The Kindertrauma website describes itself as …

… the movies, books, and toys that scared you when you were a kid. It’s also about kids in scary movies, both as heroes and villains. And everything else that’s traumatic to a tyke!

Through reviews, stories, artwork, and testimonials, we mean to remind you of all the things you once tried so hard to forget…

I’m not sure how I found this (as usual), but one of its posts is how …

Kids in this high-tech age don’t know how coddled they are when severe weather is forecast!  Today, you’ve got all these electronic graphics with little maps in the corner, crawls across the screen, and now and then a weatherbabe (or weatherguy) may come on to give logical, reasoned updates.

Not so when I was a kid in the ’70s.

Even for a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, the programming would stop, the TV screen would fill with some ominous-looking graphic (still, of course, no movement back in those days) screaming whatever watch/warning it was in all caps, vivid colors…and worst of all, that infernal, screaming, shrill Emergency Broadcasting Service tone!  Then usually an announcer with The Voice Of Doom would come on and provide the “public service” of warning us all of impending tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail that were SURELY going to target the house you lived in and make Dorothy’s tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ about as scary as a silent fart.

Almost as bad were the “ALL CLEAR” statements that would come on-screen when the danger was supposedly past…except that the graphics were usually in more soothing shades of green and white.

The fake warnings created on YouTube are laughable compared to the horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the 1970s that made me want to scream running for the cellar – and, worse, my parents made me watch them because it was “educational“!

“Fake warnings,” you ask?

“Horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the ’70s,” you ask?

These relatively crude presentations occurred, of course, before color weather radar in the 1980s. (Previously weather radar was nothing more than World War II surplus air traffic radars.) For that matter, they all took place before TV stations routinely went to continuous weather coverage during tornado warnings, the first of which may have been …