About the only episode of that series that I caught was the one where the Marines were competing with the Army Air Forces for the privilege of shooting down Yamamoto. Apparently there was some difficulty in getting footage of P-38s (the planes the AAF pilots actually flew on the raid), so they substituted film of P-51Ds instead. At that point in the war (April of '43), the AAF would have given anything to have had Mustangs assigned to the Pacific theater (and the D model didn’t enter service until mid-1944).
If I’m not mistaken, the Devastator was only used in the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway, with disastrous results. As a result, the remaining examples of the type were withdrawn from service. This is why I’m surprised that there’s any actual combat footage for them. I remember lots of inconsistent shots of different planes in Midway, but no Devastators.
Two images are stuck in my mind forever: the formation of F6F Hellcats in John Wayne’s Flying Leathernecks all bearing post-1947 national insignia, and the launch of the Grumman Trader/Tracker (also with post-1947 insignia) from the angled deck of the carrier in The Wackiest Ship in the Army.
Also, the squadron of AD Skyraiders flying over the battleships in The Longest Day. I remember reading somewhere that that footage was actually shot during the landings at Inchon in 1950; at any rate, it sure wasn’t filmed at Normandy.
F-84’s (from the Thunderbirds no less) become F-80’s and then turn back into F-84’s.
Trying to remember the film, it could have been Fiend Without a Face or even Earth vs The Flying Saucers, but I once saw an F-86 –> F-84 –> F-89 –> F-86 progression
One of the reasons I love those old films is they do have a lot of footage of the 1950’s fighters in action.
There were a number of T-6 Texans modified to look like Zeros for Tora! Tora! Tora!. If the same aircraft were used for Black Sheep Squadron then it wasn’t just a different paint job you were seeing. Changes included a three bladed prop in place of the original two blades, some modifications to the fairings at the bottom of the rudder, and a single place canopy replicating the look of the Zero canopy. The result isn’t too bad although the Zero was much more delicate looking than a Texan can ever hope to be.
It’s not mentioned in that Wikipedia photo caption but I think there was a wing tip fairing modification made to round off the fairly square Texan wing tips. The whole wing shape is wrong though and it only improved the overall look slightly. A Texan and a Texan/Zero replica shared space in a hangar I used to work in, so I’ve had a good look around both aircraft, albeit over 13 years ago. Ultimately it’s a matter of money. Texans are plentiful and relatively cheap, Zeros aren’t.
Black Sheep Squadron was pretty much like Battlestar Galatica from the same time period. The same footage for every dogfight re-used each week.
At least BSG kept their ships right,
Can anyone think of any movies that got the aviation stuff right? Older movies had to make do with whatever footage they could, or disguise plentiful planes (like Texans) as something else. But even something like Top Gun, with access to all the money and planes they could want, gets things wrong.
There’s a scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind that’s well done. An air traffic controller is talking to a couple pilots when there’s an unknown radar contact near them. The words and the cadence sounded like the filmmakers had put in the effort to get it right.
Just watched another terrible military movie called Tactical Assault. It must have been shot mostly on some former Soviet or client airbase, as the Americans were always walking around Mig 29s and Mil helicopters. They got the “action” sequences a little better – for them they showed F-16s.
As far as movies that got it right, IIRC Twelve O’clock High did a good job. Of course it was also one of the ones with easier choices, just showing scenes of B-17s cruising along with German fighters swooping in. I think the worst they did was show gun camera from fighters chasing and shooting down other fighters when they were portraying gunners shooting at incoming fighters. That is another almost universal mistake – I guess there’s not a whole lot of genuine footage from B-17 gunners’ perspective.
Another that did a better than average job is Hot Shots. Yeah, they had those goofy little planes doing all that impossible stuff, but at least they always had the same planes, and the enemy planes didn’t change either.
It’s not footage of Devastators in battle. Actually I think they used real Devastators as props for the movie. The flying scenes are in colour, not colourized. I remember watching Midway in the theaters when it came out and not liking it very much. I watched it again a couple of weeks ago on Netflix and it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. I think the reason I disliked it the first time, might have been because of the sound (it used the same gimmick as Earthquake).
There’s enough, if the producers bother to look for it. Newsreel cameramen flew quite a few missions over Europe, in all sorts of bombers. The movie makers usually just grab whatever is in the vaults at the studio.
I’m sure that’s true, as we keep seeing the same combat footage time after time in one movie after another. There must be thousands of hours of genuine footage that have never seen the light of day since they were shot. I wonder if the Air Force still has it all in archives somewhere, or if they just dumped it at some point.
If they did, they built them from scratch. According to Wiki, not a single one survived the war. More than half the ones left were shot down at Midway, and the few remaining were scrapped in 1944. There isn’t even a non-flying one on a museum. A little more googling shows there are locations known for a total of three of them, all underwater after ditching, and so far none have been recovered for restoration.
