Various Artists – Atomic Platters: Cold War Music From The Golden Age Of Homeland Security, 6-CD box

The Atomic Cafe, an acclaimed 1982 cinema verite documentary (and its soundtrack LP), brilliantly presented America’s official atomic preparedness propaganda of the 1940s and 1950s, laughably dated and discredited by the ’80s. Though it debuted during the Reagan years, most negative commentary came from witless pacifists unable to grasp the film’s ironic humor, who whined that it made light of nuclear war.

The events of 9-11 renewed America’s focus on Homeland Security, some of it essential in a less secure world, but not all. Duct tape and color-code alerts, maligned symbols of today’s Homeland Security bumblers, will inevitably prove as campy as the famous 1950s Duck And Cover cartoon included in Atomic Cafe.

Bear Family’s five-CD, one-DVD Atomic Platters builds on that movie’s legacy, aided by Conelrad, a Cold War/nuclear popular culture resource named for the government’s old emergency broadcast network. The group’s co-founder, Bill Geerhart, authored the collection’s comprehensively researched, hernia-inducing 292-page hardback LP-size book, complete with background and in-depth interviews with singers and producers of the old films.

The first four CDs are a sweeping blend of 1946-1966 Atomic/Cold War tunes crossing all genres from Roosevelt Sykes, the Goons with Peter Sellers, Ann-Margaret and Jim Eanes to Hank Williams, Marty Robbins and obscure ’60s conservative chanteuse Janet Greene. Vintage public service nuke announcements by Johnny Cash, Pat Boone, Groucho Marx and Don Pardo, among others, pop up between songs. The fifth disc assembles two spoken-word LP cautionaries about nuclear war. One, The Complacent Americans, is so hysterical and scenery-chewing, it sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch.

DVD selections include a reprise of Duck And Cover and several dark, bizarre preparedness films. One, 1963’s What Is Communism, is hosted by Herb Philbrick, whose infiltration of the U.S. Communist party for the FBI inspired the book I Led Three Lives and a 1953-56 TV show. Philbrick’s hyperbole-ridden descriptions of Commie traits and tactics anticipate the pro-Iraq war rhetoric of the feckless faux-conservatives currently controlling the White House and Congress.

Expect a collection based on today’s situation, in whatever media is in vogue, a few decades from now.