There Will Come Soft Rains & Zero Hour (DIMX)

This episode of Dimension X is unique in that it featured not one but two short stories, switching at the break. Both are amazing and both are by the incomparable Ray Bradbury. If you grew up in the 80's at the tail end of the cold war, you might have been asked to read There Will Come Soft Rains in school. Or you may have encountered it as a chapter in The Martian Chronicles. It is a poetic story about a robotic house living on after its occupants have been fried in a nuclear strike. My favorite of the pair, though, is the genuinely creepy Zero Hour, in which invading aliens use children as a 5th column.

Modern audiences may not catch the relationship between these stories, but the unspoken link is Communism. Zero Hour is most likely a thinly-veiled reference to the supposed increasing and pervasive influence of Communism in America. Soft Rains is basically a bleak look at life after Russia and America duke it out with nukes.

Dimension X #11
There Will Come Soft Rains & Zero Hour
17 June 1950
19500617(011)_DIMX_ThereWillComeSoftRainsZeroHour.mp3
Ray Bradbury (author), George Lefferts (adaptation), Agnes Young, Butch Cavell, Denise Alexander, Norman Rose (host), Peter Lazer, Rita Lynn, Roger De Koven, William Griffis, Van Woodward (producer), Edward King (director), Bob Warren (announcer), Albert Buhrman (music), Don Abbott (engineer)

Comic adaptation by Feldstein and Wood (1953)