I heard they’re planning a spin-off set in Korea.
Well, my sister works in the industry and I’ve seen a copy of the original screenplay. The idea was to have the Western Allies meet up with Soviets in Berlin in a big celebration at the Reichstag. The producers were going ape at the cost overruns and insisted on the Allies stopping at the Elbe River and stopping shooting.
The giveaway is that the finale has Berlin divided as per the original script! Oops!
Yeah, but they used NAZIs. Come on, those have surely been overdone, everybody has NAZIs now. Couldn’t they be more original?
Something is wrong with that statement. “Substance over style” and “sizzle over steak” are exact opposites. “Steak” is equivalent of “substance”, “sizzle” equals “style”.
Fuggedabahdit. Nobody ever watched a series based in Korea! :smack:
Please, they introduce a whole nation of guys named Scott just to appeal to the cross-dressing audience. Really, do those folks buy that much? I mean, to throw whole regiments of guys in skirts? Sheesh.
Though it was a pretty clever way to introduce the characters to the Cold War’s sequel in the Afghanistan plotline, which totally seemed like a sideshow to the main plot at the time.
What, then after that they can do a spin off of the spin off set in Vietnam or some other random country most Americans can’t identify?
They had a spin off set in Korea, but everyone forgot about it.
I don’t want to threadshit or anything but I don’t get the hate going on here. I watched the 5 seasons and thought it was reasonably well done. I didn’t like it when they went with colour later on. I think they meant it to be in black & white and the colourization detracts from the story.
It did start out a bit slow but quickly picked up momentum - ending with a big bang. Sure, they took some artistic license but if they followed too closely to the real story the audience would get bored. I think they provided a good balance between story action and believability.
Don’t tell me, let me guess: your favorite episode was the one with the Maginot Line, which you didn’t think was at all cliché, not one bit, no?
Oh, god. Audie Murphy. The Wesley Crusher of WW2. At least with York they tried to make it believable. They cast a guy who was 6’ and had some muscle on him. But Murphy? The kid wasn’t even 5’6" and weighed maybe 110 when wet. And I mean kid too. He couldn’t even legally drink until the last few episodes.
So we have to sit through him getting rejected from all these enlistment centers cause he’s just so eager to go to war until he finally gets in. Way to rip off Captain America there. And then just to cement his supersolider status they have him contract malaria early on. You know how many people died of malaria just last year? Over 1,000,000. But not Murphy. He just shrugs it off and spends the whole war with it, not that this slows him down any. Then afterwards he just drinks some orange juice, takes a nap, and he all good?
And don’t get me started on his damn spin-off series. Oh look, now he’s a movie star! And now he’s a songwriter who gets like a dozen artists to record his songs, including frickin’* Dean Martin*.
Yes, I get it. You are one of those nose-in the-air snooty types that look down on the Maginot episode because it was popular and easy to get through at the time. Must everything be impenetrable to be considered good nowadays?
And you know who else didn’t like the Maginot Line? Yes, that right. General Martin when he locked himself out of it.
I hear they had some good ideas going, but it turned out to be a total mash-up.
Harking back to dumb stuff, notice how they gave the Germans these cool jets, and the British these, and then they totally forgot to ever have them fight each other - which obviously both sides would be looking to use their new jets for! :smack:
Logic aside though, I can sorta see why. Someone already said how the over-use of magic superweapons spoiled the later episodes, and maybe jets didn’t really belong in this story. Thoughts?
That’s true, but they turned it from a movie into a long-running soap opera, the longest in history really, and pretty much everyone got tired of it.
So they spun off Perestroika, and a bit later the two German programs, the single episode “Tear Down This Wall”, and the “Reunification” miniseries.
And they had a lot of success as well with some more bittersweet breakup tear jerkers – “Czech Means Never Having to Say Slovakia”, and “You Go, Slavia” (which itself spun off several entertaining adventure yarns, kind of like an anti-Friends).
It was all the suits in finance. The cost of the new effects was high, at a time when there was plenty of stock footage to recycle. Once they planned the a-bomb finish, there just wasn’t enough money left over.
A bit meta but one of my major complaints is how the WW2 series drew all the studio funding away from one of my favorite long-running soaps, The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire. It straggled on a few years, but combined with the late series’ controversial plot lines and casting choices* Sun Never Sets really was only a shadow of its former self.
(Although you could say the crossover episodes were quite good, and rather bittersweet in retrospect. “Their Finest Hour” indeed.)
*“The King of England Wishes to Marry A Thrice-Divorced American Woman, But The Throne Stands In The Way Of Their Love!” – oh puhleeze . . .
And the brother who takes over the throne is a stutterer. Really?
Hey, my grandad was an extra or something in one of the navy episodes. Must’ve been some sort of stuntman because he had to get rescued twice from the ocean. I also heard that some animals were harmed during the making of the films. Where’s the outrage?
I have a few props used by Russian characters. As is typical of something one of thousands of extras will be carrying, workmanship isn’t as good as what you see in a hero gun.
*Sun Never Sets *had been plagued by cost overruns and cast problems for years. It was a big thing when Ireland left the show, but after India and Pakistan split there really wasn’t anyone interesting to drive the storyline anymore. Oh sure, they came up with one final moment of good drama left Egypt and Sudan, but mostly the show just stumbled along with recycled plots and a third-rate cast like Rhodesia and Cyprus.