I’m watching an episode of Great Planes on The Military Channel. I’ve just discovered the show, and I don’t think I’ll be watching it much.
The episode currently playing is in the P-51 Mustang. Some of the errors: The narrator calls Herman Göring ‘Commander and Chief of the German Air Force’; not ‘Commander**-in-**Chief’. He talks about the ‘Malcom hood’ on the P-51C, and illustrates it with the bubble canopy of the P-51D. He mentions that Chuck Yeager was the first pilot to shoot down a Me-262. I believe he was one of the first. They’re little things, but cumulatively they show sloppiness.
I also watched the episode on the Douglas Skyraider, because my dad flew in them in Korea. The narrator was talking about the A-7 Corsair II as a jet replacement for the old Able Dog. And all the while there is a rather static shot of a Skyraider on the screen. I don’t think they ever showed an A-7. I noticed a few examples of the narrator talking about one plane while showing another.
The editing is really lousy. They play footage too long. There are jumbles of shots that lack context. The graphics are bad, too. Typically a show of this sort would have 3D wire animations. Great Planes uses three-view orthographic drawings superimposed on one another. Imagine cutting a profile of an airplane out of a sheet of balsa wood. Then cut out a plan view. Then cut slots in the sheets and put them together in a cross. Very crude. Finally, the self-proclaimed superpilot seems utterly uninterested in the subject matter. He seems bored by it all. Hey, these are airplanes! Show a little excitement!
The show is little more than eye-candy. The kind of candy your grandparents think is good and buy in bulk at the supermarket.
Basic cable? And you are surprised? Didn’t History or Discovery approach a Doper to write a program based on his specialty and the pay was the frickin’ HONOR of spreading his lifetime of research and knowledge around basic cable?
Likely as not, whoever put it together couldn’t tell a Malcolm hood from a bubble canopy and assumed the rookies watching the show couldn’t, either. And it’s not like they are common. Never seen one in the wild.
I’m watching another episode of Great Planes. Actually, I’ve caught quite a few episodes recently. I haven’t noticed the cheap graphics I complained about months ago (though I’ve seen the ‘cut-out’ graphics on another show about military commanders).
The presenter is Paul ‘Max’ Moga. He’s an Air Force major and an F-22 pilot. For someone who flies for a living, he sure asks dumb questions of his guests. (I can’t think of any specific ones right now.) Gotta dumb it down for the audience, I reckon.
I saw one where Paul Moga almost tripped over something while walking and reading his teleprompter or cue cards. He wasn’t facing the camera he was on at the time either.
The extended drum solos in the audio portions of the film clips are more than a little irritating. They sometimes drown out the narration (but maybe that’s just my funky old TV).
It seems like these kinds of shows were produced way better in the 80’s.
PBS is the last bastion of decent educational/informative/documentary programming. All the cable channels have gone sensational in search of the buck. Discovery Channel ruled when I was a kid; now it’s just nerds blowing shit up and chicks with big tits. TLC is a fucking joke - it’s Jon and Kate Plus 8 24/7. What are we learning from that? Don’t knock up mean women. Brilliant. I knew that when I was like 4.
Incidentally: The guy who started the meetup group got deployed or something. The group will disappear in a week and a half. I’d take it over, but the I don’t want to spend the money.
I didn’t realize that the Meetup group cost money, sad. Incidentally, I have about 12-18 guest passes to the Museum of Flight if we want to have one last gasp.
I think Mike was the only one who could schedule meetups, and he’s not around. How about a Seattle Dopefest and distribute them there? I know one Doper who’d show up!
I still get a kick out of these shows but they do have their occasional WTF moments. Yesterday on World’s Deadliest Aircraft about the B-29, I was hoping they would talk about how they overcame the problems of pressurization, overheating, etc… Instead it was all about the operational aspects (the same high-level/low-level decisions that every other program has already covered 100 times). The WTF moment came at the end when they said the legacy of the B-29 was that it led to the B-58 Hustler, that delta-winged Mach 2 penetration bomber.
Wow, and not say, the B-50A Superfortress, or the B-52 Stratofortress and KC-135? (actually a shorter trip to the 135 than to the BUFF, I think. The mid-air refueling stuff used now in the Air Force was all originally used on KB-29s, KB-50s, and KC-97s, all tankers based originally on the Superfortress airframe).
