It never hurts to be prepared, even as the world is ending. When CNN launched in 1980, Ted Turner had his cable news station ready for just such a scenario, as he said, “Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends.”
Not many people might have taken him literally, but the “Turner Doomsday Video” is an actual clip that was planned to play in the event of a doomsday event like, say, all-out nuclear warfare or an alien invasion (and assuming the aliens didn’t appreciate baseball). Turner himself instructed the video to be made, and it features members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine bands all playing the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee” together in what amounts to a pretty haunting performance that certainly wouldn’t do much to calm my fears of any impending apocalypse.
Though the video had never been seen publicly until 2015, there had always been rumors of its existence, going back to 1988. The doomsday video was finally brought out into the light seven years ago, when a Jalopnik writer revealed he discovered the file in the internal CNN database as an intern back in 2009.
Let’s All Watch the CNN Doomsday Video Together
It took six years from that point to actually acquire the video, but here it finally is, for all the world to see:
I’m not entirely sure this would bring me much peace if I knew an asteroid was ready to slam into the planet, or if we were finally brought down as a species in the next, far more deadly plague. But I have to say, I appreciate Ted Turner for thinking of us during our darkest hour, and I hope CNN is still planning to do the right thing and play this during our inevitable downfall.
