He didn’t look too far away to me, and he had a direct line of sight to where the shots were being fired, so no buildings or walls to muffle the sound. How far away could you expect to hear those sorts of guns?
And even if Powell was too far away, I’m surprised somebody closer didn’t hear the shots (you’d hear them at street level, right?) and call it in. The police dispatchers wouldn’t ignore two such calls about the Nakatomi Building, I hope.
I thought that was a much bigger problem in the second Die Hard movie. The airport police had a lot more to do in that one (because McClane wasn’t trapped by himself), and were a lot more incompetent at it.
They didn’t say that frequency was for emergencies, they said it was for police use only. That’s why he started yelling “Fine! Then come and arrest me!” into the radio.
IIRC, McClane didn’t identify himself as a police officer, because he didn’t want to give Gruber any hints as to his true identity (since Holly was one of the hostages the terrorists had taken). So it’s not improbable that the policewoman at the communications center thought he was a prankster.
That building looked pretty damned far away from the convenience store to me. And I don’t know: with a firefight on the roof of a skyscraper, where most of the sound would be radiated up and away into the atmosphere, would the shots be heard by passers-by on a busy city street? Or even recognized as gunfire? (It didn’t seem to me that there were a lot of pedestrians in the vicinity of the tower anyway.)
Trivia note: Nurse Able was Judy Farrell, who was Mike Farrell’s wife.
But here’s the funny part. Before Mike Farrell joined the cast and got his wife the part, Nurse Able was played by Gwen Farrell, who was unrelated to Mike Farrell. After Judy became Nurse Able, Gewn’s character became Nurse Gwen.
I’m fairly certain that in the episode where Charles is giving a lecture to the nurses, he calls her “Lt. Nakahara.” It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a lapse in continuity here.
I remember an episode of Adam-12 where the dispatcher sends a call out that a lion is in a suburban neighborhood. Reed gets on the horn and asks, “Repeat please, did you say ‘lion’?”
Yup. I worked as a volunteer cop when I was still in the military. First time I called in a plate I used the military phonetics I was used to and the dispatcher yelled at me to use proper procedure.
Apple
Beer
Charlie
Don
Edward
Freddie
George
Harry
Ink
Johnnie
King
London
Monkey
Nuts
Orange
Pip
Queen
Robert
Sugar
Toc
Uncle
Vic
William
X-ray
Yorker
Zebra
In his memoirs Spike Milligan mentions having to learn a new phonetic alphabet when the British Army in Africa (IIRC - could have been before the invasion of Italy) started operating with US forces.
**McClane **shot at the squad car?!? With a short-barrelled submachine gun?!? Set on rapid fire?!? :eek:
Damn, that’s what’s called “taking one helluva big chance”! He could easily have hit Powell with the friggin’ thing, especially at that distance. It ain’t a real accurate weapon, even up close.
Oddly, I don’t remember this. I thought it was the terrorists who were doing the shooting. My mistake! :smack:
Operation TORCH (the American landings in NW Africa) took place in November of '42; the Axis forces were driven out of North Africa via Tunis six months later.
Sicily was invaded in July of '43, Italy in September of '43.
