I haven’t watched a miniseries since “North and South”, and I didn’t even watch all of that. Let’s face it, I was never the miniseries kinda guy, I am more of the pointless sitcom sort. But I am a native Californian, and as such I grew up with earthquakes AND disaster movies, so when “10.5”, a miniseries about a mammoth westcoast earthquake, hit last night on CBS I threw caution to the wind and pulled up to the TV to check it out.
I lasted about 10.5 seconds before I went to bed.
Irwin Allen, the undisputed king of disaster films, knew how to work the formula; character development, disaster, characters in stressful and dangerous situations, payoff, roll credits. His films cheesy as they were had excitement, great visual effects, and could even make you believe that a luxury liner could be capsized by a gigantic, cresting wave in the middle of the Atlantic.
The show opens with a bike messenger screaming around the streets of Seattle until he comes to rest in the shadow of the Space Needle. The earthquake hits, and remarkably the biker not only stays on his feet, (for the uninitiated, an 8.0 will knock you off your feet if you are close enough to the epicenter,) but as the 605-foot tower starts to fall, he peddles off in a race to beat the tower before it hits the ground, and squishes him. He loses, and deservedly so.
That is when I went to bed. Therefore my thoughts on this show are not valid since I didn’t choose to sit through the whole affair. I figured with an opening stolen straight out of a "Tom and Jerry" cartoon, the rest had to be pretty bad as well. It just may well have turned out to be the greatest, most important miniseries since Roots, but I kind of doubt it.
Give me a real earthquake and Irwin Allen anytime.
I lost practically everything in the Northridge quake -- everything that could break anyway (TVs, appliances, dishes, mirrors, etc.) Even things that looked perfectly fine like my stereo would no longer work.
What a living nightmare! Luckily, my apartment building wasn't "red-tagged" like others in the neighborhood. Mine got a "yellow-tag" which meant that it was structurally damaged but habitable. The red-tagged folks had to find a new place to live.
That quake caused $40 billion in damages -- the costliest disaster of any kind in U.S. history. I didn't have earthquake insurance -- so about $15,000 of that was my personal property. You can bet I have earthquake insurance now. I won't live in California without it.
Posted by: Fritz at May 5, 2004 3:09 PMOf course having lived in California I am well aware of the damage and loss of life that accompanies earthquakes, and I would like to go on record as having nothing but compassion and sympathy for those who lost property and/or loved ones in an earthquake.
However, I kinda get a thrill out of them when they do rumble through town. I was in San Diego approximately 200 miles south of the epicenter of the Northridge quake, and that one woke ME up! Having experienced many earthquakes before, I mumbled something about a little 5.0'er, and went back to sleep.
When I woke up a little later to go to work I started thinking about how I have rarely heard of even a 5.0 as far south as Imperial Beach. I thought to myself that if that was an L.A. quake, it must have been massive. That's when I turned on the TV. and found out just how large it had been.
I went to Ventura the very next weekend. It was the damnedest thing you ever saw. In typical stop-and-go, weekend traffic through L.A. on the 101, every car would stop short of every overpass! No one would stop under one. They would wait for traffic to clear enough on the other side for their car to fit, and then jam under that overpass as fast as possible.
Ironically, they didn't realize they were forty-feet above the downtown traffic.