WTF was it with the whole Italians invade Ethiopia subplot? How did that contribute to the story at all? I mean, it was great to show the valiant Ethiopian fighters throwing spears at fighter planes, but after that the Italians just smash the place and it all ends with kind of a dull thump. If it had set up something meaningful further down the line, it would have been one thing, but as it was, it was a useless waste of celluloid.
And those photos of supposed “victims” of the US’s nuclear weapons? You can see the numbered props in the background.
Yes, indeed. The idea that the Americans would know that the evil (but cash-strapped) Nazis had these kick-ass uberpanzers that would blow the shit out of any Sherman that crossed their sights, and just shrug their shoulders and go “Meh. We’ve got plenty more tanks where they came from, plenty more farmboys too”… yeah, right. Americans always have to have the biggest and the best. Look at those B17s next to the Luftwaffe’s piddly little bombers and tell me why the Americans wouldn’t have built a 500-ton land battleship. It’s not like they didn’t have the resources, the way the story gets told.
Maybe not lasers - just a honkin’ big naval gun. 
Stanley Kubrick tried his hand at a sequel about 20 years later, kind of like how Rankin Bass did “Return of The King” as an unofficial followup to Ralph Bakshy’s “Fellowship of the Ring.” Kubrick’s no Rankin Bass, though.
I hinted at this in post 85, but you’re absolutely right.
I’m glad I’m not the only one to listen to the cinematographer’s DVD commentary.
But we already had that happening. In Episode 1.08, “The Arsenal of Democracy,” the USA was openly helping Germany’s enemies; then in Episode 1.11 “Battle of the Atlantic” you actually had the USA and Germany shooting at each other. It just isn’t a really big stretch to start a war over that.
It would have made a lot more sense for the writers to just have Germany actually start a war; present some kind of military necessity stemming from the Atlantic convoy battles to openly declare war. Basically the same thing worked in Episode 1.07, “The Quisling.” I’m not suggesting repeating the first series’ way of doing it but why not at least connect the dots? Or if an alliance with Japan is necessary tp start things up, just figure out a way to wrap up the Pacific thing in a few episodes so we can get back the the main plot.
You can come up with a hundred ways to write in American involvement that don’t involve starting a completely different and unconnected plot, one that in this case doesn’t even have a super hot Danaerys Targaeryn to at least make it good eye candy.
They did a trial run earlier on with the Altmark, and since it seemed to get a good audience reaction, they tried it again.
That was an early episode and they hadn’t really figured out yet where they were going with the series. It’s like how Spain and Manchuria and Czechoslovakia were all supposed to be major stories and they all ended up getting dropped.
You argue very skilfully - it’s just that I think you’re making a mistake if you assume these writers could write their way out of a bowl of alphabet soup.
I wonder if you noticed a couple of things that were quite subtly handled (yeah, blind squirrel and all that)? The writers would have us believe that the P-51 didn’t really get legs until the British put one of their own engines in it. Later (sorry, I don’t have your faithful recall of episode numbers and titles! 
) we get those same British thinking of putting a kick-ass gun in the Sherman - the conversion was called “Firefly”. I haven’t yet spotted the English name in the credits, but I wonder how he managed to slip that past the rest of the team.
Fact: a fair number of those panzers the Germans used later on were originally going to be Czech props. They couldn’t afford to waste the budget.
I think Mussolini was supposed to be on the Allied side. It’s the mustache rule. All the top villains had mustaches - Hitler, Tojo, Hirohito. When Chamberlain and Churchill were arguing, we were supposed to be on Churchill’s side. When France quit, who took over? Petain. When they started hinting that one of the Allies was going to turn on the other two, who was the bad guy? Stalin. When Patton and Montgomery were feuding, who was supposed to be the bad guy? Montgomery.
Really, it’s pretty obvious. Whenever you’re watching an episode and they show a guy with a mustache, you know they want you to root for the other guy.
My guess is Mussolini was supposed to be a good guy when the show first started. I think they were going to use Franco as the third bad guy. But my guess is Franco wanted too much money or something, so they dropped him and rewrote Mussolini’s part.
But what about Stalin? Throughout the majority of the plot, Uncle Joe is a Good Guy, and mustached.
Okay, so first off, our heroes got their asses kicked at Hattin, so BUMMER. What, do the producers want us to suffer? They have this big build-up the previous episode to the battle, and then all of a sudden, everyone’s dead or captured. I thought this show was called Outremer, not Saladin.
