Ooooh… I remember the guy playing the commie antagonist. He even had a Bond villain- like birthmark on his head. That was hilarious. Subtlety has never been the strongest point of the series.
Wasn’t that the one where the Evil Bad Russkies shoot down an airliner that just happens to be Flight 007?
“Flight 007”? Seriously?
Fer sure. But, you know, scriptwriters seem to pull this shit way too often. I mean, in a monarchic system like we have in the UK, I admit we’re stuck with the luck of the draw until he or she croaks in their own good time, but the whole point of the American system is that you get the man best fitted for the job, and not some clueless clown who looked good on camera fleetingly in the 1950s. Electing your head of state means you don’t get saddled with a babbling simpleton just because of who his father was!
They also had the guy who was President of the John Birch Society on the flight. A character (admittedly a fairly minor bit part up to this point) who has been established as an absolute stone anti-Communist hardliner, and now he’s killed by the Commies in a major international incident! But is there any follow-up? Some shocking secret reveal? “Comrades! The American Congressman, McDonald, is going to reveal our secret plans to invade America! He must be silenced–at all costs!”
Nope. Nothing. Just another meaningless sub-plot that winds up going nowhere.
True, sometimes those parts are poorly cast, but on the other hand, what about the characters who they kept trotting out for DECADES, even though they’d long since outlasted their welcome.
DeGaulle was there through the 1969 season. People were literally walking on the freaking moon and Charles DeGaulle was still there.
Tito lasted even longer, until 1980. By then the character was so irrelevant that they recycled his name for Michael Jackson’s brother!
There was also a minor character named Enver Hoxha. Despite the Bond villain name and the Mission Impossible nation (Albania? Really?) he started out as a freedom fighter, and worked his way up to a small but continuing role in an increasingly small subplot. Fair enough, but they kept writing him in until 1985! He was like the “Grandpa” character in a soap opera they bring out once a year in the Christmas episode.
Contrast them to the Mao and Zhou characters in the Asian episodes. They kept getting fresh storylines and updated plots and ended up as major characters.
For your first point, though, one of the most pathetic examples was Chiang Kai-shek, whom they wrote out of the main series but gave him his own show as sort of a consolation prize, titled Ihla Formosa (My Beautiful Island) . Sad, as he kept on plotting his comeback and never got it through his head he was no longer a big star. The latter show never amounted to much during his run, but there was a revival of interest and some fresh storylines once Chiang’s character was finally killed off.
Well, what about that whole Gang of Four after Mao died? I thought we were going to have some real “Three Kingdoms”-style soap opera hijinks, but no, they must have had the same writers that wrote Ronnie Reagan into the US series, the Gang of Four got written out real quick, and we got good old “Let’s get rich!” Deng Xiaoping. I mean, yeah, the Cultural Revolution was a little hard to take, but still, that didn’t stop Pol Pot…
The only thing less plausible was the “Rah Rah Rasputin” subplot in the “Red Revolution, White Snows” story arc in Russia. Hint: if your story arc and villain can be accurately summed up by a German-Caribbean disco song, you’re doing something wrong.
It’s pretty clear to me that the whole Pacific subplot was an attempt to expand the show’s audience to an Eastern market. A war themed serial had performed well with focus groups in East Asian markets, but they really ballsed it up by making it such a peripheral part of the plot. Oh, and by bombing Japanese cities. That was probably a mistake as well.
I figure that’s why they did the Vietnam spin off, to try and give that audience something to get behind. But all it really did was make an awful lot of people very angry. Surprised no one referred that one to the broadcasting ombudsman. R18+ for sure, certainly not suitable for primetime.
I just don’t buy this Roosevelt character. He is a distant cousin of one of the most dynamic presidents in U.S. history, a genuine war hero, a big-game hunter, adventurer and world traveler - some kind of cross between George Washington and Indiana Jones - yet this Franklin develops a disease that robs him of the ability to stand or walk? Complete hack writing.
As for superweapons, the Germans put an airplane into flight that ran on hot air and spinning fans, was about 150 mph faster than any of the Allied planes and could fly circles around them, yet still couldn’t gain an advantage over the Allied forces?
And don’t get me started on the suicide pilots. Japanese pilots willingly followed orders to sacrifice themselves by crashing at full speed into American planes and ships? You wouldn’t catch any American pilot following orders to turn his plane into a barbecue.
A plane that fast? At that era? Real world physics don’t work like that, people.
Oh, come on, that was a spectacular (if admittedly hurried and nonsensical) finale that set up beautifully the Cold War series.
You know, that one where they make the Russians, who until that point had been the ambiguous brutes you never know what side they are really on, transform overnight magically into some sort of sophisticated superpower.
As if.
Not to mention that destroying Japanese cities is an obvious rip-off of Gojiro <Comic Book Guy>The infinitely superior re-make of Godzilla, “starring” Raymond Burr, of which I shall no longer speak.</Comic Book Guy>
They came up with some technobabble about the engines being prone to flameout, and only having an average service life of about 20 hours! I mean, who in their right mind would operate planes with that kind of durability. ISTR the episode was a hit with the viewers, and was probably what encouraged to writers to come up with even more ludicrous contraptions for the last luftwaffe-centric episode (‘Bodenplatte’ or something): planes with rocket engines, landing on a sort of kids bobsled strapped underneath. Another didn’t land at all, the pilot just parachuted out.
