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Masters of the Air


JustinEF

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Anyone Watching?  Only two episodes in and have pretty impressed by it.  Don't want to give any spoilers but didn't think I'd ever see JU-88s doing air intercept missions in a major Movie/TV show.  

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I avoid subscribing to any of the "plus" channels as a general rule, but I may just sign up for Pothead+ just to watch some twin-engine fighter action.

 

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1 hour ago, Ivanhoe said:

I avoid subscribing to any of the "plus" channels as a general rule, but I may just sign up for Pothead+ just to watch some twin-engine fighter action.

 

Pothead??

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Going to watch it tonight. Gotta say the trailers seem cheesy as hell -- everybody's way too attractive, lots of swing music and "hey Joe whattya know"-type accents etc. but I'm happy to be proven wrong. 

Anybody else think The Pacific was way underrated? I watched it again last year and actually preferred it to Band of Brothers (which was also great). 

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The Pacific didn't do as well, but I put that down, in part, to folks expecting one story arc vs two from With the Old Breed and Helmet for my Pillow. The Pacific theatre is also a lot more brutal with less of the victory parades through parts of Europe so a lot less up beat scenes. It's a great project and I'm glad they did it I hold it in the same esteem as Band of Brothers. So, yes, arguably under rated. 

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1 hour ago, Angrybk said:

Going to watch it tonight. Gotta say the trailers seem cheesy as hell -- everybody's way too attractive, lots of swing music and "hey Joe whattya know"-type accents etc. but I'm happy to be proven wrong. 

Anybody else think The Pacific was way underrated? I watched it again last year and actually preferred it to Band of Brothers (which was also great). 

I thought the same about the trailers, this hasn't seemed to carry over into the show so far. Yes they have swing music and typical "southern good old boy" but it seems to fit just fine with the story etc.  As for the pacific I thought it was very good.  I don't feel like it did as well as band of brothers because of how the story seemed to move around and not follow as small of a group of soliders over a shorter period of time.

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6 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

I avoid subscribing to any of the "plus" channels as a general rule, but I may just sign up for Pothead+ just to watch some twin-engine fighter action.

While you're at it, might just as well try For All Mankind. Superb, if you like Space Stuff.

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3 hours ago, JustinEF said:

As for the pacific I thought it was very good.  I don't feel like it did as well as band of brothers because of how the story seemed to move around and not follow as small of a group of soliders over a shorter period of time.

BoB followed a company. The Pacific followed a division. It could not possibly connect the audience just as well, but it makes up for it, I think, in higher historical accuracy. Reading the Chesty Puller bio made me watch The Pacific again, and only then I realized how good it was.

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One of my favorite different department managers at Turner was a Vietnam era marine, Fred Gamel. Great fucking dude. His larger department was generally awful as an organization  but his little bit was run just fine and he had  a healthy perspective in the way that Marines often do when they are managers  

 

He had a bee in his bonnet that there had not been a proper set of recent movies or shows about the Marine/Pacific experience like there had been with Band of Brothers, A Bridge Too Far, or Saving Private Ryan (to name a few). He had noted With the Old Breed to me as books to read. I took that up and read that and A Helmet For my Pillow when The Pacific was announced. 
 

 

Edited by rmgill
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6 hours ago, NickM said:

Pothead??

Old stereotype that fanbois of Apple products are mostly potheads.

Apple used to be considered counterculture, increasingly amusing given the percentage of their products built by slave labor.

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Oh my god. They did nice technical details on the pre-flight checklist in episode 1 down to the priming pumps. Looks like they had honest to god excellent Technical advisors from the CAF or perhaps the Collins foundation on B17 flight ops. Love it. 

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Say what you want about Apple TV; what I've seen so far had excellent production quality. Not everything matched my taste, but I can't deny that they attend detail.

Anyone who liked The Expanse can watch For All Mankind as some sort of prequel, The Very Early Years. The counterfactual is limited, the tech and science side is very solid early on, becomes more sci-fyish later on, but that's unavoidable, and it remains way more grounded than, Star Trek.

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Related, this is the details of my Great uncle. He was a Navigator on a B-17, shot down and MIA for quite a while. Turned out he was hidden by a French woman. 
 

Grady Wayne Roper 

Service numbers

O-790158

Highest rank
Lieutenant Colonel

Role/job

Navigator
Only 23 years old at the time, Roper was the sole crew member to not only survive the crash of his 92nd Bomb Group 327th Bomb Squadron B-17E, tail No. 41-9018, on an Oct. 9, 1942 raid over Lille, but also to evade capture. The bomber was shot down by Luftwaffe ace Oberleutnant Otto "Stotto" Stammberger. Roper hid out with the Resistance three months, fled over the Pyranees Mountains into Spain and was returned to England.


