Masters of the Air

S7DiscoDown said:
I'm looking forward to watching it. Yet I'm very much part of the binge generation so I'll hold out and watch them all at once. The hard bit is avoiding spoilers.

I watched a YouTube documentary recently about how much of a financial disaster The Pacific was for HBO. I didn't realise it nearly sunk them.

I thought it was decent enough yet nothing will ever compere to Band of Brothers. The cast and story made one of the best TV series ever made. I'd argue the 'best'. I watch it a couple of times a year. The effects still stand up to anything you see today. I still get invested in the characters even though I know what's going to happen.

I will go into MOTA on its own merits. Absolutely no point in compering anything to Band of Brothers.
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Is that the documentary that EBD linked above? I am going to give it a watch later.
 
Read the Donald Millar book about the American 8th Army Air Force during WWII, superb. Always seemed a bit naive and gung ho with their attitude to the daylight raids.....although their air crews had to have had balls bigger than King Kong.

The Schweinfurt / Black Thursday raid was just horrific.

Haven't got Apple TV so will have to wait until it's on Sky etc.
 
h_m_boro said:
Read the Donald Millar book about the American 8th Army Air Force during WWII, superb. Always seemed a bit naive and gung ho with their attitude to the daylight raids.....although their air crews had to have had balls bigger than King Kong.

The Schweinfurt / Black Thursday raid was just horrific.

Haven't got Apple TV so will have to wait until it's on Sky etc.
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Loads of free deals for apple I’ve not paid yet..

The pacific has the best theme of the 3… intro theme I mean by that
 
Jedi boro said:
Can I ask those bemoaning the cgi how they could possible recreate a 600 plane raid over wartime Europe without it.

As of November 2022, four aircraft remain airworthy
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It's obviously needed but it's just not very good - looks like cut scenes on a Xbox game.
 
SalfordBoro said:
Personally I think it's terrible - the actors are a bit wooden, the story is none existent and the way they portray themselves (the Americans) as the great saviours is an insult.

I can't warm to any of the characters in the way I did for Band of Brothers or the Pacific.

It's just the American bomber crew going on a day light raid, why are they going on that raid, what part of the war is it, what affect will it have on the outcome etc.

Look at us we are American this is our fire power we can do all this and send up this amount of bomber crew's.

We all know the Russians won the war.

We all know I'm here until the end of the series though 🤦🤦🤦
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The Russians didn’t win the war the Germans, or make that Hitler lost it by not listening to his Generals. They told him if they were to invade Russia they would have to go in April to complete the task before the Russian winter set in. Naturally he ignored them and sent them in July. The fact the Germans wiped the floor with the Russians meant the Germans could see The Kremlin through their binoculars. The downside of this was the Germans now had supply lines over a thousand miles long and their army outside Moscow when the winter set in overnight, this enabled the Russians to re group and re arm.
The same happened to Napoleon.
 
WoodallServices said:
The Russians didn’t win the war the Germans, or make that Hitler lost it by not listening to his Generals. They told him if they were to invade Russia they would have to go in April to complete the task before the Russian winter set in. Naturally he ignored them and sent them in July. The fact the Germans wiped the floor with the Russians meant the Germans could see The Kremlin through their binoculars. The downside of this was the Germans now had supply lines over a thousand miles long and their army outside Moscow when the winter set in overnight, this enabled the Russians to re group and re arm.
The same happened to Napoleon.
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Yeah I know all that, I was more making the point that America and Americans always think they won the war and it only started in 1941.

A lot of variants prevented Germany from winning most notably as you point out Hitler not listening to his generals. I watched an interesting documentary before Christmas about their technology weapons etc. every branch of the armed services worked against teach other to get munitions and tried to innovate. The Allies on the hand had sleek supply lines. Didn't vary too much from them and therefore didn't need different machines to build them or have supply line issues as they had a small numbers of different rifles, tanks, trucks etc etc to build.
 
Emmersons_BrazillianDong said:
The video was more about the business decision and it's impact rather than the technical details, but they shot real life sequences in The Pacific and then supplemented with CGI to make the scale look much bigger. It was used in The Pacific but the cost for CGI at the time would have been much greater too.

Would be relative peanuts now with the proliferation and development of the tech in CGI.

Here's the video if its of any interest

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I've just watched EBD's link above and it is eye-opening at how much money was spent on making these series and how much it is rumoured HBO has lost. No wonder they declined Masters of the Air, which is rumoured to have had its own difficulties in making.

The reasons for the loss of The Pacific have been mentioned by posters above but I did like this analogy, 'The Pacific, is like you are skimming a 500 page novel in 5 minutes, the pace is all wrong'. I just hope the producers have got it right with Masters of the Air. I've enjoyed the first three episodes so far.
 
Norman_Conquest said:
I've just watched EBD's link above and it is eye-opening at how much money was spent on making these series and how much it is rumoured HBO has lost. No wonder they declined Masters of the Air, which is rumoured to have had its own difficulties in making.

The reasons for the loss of The Pacific have been mentioned by posters above but I did like this analogy, 'The Pacific, is like you are skimming a 500 page novel in 5 minutes, the pace is all wrong'. I just hope the producers have got it right with Masters of the Air. I've enjoyed the first three episodes so far.
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It was delayed massively due to the pandemic.
 
I just wish they wouldn't keep saying "Roger that" all the time. Firstly as it's gratingly bad radio telephony and makes no sense, and secondly I'd like to think it's a recent trend.

Out.

PS the book it's based on is excellent; and representative of actual history rather than jingoism.
 
There's some appalling statistics out there which reflects your grandad's sheer luck that day. Some of the earlier missions with no fighter escorts deeper into enemy territory defy logic, and ramp up the odds against survival to a ridiculous level.

No amount of ideology or doctrine can overcome the probabilities,, and yet there were plenty of proponents of developing long-range escort aircraft earlier than they got them in the end - after all, they'd seen what happened to RAF and Luftwaffe daylight raids. Those voices weren't as loud as the Bomber Mafia's, unfortunately for all those crews.
 
Anton_Berg said:
Surprised nobody has made comparison with Memphis Belle.
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I was thinking the same. I've watched the 1st episode of MOTA but will wait for the rest to be available to watch as the jury is out in our house. The problem I have with anything American and WW2 related is their belief that they "won" the war. They did not. Any historian will tell you that. But it is their propensity to distort non-American heroism into to pro-American jingo-istic "we are the greatest" rhetoric that seriously boils my urine. Memphis Belle and U-571 being the two greatest offenders of the genre.
 
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