Anyway, Reynalddies in what is CLEARLY a Sweeps Week ploy for ratings. SO WEAK. He dies like a bitch, but Gerardmanages to slip away, scot-free, AGAIN? Puh-leaze, the writers are really trying my patience with that one. And then in the next episode we find out Raymond of Tripolidied too, off-screen, in a throwaway line. So after all that build-up they’re not gonna have him back this season for the aftermath of Hattin, they just quietly kill him off behind the scenes! Who writes this show? TRAINED MONKEYS?
Okay, and what’s with this Conrad of Montferratcharacter? This guy, who’s never been mentioned before until this season, just HAPPENS to be the brother of Sibylla’s dead husband, and just HAPPENS to be some great warrior, and he just HAPPENS to come rescue Tyreright when it needed rescuing. DEUX EX MACHINA. There, I said it! Lemme guess, next thing that happens is he romances Sibylla’s sister Isabellaand becomes king of Jerusalem. MARTY STU ALERT!
Oh, and I guess next season we’ll be getting a whole new cast of Crusaders, none of them ever mentioned before but all of them relatives of canon characters, showing up to save the day and fight over the kingdom just so the producers can cast lots of pouty-lipped hotties as “hot new talent”. blows raspberry
So then Guyis ransomed and like 5 minutes later he decides to lay seige to Acre on the advice of GERARD DE RIDEFORT. Ahhhh! Guy, I’m trying to LIKE you here! When has listening to Gerard ever worked? Why don’t you just kill him, hide the body, and never speak of it again?
But I haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet! SIBYLLA DIES and both her daughters die too! This is inexcusable! Sibyllais like the last character left from the first episode of the first season. I am outraged that they killed her off just – like – that. WEAK.
If the show doesn’t pick up next episode, I’m SO out of here. I’m taking down all my Guy/Sibylla fanvids from Youtube and SOMEONE ELSE can run the kink meme, because *Outremer *has officially jumped the shark!
That Skorzeny guy…why didn’t they just dress him in tights and call him “Captain Germany” or something? The stuff they had him doing fit better in a popcorn action movie than it did in something with a serious tone like they were going for. I thought my eyes would roll clear out of my head when he rescued the Italian leader from a mountaintop prison. They did play well off of each other, your classic action hero and comedy sidekick, but they felt like they had wandered in from some other, more lighthearted, movie.
It had some touching moments too though, like General Teddy Roosevelt Jr. leading one of the beach landings on D-Day. I mean it was a little sappy and clearly played to the heartstrings but it was so well done it worked.
I mean they even had the most beloved General on the American side say it was the single most heroic action he had ever seen in combat.
Foreshadowing!
But seriously, I still don’t get why that singing family escaped over the Alps back into Nazi Germany. Were they really that bad at geography? At least they left the deaths of the nuns to the imagination, that would ahve been just a bit tasteless.
They did show the Nazis and the Japanese working together every once in a while (I guess when the writers would remember “Oh, hey, they’re supposed to be allies, aren’t they?”) Which led to a pretty cool “Hot Sub on Sub Action” episode.
The “super-science weapons” stuff was often entertaining, but sometimes it did get a little :rolleyes: . The whole thing kind of went through a genre shift, starting off as a pretty straight-up war movie and then transforming into some kind of Tom Swift/Buck Rogers sci-fi story (invisible rays that let you detect enemy ships and aircraft; robot airplanes and rockets that fly through outer space and hit things hundreds of miles away; and of course the already mentioned deus ex machina of the Super-Bombs that blow up whole cities).
Some of that stuff got awfully far-fetched though. (An aircraft carrier made out of ice and sawdust? :dubious: ) The really went crazy with the “super-science wonder weapons” stuff on the Axis side (making it sort of ironic when the Americans win the war by pulling the whole “Super-Bomb” thing out of nowhere). A 1500-ton tank armed with a gun with a 31-inch barrel??? :eek: It’s pretty obvious at that point that you’ve just got a bunch of Hollywood “creative” types (with no real understanding of real-world physics and engineering) coming up with this stuff.
The submarines that carried airplanes were pretty cool, but I can’t help but think they’d be a bit impractical.
Far fetched? What about those odd, vacuum-tubed powered adding machines in season 6 (that’s the series about 1944, right?) that, by a process so badly explained that it seemed magical, somehow became the basis of a worldwide data and communications network*. Talk about far fetched!
*This last bit was from The WW2 Encyclopedia, printed in the 70s, that took the original story and extrapolated the implications of World War 2 for the next 60-odd years. It’s not really canon (and out of print because of copyright claims by the heirs of the original producers), but it’s wonderful stuff and I recommend it to any WW2 fans (if they can get a copy of it.)
You want far fetched? How about those special bombs that skipped (!) over the water order to blow up German dams? The attack was like something out of a science fiction movie.