Nuke Pop: Popular Culture Images of Nuclear War • Credits

Fun and Games

Fun and Games
Gum wrapper with mushroom cloud exploding out of baby's head and text, Garbage Pail Kids. Topps - 25 cents - Cheap - All New! 5th Series. Stickers - 5 stickers - 1 stick bubble gum.
Nuclear war themes are present even in products aimed at children. Consider this gum wrapper featuring the wildly successful and controversial Garbage Pail Kids.
Atomic Fire Ball candy packaging displaying a mushroom cloud explosion. By Ferrara Pan.
Students I have talked to had not even considered the implications of the logo for this popular candy whose wrapper has not changed since the fifties.
Ad for Kix cereal with bombs and text, See genuine Atoms split to smithereens! Inside this Kix Atomic Bomb Ring!
Atomic war toys and games appeared shortly after World War II, including a board game that let you bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Atomic Bomb Ring, which was sold for 15¢ and a boxtop from Kix cereal. Kids peered into the plastic to “See Genuine Atoms Split to Smithereens!”
Over six million were distributed between 1947 and 1957.
Game packaging for the game Trinity with mushroom cloud explosion and sundial for the Apple IIc, IIe.
Nuclear war is also a feature of several popular board and computer games, including one entitled B-1 Bomber, which allowed the player to drop warheads on Moscow and another called simply Nuclear War, which treated the subject with a macabre sense of humor. The anti-ballistic missile game Missile Command had a considerable vogue some years back and even turned up in fiction.
This game combined the original 1945 atomic bomb test, named Trinity, with the bombing of Hiroshima and a future nuclear holocaust.
Comic book panel of giant scorpion attacking man and the text, Nuclear Spring.
Such a computer game is the focus of this comic book story in which a strategic planner accidentally becomes enmeshed in his son’s game rather than the scenario he was supposed to be testing.
Cartoon of mushroom cloud, person running away and other beings with text, Choose your own Doomsday! The game of post-nuke survival in which you are the last man on Earth. Interactive computer game. You must face Mutants, Giant scorpions, Slow Dogs
The cartoonist comments on the hazards inherent in playing at apocalypse by having this mishap result not only in the death of the boy’s father, but in the launching of a real nuclear war.
Comic panel with scantily clad woman and broken video games in background. Woman is saying, But the games they played were deadly...
In this frame from the AXA strip we see her musing on prewar video games such as “Desastre Nuclear,” visible in the background.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game with text, After the Bomb.
The popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles become involved in a post-holocaust scenario in this game.

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