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  Established in 1998, Nostalgia Central is your one stop reference guide through five decades of music, movies, television, pop culture and social history


THE CAST

Oliver Reed
Geraldine Chaplin
Don Gordon
Diane Cilento
David Markham
Sheila Reid

Director
Michael Campus

 

 

ZPG (1972)


Smog covers the Earth. The oxygen is depleted. Love is encouraged but the penalty for birth is death. 

World Governments have placed a 30 year ban on conception in an effort to achieve Zero Population Growth (ZPG) and save what's left of life on earth.

Instead of real babies everybody is entitled to go the Baby shop and get themselves their very own animatronic child. It's a world of plastic food and simulated merriment . . . and a museum to contain the last living remnants of Earth's natural flora and fauna. 

The caretakers of that museum, Russ and Carol McNeil, are a young couple who represent the last living link with today's humanity . . . the last holdouts for individuality in a sterile, bland future.

They defy the anti-conception edict and produce a child which they must hide - and try to save from being put to death. Russ hides Carol down in the fallout shelter for five months, and tells anyone who asks that his wife left him. 

Once the child is born, Carol and Russ's neighbours discover their secret and reveal their psychotic side, demanding firstly to hold the baby, then to share it, and ultimately to take it away for their own.

When a baby is discovered in this future society, the authorities swoop and the offending parents and baby are placed inside a big dome. They are forced to stay under the dome for 12 hours to contemplate their transgressions, and then they're executed in the dome.

Russ and Carol, realising it is just a matter of time before they are discovered, have been secretly getting their escape ready. They have figured out where they would be executed and get their gear together underground, below the execution spot. When the inevitable happens and the dome descends, Russ has a digging tool strapped to his ankle and burrows down to the sewer tunnels where their raft awaits for them to paddle off into the sunset.