Warbird Information Exchange

Just a reminder that WWII in HD The Air War will be on HistoryHD tonight! I've already told you once so if you miss it I have no guilt now hehe

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Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool...

Not what I was hoping for. Mostly footage of stuff that's been on many times before.

Mudge the disappointed

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Land of the free because of the brave

Agree with Mudge!

I was even more shocked when at one point there was footage of a damaged B-17 coming in belly first to a base in England and low and behold.., they cut to a shot of an ambulance and rescue trucks screaming down North Field Guam to a 29th BG B-29 crashed off of the runway.

A lot of B-17's fitted with Scott's Radar Domes. I saw at least four or five different sequences that had them in it.

Same footage just re-edited once again.

Very disappointed.

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S.

Not being a B-17 aficionado, I guessing here, but did they have quite a few shots of early B-17s? On some of them, the nose didn't look the same as what I'm used to seeing. It also seemed that they were showing, what was supposed to be, the earliest raids on Germany and they were flying the "G" model which, if I remember correctly, didn't show up in England until early '44.

Mrs. Mudge hates it when I pick apart weapons usage, but it's my job.

Mudge the pedant

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Land of the free because of the brave

Mudge.,. you deserve to be picky.., just like we deserve to see accuracy in these documentaries. Afterall, who is watching these documentaries.., but people who know WTF is going on. Seems like this was edited by a 20 year old with absolutely no idea of the subject.., he just had a stack of footage of B-17 'stuff' and just plopped it in next to a sound bite!

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S.

Mudge - I noticed the same thing. As the program covered the raids during 1943 they frequently showed footage of B-17G models with the chin turrets, even sometimes showing footage with Aluminum finish B-17G's which were not seen normally until the latter part of 1944 I believe.

The narrative of some of the B-17 veterans was very good, but the accompanying footage was often confusing and not accurate for the time period being covered. I also find it annoying to see the "pseudo" HD picture on the History Channel which causes the B-17's and other aircraft to be distorted with a "stretched out" appearance.

Next, expect a
WWII in 3D

series to come out next year!

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S.

I'm a bit surprised at the responses from some of you guys. Was the series developed to do nothing more than show airplanes in combat or was it developed to give you the viewer a very rare chance to experience and hear firsthand what handful of these airmen went through and survived? I frankly was taken aback at times from what I was hearing and other times nearly moved to tears (Not an easy thing to do to this relatively tough 47 year old). I believe the series was not about revealing hours and hours of new, never-before-seen combat footage, it was about men and women who laid down their lives under very dire circumstances that today most would run and hide from. Further, it revealed, at least for me, a lot of interesting facts relating to behind the battle strategy from the commanding generals to the Oval Office.

In case you were wondering, it’s not about the airplanes…

Kind regards,
John

OK...OK...I, obviously, failed to make my point. I was not "complaining" about the narrative by the veterans. JWC50 made the point I was groping for. The video being shown with the narrative was, at times, distracting because the Vets were talking about a specific mission and the a/c being shown were not what they were operating at the time. The only analogy I can give you would be akin to seeing footage of the Korean war while the narrator was describing the Gulf war.

Mudge the verbally challenged

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Land of the free because of the brave

What he said.

Give me a break if you don't think we cared about the veterans. What forum do you think you are on?

We said nothing about the veterans and what they were saying because what they said and were saying was brilliant. The footage was, at some points, insulting and implausible. It sometimes seemed that the videographer was not even listening to the audio. He was just tasked with dropping in "x" amount of stock footage for "x" amount of seconds.

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S.

Before JCW's post not one word was mentioned about the veterans so it was an easy conclusion to draw that the footage was primary and the veteran’s recollections were secondary with the respondent’s. I know what forum this is

Again, we said nothing negative about the vets, mate!

The footage was grade school. It was hyped and hyped and hyped HD.., what we got was the same old, same old randomly composed.

My question to you is.., why are you trying to stir the pot?

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S.

I think you've nailed it. It WAS over hyped to the point that we "aficionados" were expecting something on the level of "Dog Fights". When we didn't get it, our disappointment was equally "over hyped".

Mudge the psychologically astute
(But you can just call me "Psycho" for short. )

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Land of the free because of the brave

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S.

This WWII in HD series uses color footage that doesn't correspond to the place, time or location of the commentary which upsets me because if it is documentary then shouldn't it be truthful?

I saw one episode and they used P-47 Thunderbolt attacking targets in Italy in 1943 and they said they were shot in the Pacific war. They had Thunderbolt footage shot in 1945 over Germany and said it was 1943 over France. In one show about D-Day they showed Czech partisan fighters filming in May 1945 and said they were French farmers welcoming US troops in Normandy in 1944. There are dozens of other examples. I guess they feel that the footage is just an "example" of what they are talking about.

I agree with a previous poster who asked if could you use material of the Iraq war filmed in 2004 and use it in a film about the war there in 2009 ?

Would like to hear comments about this use of materials in this documentary series from others.