resemblance to any possibility; recently it has emerged that this was not true.