Inaccuracy With Stock WWII Aviation Footage...It Drives Me Crazy (1 Viewer)

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they don't need to because the average American doesn't know any better

This is absolutely part of the problem. The average Joe & Jane don't really know details about our military history and don't care, so the doc film makers think they can get away with inaccuracy.
 
This is absolutely part of the problem. The average Joe & Jane don't really know details about our military history and don't care, so the doc film makers think they can get away with inaccuracy.
why should they care society does not demand they care about others all they care about who has the biggest butt on insta and doing the best to make sure everyone loves them
 
I don't know if anyone else watches the Don Wildman series on the so called Travel channel or Ghost channel as it has become, but they are of the opinion that if it flys it an airplane and the viewers will be to dumb to noticed any difference. Has anyone else spotted the the one on the C-54 that vanished in Alaska. It must be a computer generated plane as it has a DC3 vertical stabilizer. But the one that really drives me up the wall is not avaition related but showed U.S Army solders in the south pacific with German helments! I have seen planes which are supposed to be jets with two wings , in other words biplanes! The uniforms are also silly with upside down chevrons etc.
 
My pet hate is the dialogue, generally a few shouty people who I am told are historians making sweeping and completely untrue statements like "you cannot design a propeller without a wind tunnel". I have met maybe half a dozen conspicuously intelligent people in my life, none of them were shouty and prone to making such ridiculous sweeping baseless nonsense that is now called historical discussion.
 
It is bad enough when they just splice in a bunch of stock footage with a running commentary that is not really associated with it, but when they take excellent original film and make up stuff about it, that is unforgiveable.

For example, there was a documentary about the F-80 in which they had this great film of two P-80A's, possibly even YP-80A's, with troops looking on with wonder when they arrived at their base. And they said, "These F-80's are called P-80's because P stood for prototype and these are the early models."

Okay, there is no real expert nor any reference source that would tell you that. So they had to make it up, from scratch. Now, British prototype aircraft sometimes had a "P" letter marking on side, so I guess that is how they figured it out. But there must be at least several thousand people handy they could have found to tell them the real answer.
 
I don't know if anyone else watches the Don Wildman series on the so called Travel channel or Ghost channel as it has become, but they are of the opinion that if it flys it an airplane and the viewers will be to dumb to noticed any difference. Has anyone else spotted the the one on the C-54 that vanished in Alaska. It must be a computer generated plane as it has a DC3 vertical stabilizer. But the one that really drives me up the wall is not avaition related but showed U.S Army solders in the south pacific with German helments! I have seen planes which are supposed to be jets with two wings , in other words biplanes! The uniforms are also silly with upside down chevrons etc.
Product of the California education system?
 
Some friends of mine and I collapsed in hilarity one day when we were watching TV at my place. A light aircraft took off and they had spliced in a short clip of a B-52's landing gear retracting, as seen from inside the gear well. We all were engineers working at the main Air Logistics Center for B-52's at Tinker AFB.

On another show the hero had sneaked aboard a jet airliner because he found out that some bad guys were going to kill someone on board by "turning off the oxygen" to the cabin the victim was in. Of course, they don't add oxygen to the air in the cabin; it is pressurized by the engines. At the time I was working on aircraft pressurization and air conditioning.

The old exclamation, "Who thinks up this stuff?" really does not apply in many cases. All too often there clearly is no "thought" involved!
 
Regarding the Dauntlesses bombing Pearl Harbor...this frustrates me too, but there is an explanation:

After Pearl Harbor, General Marshall wanted information regarding the war provided to the public in a moving yet accurate way. He didn't think the Signal Corp was quite up to the task. He hired the well-regarded Hollywood directors John Ford and Frank Capra (the "Why We Fight" series) to provide documentaries, which proved ultimately quite successful.

"December 7th" was John Ford's initial effort. Interestingly, although a number of cameras were rolling during the Pearl attack, very little was usable. There was no stock footage of Japanese bombers that could be employed, so Ford used available Dauntess footage as a stand-in. He had little choice, because the military wanted the film in theaters promptly. And some other scenes had to be recreated. I also recall, in the documentary, some rear screen projection was employed for other attack scenes, which of course does not portray events as they actually occur.

In all fairness to Ford, it was an extremely effective presentation.

I have an interest in old cars, and shows, especially for TV, can get pretty sloppy. For example, the History Channel recently had a feature regarding US titans of the 20th Century. There was a scene during WW2, showing J. P. Morgan riding in a car, along with two other vehicles. They were: 1952 (or 53) Packard, 50 ("Bucktooth") Buick, and 1952 Buick! They also showed a C-54 with the 1947 USAF insignia (red stripe).

More more observation re the airplanes: often, they get the aircraft right, but the markings are all wrong, given the theater of operation, and the date. I'll give the moviemakers a pass on this one.

Currell
 
Goes to books, too. If a review says this is a really great book written by a journalist, you can be sure I won't buy it. Journalists and history don't mix.
 

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