IMHO, Sun Never Sets suffered from bad writing way before the “Ireland, My Ireland” episode. They should have gone with the whole “Imperial Federalism” thread, but that was just tossed aside. I suppose you could see repudiating Imperial Federalism as an echo of “Georgie Porgie Made The Colonists Cry”, but it was pretty ham-handed–they had the Irish Civil War and then completely flip-flopped with the Balfour Declaration.
I think they were already trying to write in plot links to The Great War as well. Too bad that knocked the stuffing out of the whole Sun Never Sets story arc. Top-level editorial disagreements perhaps? I’m left feeling as let down as I was by the Bakshi “Lord of the Rings”.
I did enjoy the various cameos by Hollywood actors – James Stewart as a general, Clark Gable as a fighter pilot. It’s also fun to look back to see actors before they were famous, like Neville Brand as a infantryman and Jack Palance as a pilot. If you look closely, you can even see James Doohan on the beaches at D-Day.
Though it’s inexplicable that the producers didn’t ask John Wayne to do a cameo, too.
James Arness and Charles Durning, also unknowns at the time, had standout moments in small roles. Though I do confess, no matter what he is in, I always expect Durning to break into "Dance a Little Sidestep."
They did try to incorporate some humor in The Deuce. Remember the episode with that Polish bear that was an official private in the army? The writers kept pushing it further and further. Instead of a simple wacky subplot, they destroyed my suspension of disbelief by adding ridiculous antics. The bear drinks beer. He smokes cigarettes. He wrestles his friends. He marches on two feet. He’s just like a human. :dubious:
They completely lost me, however, when they had the bear start carrying ammunition. Everyone knows that wild animals run away from loud sounds, but here the bear is actually contributing? :rolleyes: It was too much for me.
Another spin-off from The Sun Never Sets, of course, was Partition. I thought it was a bit contrived from the get-go, and maybe a bit suspect from a certain point of view - okay, India makes a great setting for this storyline where there turns out to be loads of feuding once the English have gone and it’s not just cliched happy-ever-after, but I felt it left a funny taste in the mouth, as though the writers were trying to imply that, after all, the funny brown subcontinentals might have been better off under Empire rule anyway.:dubious:
But I stopped watching that one after about Episode 2. They’ve got this really powerful Gandhi character who was oozing charisma all through the India stories in TSNS and what do the writers do? They kill him off about five minutes after the English leave! :mad: I don’t care what issues there may have been around the actor, his salary, backstage personality clashes or whatever other stories you care to listen to - there was just no way anyone as inspirational as that would ever have been just murdered after he’d played such a huge part in engineering his country’s independence.
They did something like that in the U.S. series Dreams! There was a really charismatic “hot” character with a great name, Malcolm X. He gets killed off. That set up the emergence of the cool, rational character, Martin, as the lead. Wrong! They killed him off, too, leaving us with no one left as the star.
I don’t like to brag, but I had family members who were in this series, just as unnamed extras of course. My grandfather can be seen in several of the pacific island scenes. I have a collection of photos that were taken during production and you wouldn’t believe how large and elaborate the sets were. My grandmother had a role during the part where they were making that big bomb thing that they used at the end. She played a worker at the big bomb factory thing.
Similar thing happened in the denouement of The Missiles of October. Hero saves the day, and then gets shot not too long afterward. Those series in the 60s really had a hard on for killing off the protagonist.
[QUOTE=Cracked]
Back in the beginning of World War II, Britain was all kinds of royally screwed: The Nazi war machine marched on and the U.S. had no interest in helping for fear of breaking its winning war streak in an away game. But Britain wasn’t content to let the Americans sit it out, so they assembled a secret agent group nicknamed the Baker Street Irregulars to nudge the Americans into the war. Since this mission didn’t involve stabbing or shooting people, the agents were chosen more for their ability to make friends, charm people and find their way into women’s pants.
[/QUOTE]
And what were they smoking when they had that cameo by a beloved children’s author not only playing a spy, but an exceptionally horny and foul mouthed one*? I mean, I’ve heard of casting against type, but just . . . wow.
I’m the biggest fan of World War: TOS. Sure, the writing was a bit cheesy, they had next to no budget, they kept reusing the same “dirty trench” set for both sides and the “planes” were obviously made of canvas and wood. I know all that.
But damn, was it realistic. Grim, gritty, with no real heroes or villains, kids who never knew what they were fighting about.
Each series since then has been increasingly dumber, until we get to the downright insulting current series War on Terror (WW: WOT) and their use of badly drawn caricatures as main characters. Last time I watched that tripe, they were literally using a black actor as the President. How clichéd and patronizing can you get?
Yeah, since Morgan Freeman aced the role in Deep Impact or Armageddon or whatever, the “black president” has become quite the cliche, hasn’t it? It’s almost become part of the “mystical negro” approach to African-American characters in movies. Who wrote that stuff anyway, Stephen King?
Which reminds me of the most unrealistic subplot of the entire war. Ian Fleming supposedly listed a whole bunch of ideas, one of which led to Operation Mincemeat in which British intelligence got an unclaimed corpse, invented an identity for it, and then dumped it into the ocean with a letter saying that the invasion of Sicily was really going to be an invasion of Greece. It washed up on the shores of Spain, a Nazi sympathizer copied the letter and replaced it before the corpse was returned to England, and the Germans actually believed in. Pull the other one, folks!