And who was the writer who came up with the name of the best japanese plane in the first episodes. The british and US planes have suitably bloodthirsty names like spitfire or hellcat. Since there is a lot of merchandise on the market (model kits and whatnot) it makes sense with brandnames that appeal to adolescent boys. The german planes get boring numbers (probably to reinforce their role as faceless enemies) but at least it was positive numbers. But the japanese fly the type zero!
Also these ‘zeroes’ go up in totally unrealistic fireballs when hit. The producers must have caught some flak for their gratuitous use of explosions in the later air combat episodes (‘Solomon’ and especially ‘Turkey Shoot’) and they came up with some lame explanation about the ‘zeroes’ not having armored fuel tanks. They needed to have really long range you see, much longer than the bombers they escorted! Puhleeze … !!
Let’s think this through. The Teddy character was a sickly young boy who grew up into a manly man and became a Republican President. Now you have to write another President character. So let’s make him an exact opposite – a Democrat who was healthy as a boy and then grew up to be crippled. The real problem is that the Franklin character was so interesting (“savior of the country” or “traitor to his class” and “secret Jew” – you have to be a great character to get that kind of over the top reaction from the fans!) They kept bringing him back again and again, despite the fact that he was supposed to be sick. Sure enough, the actor died before they were ready to write out the character.
Good thing Franklin’s replacement turned out to be interesting. I don’t understand how they could give the Tom Dewey character such a great backstory (Fearless Gangbuster) and then write him to be so dull.
Really badly written, though. He’d been the Free French figurehead all through WW2 so you’d figure anything Britain wanted was just fine with him, but later on they’ve got to turn him into a raving anti-Brit who vetoes their entry into the new “European Community”. :rolleyes:
Panzerlied seemed like a buttkickin’ tune.
I did like the episode where they crossed over a minor character from the long standing series Baseball (the one Ken Burns did a Readers Digest mini-series of in the 90’s).
So let me get this straight, you’ve got this guy, who graduated from TWO Ivy League schools, spoke several languages, and educated enough in the Greek and Latin etymolgies of English words enough to win mad cash on quiz shows. You have him working as a spy, gathering intelligence, interviewing German physicists and working for the OSS/CIA, etc., etc. Oh, and as an extra fuck you to the bad guys, is Jewish.
Ok, a little too singularly contrived and stereotyped for effect, but ya know, I’m game. So far, so good.
Here’s the kicker. Where does said two-time Ivy League school graduate cum linguistic genius come from? He’s a lifetime backup catcher. Really? Come on, now. What kind of person with that kind of education and intelligence spends 15 years as a bit player on a bunch of bad teams with a bunch of uneducated baseball playing louts?
Took me completely out of the story.
The writers had a lot of deadline pressure in this show, I’m told, and as a result, sometimes they filmed off of rough drafts. Those numbers were put there as placeholders, they were supposed to be changed to something else. You see this a lot in the series, the invasion of Europe is usually referred to as “D-Day,” but other times as “Operation Overlord” (which is what is was meant to be called).
There were also problems in the props department. There’s the “A” bomb, but somehow there were two different versions of it. That’s because they were supposed to shoot all the sequences with it being constructed and loaded for both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki episodes before they actually dropped the prop, but somebody screwed up and the “Little Boy” version got wrecked. “Fat Man” was actually just an egg spray-painted black, with, I must admit, some mighty fine forced perspective shots making it look much bigger than it was.
Another screwup in the show that was a fault of the prop department was the aforementioned “D-Day invasion” fiasco. Although there are mentions of it in some of the previous series, the “Marine Corps” really makes it’s first major on-screen appearance in “The War to End All Wars” episode in “Teufelhunden” (sorry, don’t remember the episode number). Problem is, the writers didn’t really know where to go with it, it’s just like the Army, except more badass because it was supposedly founded in a bar. Yeah, if where the screenwriters work counts! Anyway, once they got the WWII show going, they had the (pretty brilliant) idea of making the “Marines” into a specialized amphibious warfare unit. Great, but when the time came for the amphibious money shot at Normandy, where are these “Marines?” Props screwed up, didn’t get the costumes shipped up from Florida (where they filmed most of the Pacific sequences) to New Jersey on time. The miniatures were built, the vehicles rented, and you had a whole bunch of extras hanging around in jeans and t-shirts, so they just slapped them into Army costumes and started filming. When you think about it, having the “Army” doing an amphibious invasion makes about as much sense as having the “Navy” doing most of the aerial combat scenes. Lazy and inconsistent sums it up.
There are many problems with a lot of the characters’ backstories. It’s hard to believe that the rightful king of England would abdicate in order to marry “the woman he loved” just so they can show him as an admirer of Germany who would have wanted to end the war on German terms early on. I get it – we’re supposed to say, “weren’t they were lucky he wasn’t on the throne.” But it’s not like a king could never have a mistress.
There was also MacArthur’s father’s name: Arthur MacArthur. The writers were phoning it in. Names were never a strong point, either. Important allied generals were named Dwight, Omar, Bernard. I know they probably wanted to avoid names that were too macho, but they went too far in the opposite direction.
Actually, the different actors playing the vice president was an Easter Egg, the director had previously worked on “Doctor Who.” The whole joke backfired when the guy who played FDR quit in a pay dispute and they actually had to use VP character.