Really bad program film from Republic starring Ralph Byrd as a TV reporter who tries to stay out of a dirty political race for mayor in New York but instead finds that he's drawn in. The conclusion of the film uses, yet again, sequence lifted from the film Deluge, which shows the destruction of New York by tidal wave. Illogical and dumb, this movie speculates a world where TV is in every home. It's a novel idea that's some 15 years too soon which makes the power of Byrd's character as a pundit all the more hard to swallow. The twists and turns he and his family are put through make so little sense that when in one scene Byrd is seen getting drunk in a bar one can only speculate that the real reason was that the actor had just read the script and realized what a piece of garbage he had agreed to front. The worst twist or turn is the fact that wide spread panic and rioting results from a "news" broadcast in New York showing the destruction of the city. The idea is to keep people home from the polls, but that would have required the mass of people to both have TVs and then not look outside their windows to see everything was alright. To say that the logic gap in the plot is huge is a beyond an understatement. One of the stupidest and most moronic films I've ever seen which is saying a great deal.

I saw this movie once on early television when they were struggling to get anything to fill hours. Every decent station had its own musical groups performing live, with fill in material done by known singers such as Burl Ives and others. These were the first music videos.The plot was pretty thin but still memorable for me. Suppose the mob wants to spoil the election and arranges for every station in town to play a live documentary or newscast about the tidal wave hitting New York. Everyone would be glued to the TV box and forget to go vote. Thus the ward bosses get out to vote against the mayor, district attorney? Whoever. Somebody with some alertness realized that a building which had gone down was still transmitting stock news on the ticker. Whoa, call New York, confirm,get the voters out.The production period suggests to me that this was cheap science fiction using the tidal wave footage from another movie. It was obviously influenced by the great radio shocker which warned not to simulate live news in a fictional invasion from Mars story.Another reviewer suggests this was all so poorly done it was among the most horrible movies made. Maybe so. I can't address the effete aesthetics of film criticism because it has been too long and I have never had another chance to see it. HOWEVER, nobody in 1939 had a clue about what television coverage would be like on a large scale.Consider our real coverage in the last fifty years. Big news happens and all stations replay and analyze the three minutes of film everybody has. Experts are called in ad nauseum to analyze in microscopic speculation to fill time until there is real news. But, there have been some really momentous broadcast moments which were live.The early space race could not have been done without Walter Cronkite and the other guys giving us the scoop from mission central. One morning in the sixties I was almost late to work because nearly live pictures of the moon were being broadcast as they came in, each one closer than the last. The final frame was only half a picture because the vehicle sending the pictures took processing time for each frame. Viewers knew when the impact was because the picture snowed out.Even science fiction writers failed to predict the amazing coverage of the lunar landings. We were there on live television sent all over earth. (Right, all shot in a studio and faked.) Even O. J. Simpson's Mars mission (Capricorn One ?) couldn't make that wash.Considering the magnitude of the impact live television coverage has had in the last sixty years, at least give the people who came up with the idea some credit. Think about the impact of all the drug money selling us prescriptions and tell me a "live" disaster broadcast on all stations would not do something. I have listened to Orson Welles Mercury Theatre Mars broadcast many times. I have talked to old timers who knew it was just a story and those who were fooled.Spielberg paid tribute to the gullibility of television viewers in his Mars story. Picture Cruise ignoring the CNN coverage of what was going on in Europe because strange things were happening down the block. Schlock O Schlock Tidal Wave? Maybe, but it certainly predicted the influence television would have. Give it a break.

I remember this as an amazingly bad film, for years after seeing it, late one night in my preteen years. One of the absurdities about it, was that it was about television, some six years before commercial TV was actually seen by most of the public. The so-called TV cameras were film newsreel cameras with big magazines for film. They could have left them off to "fake" a TV camera, but they didn't. The TV screens looked nothing like actual TV. The movie showed "live" coverage coming from these film cameras.Much of it the film was stock footage from "Deluge", a big 1933," King Kong era" film about a tidal wave (tsunami) wrecking ships & flooding Manhattan. This "End of the world theme" survived with only the Manhattan footage, then crudely re-edited, and mixed with a little new material, with a new cast, about crooks and TV as a news reporting medium.It looked like the new stuff was shot in about 2 days! The result, I'd say, was the worst late 30's movie ever made.. Later, 20 to 25 years, people like Ed Wood, Ray Steckler, & Vic Savage made some "nearly as bad" films,("Plan 9" etc.)but that was "semi-intentional".I wrote the scenario, (there was no screenplay!) at age 20 for "The Creeping Terror" directed by Vic Savage.He, Ed Wood, Steckler and others were more or less playing "AT" movie making, as a kind of life style thing!I think "SOS Tidal Wave" was more genuinely bad... because the makers were probably more professional,truly trying to weave a story out of loose ends, assuming people were too dumb to notice the cameras shooting "new-fangled" TV ,were movie news cameras. The real "dumbies" were the professionals who threw this mess together, so off handedly...Or so it seemed to me, as a kid, 50 years ago.