Other members of his crew were not as lucky. Five were killed outright: pilot 1st Lt. Francis Chorak, radio operator Staff Sgt. John J. Dolan, ball turret gunner Master Sgt. James Elwood "Tug" Lane, waist gunner Staff Sgt. Donald E. Buckland and tail gunner Staff Sgt. Malcolm Culpepper. (One source site, USAAF Personnel records org, says top gunner Staff Sgt. Paul E. Gordon also was killed, though he also was reported as MIA/POW.


Production-block:
Boeing B-17E: 41-9011 to 41-9245

Manufacturer:
Boeing

Fate:

MACR: 15218


Assigned 341BS/97BG Polebrook Mar-42; transferred 327BS/92BG Bovingdon Aug-42; Attacked by Lt. Walter Meyer 7./JG26. Lost tail and three engines. Desintegrated over Lannay near the Belgian border. Monument near Mouchin on D955 direction Planard. MACR 15218. 6KIA 2POW 1EVD

P 1Lt Francis H. Chorak (KIA); CP 2Lt Joseph J. Fracchia (POW)
N 2Lt Grady W. Roper (EVD); B 2Lt Charles G. Kolodzinski (POW)
E/TTG SSgt Paul R. Gordon (KIA); RO SSgt John J. Dolan (KIA)
BTG MSgt James E. Lane (KIA); WG SSgt Donald E. Buckland (KIA)
TG SSgt Malcolm Culpepper (KIA)

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9 hours ago, Angrybk said:

Anybody else think The Pacific was way underrated?

Yes, but compared with BoB it's a very different series, showing different aspects of war in a theatre where combat was dramatically different compared with Europe. The Pacific is a more introspective show, focusing on what it does to people's minds when they spend weeks or months on a battlefield wading through mud filled with feces and body parts and faced with an enemy who doesn't surrender so you often had to kill literally every last one of them.

That "The Pacific" shows this in a completely uncompromising way was quite gutsy and I always respected the creators for that.

------------------------------

Concerning Masters of the Air:

I had a bad feeling when I saw the trailers (cheesy characters, cheesy dialogue, cheesy CGI) and what I've read so far seems to confirm this. 

Edited by Der Zeitgeist
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I watched the first two episodes now. It's not quite as bad as I had feared, the effects and everything happening in the air and in combat are very well done.

What's much harder to stomach are the cookie-cutter narratives, characters and dialogue for the parts that are set on the ground in Britain. No idea if this was affected by the strike situation, but the writing here is simply sub-par, especially compared to Band of Brothers & The Pacific.

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Just now, Stuart Galbraith said:

Does it have any RAF chaps in handlebar moustaches talking about 'Wizard Prangs?' Because if they didnt, they really slacked on the research. :D

 

It does have the obligatory fist fight in a bar between US and RAF crews arguing about which is better, daytime or nighttime bombing. 

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17 hours ago, JustinEF said:

Anyone Watching?  Only two episodes in and have pretty impressed by it.  Don't want to give any spoilers but didn't think I'd ever see JU-88s doing air intercept missions in a major Movie/TV show.  

One thing I noticed is when they call out being attacked by Ju 88s, it's actually Bf 110s. Don't know if that's intentional (crews misidentifying aircraft) or a production goof. 

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1 hour ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

One thing I noticed is when they call out being attacked by Ju 88s, it's actually Bf 110s. Don't know if that's intentional (crews misidentifying aircraft) or a production goof. 

Can confirm these are 110s, just went and re-watched it and they have twin tails, have to pause it at the right moment happens so fast couldn't tell otherwise.  So either 110s or maybe DO17 night fighters.  I bet aircraft were misidentified all the time.  Would be interesting to find out how much these episodes were modeled on actual missions.  I wonder if they went so far as to find the report from the Mission and they reported being attached by JU-88s and checked Luftwaffe records and found it was actually 110s.  I am not sure what squadron disposition was at that time in Norway.  I remember reading one instance of 110 Night Fighters being used in the daytime for defense later in the war and sounds like they were pretty nasty until the escorts showed up and got quickly thrashed........or it was just production error but with all the CGI available instead of having to find real aircraft just seems like that would be a big miss.

Edited by JustinEF
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6 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

They didnt really use Do17's as nightfighters. They did use 217's a lot though.

Ultimately though, is this worth watching? Im hearing mixed reviews of it.

Hard to say right now, only two episodes have been released so far.

Maybe just wait until the entire thing is available and then get a one-month subscription for Apple TV+ to binge it. While you're at it, try out "For all Mankind", that might also be your thing.

Edited by Der Zeitgeist
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