Masters of the Air (Hanks/Spielberg series on Apple+)

I mean, I could handle the Bastogne episode of BoB but at least if you got blown to bits in Bastogne it wouldn't be followed by falling 50,000 feet in the air

Oh yeah, every time they bail out my hands start sweating.

That post does not look good out of context.

they said on the companion podcast that often when they bailed out it was their first time ~ever~ doing it - they had no training on how to bail out

Needed a couple more episodes like this mixed in at the beginning IMO. Characters you can follow instead of just goggled heads getting blown up!

even though i had obv seen hogans heroes and great escape etc, i had never given a lot of thought to the concept of downed pilots/airmen and what their experiences may have been like … enjoying the egan storyline

This show is way too fond of Cinematic Soaring Strings and pounding drums under every theoretically dramatic moment.

Damn you, Hans Zimmer and your influence.

Also lol @ Buck doing an impression of The Bear Jew’s “Teddy Fucking Ballgame” and the navigator taking a pep pill and getting the Limitless flash of light.

well sure but also: Tuskegees enter the chat :)

those Tuskegee p51’s over France were cool as hellllll

the amount of detail they put in the prison camp set is pretty insane imo

also i’ve said it before and i will say it again Bucky is a fucking nut, he would drive me insane. Like a 13 year old hopped up on red cordial. how Buck didn’t punch him in the face like that every ~day~ is beyond me

Saw the first episode last night, it was vv good! I think them getting thrown into the meat grinder right away before we get to even know some of the guys who wind up dying is sort of perhaps similar to the experience Buck is going through, showing up and having 3 bombers and their whole crews go before he knows them. I don't know if that was the intent but I always lean into the intent being there with such things. Looked good, brutal as hell too.

difficult to adjust back to normcore Buck after his Feyd Rautha in Dune 2 lol

Great finale - some harrowing shit in the front half, then I just cried happy/sad tears for the whole back half

If I was a dude back then i would absolutely have had a cool mustache like Rosie

FYI there’s a great companion documentary called “The Bloody Hundredth” up on Apple+ now too
- interviews with the real dudes (including Rosie!) & tons of footage, great watch - highly recommend.

The finale made me retroactively dislike the series.

why?

just finished this - very compelling show even though the pacing/characterisation were all over the place. Last few episodes felt a bit rushed, with some pointless sidetracks (e.g. Crosby's British girlfriend was great but we didn't really need to know she was a spy, and if we did, would've been nice if they could have given her a moment in the finale.)

Also wish they had spent at least another episode focused on the Tuskegee airmen. Their planes looked so cool but I kinda hated the way they were included in the story - felt like the show was trying to fulfil a diversity quota. like, imagine casting Ncuti Gatwa and not giving him any kind of distinguishing characteristic.

idk if it was historically accurate but bucky's raising the flag moment was kinda eye-rolly

Rosie is the best. Loved all the flying combat scenes, and the parts where they're looking up to see how many planes came back. Just drives home what a surreal, gut-wrenching experience that must have been - one minute, you're seeing all your friends take off, the next they're just gone and most of the time, you don't even know if they made it out alive

yeah Rosie’s story is really fascinating to me, interested on reading more about him

As much as I've grown used to this sort of thing in tv, I was still a bit taken aback by the rather sudden fate of one character in episode 3

Same here, but I'm wondering if the series was shot before his role in that film?

Were the bombers really designed so that the only way in was to do weird reverse pullup gymnastics? How many pilots died in bad dismounts?

I wonder if any of the background actors were also in zone of interest...

yep pretty much! the point was carrying the bombs - the people/airmen were pretty much secondary considerations in all of the engineering decisions

This entire series was stressful but well done. Every episode is so nerve wracking.

Saw that Timothy Van Patten directed the finale and I instantly relaxed seeing his opening credit, expecting it would be handled well (and it was).

I've never seen Band of Brothers but will watch the documentary on the Hundredth and Band of Brothers at some point.

One thing I preferred about this treatment as opposed to Rogue Heroes was that I liked that the music and soundtrack seemed contemporary to the times, as opposed to soundtracking high energy scenes with ACDC or some other modern music as in some historical dramas.

It would have been nice to have more on the Tuskegee Airmen and I was glad to see so many epilogues. Not sure how much of that choice is in the adaptation, how much that is in the source material. I was wondering what happened to Crosby's friend afterwards and would have liked an epilogue but at the same time it felt strange thinking about his wife and family. Maybe it's in the book. I'm sure I'll get the book for my father in law at some point, that's the kind of thing he loves.

the documentary helps to provides some of the grounding that’s missing, that you get in the Band of Brothers series episodes with the key interviews with the actual men themselves. It really helps so much to hear them speak about their experiences themselves

Watched episode 5 - that run to Munster was an aerial hellscape. The show quite smartly perhaps shifted perspective to stay with Rosenthal's plane as everyone crashed and burned around him, leaving their fates a complete mystery in a way which I thought was v compelling (even knowing that many of them will return, having others die from this POV was a pretty gripping choice. I kept wondering how anyone ever made it through that arena of the war unscathed.

it’s hard to imagine what that would be like, to survive something so deathly.

I remember my grandparents would randomly drop scenes of total horror into their conversations ("I remember I was riding on a double decker bus and the one behind me got bombed" or "I saw a ship of soldiers in the Mediterranean, get bombed and sink in front of eyes") and it was a puzzle thinking about how they got from that to being cuddly old grandparents

This was good, probably better than The Pacific. Sometimes it veered into glossy but for the most part it felt as real and harrowing as the two previous shows. The last couple episodes were paced weird, with events happening very quickly and the scale of time was lost. Maybe some of those elements, like the introduction of the Tuskegee or the stalag, should have happened earlier in the show so it didn't feel so cramped in. But overall, satisfying show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQJp-FoH0Es

ooh yay! thx!
mr veg just gave me the Donald Miller book for my birthday & i am excited to read it

also, slightly long back story but 15 years ago we went to Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in DC and i bought myself this cool P51 mustang coffee mug that shows the silhouettes & specs on it. So i guess mr veg started digging around to find the same mug with a B17 Fortress, but couldnt find it anywhere until he stumbled on one in the Air Force Museum in Ohio online gift shop — so now I finally have a pair! A Fortress AND Mustang mug together at last.

which is all to say yes I really am this nerdy about ww2 irl

i appreciate that episode 6 doesn't shy away from the ugly nature of the german grounds troops and some elements of the civilian populace a bit rather than merely saving that for the gestapo, bc clearly there was indeed a cult-like mental illness at work in germany at the time which is vv particular to rabid fascism and certainly has manifested itself in other ways in other countries at other times.

I moved from London East Anglia in 2019 and Thorpe Abbotts is about a 30-minute drive from here, I'm going to go visit the 100th museum at some point, although there are a myriad of airfields with great little volunteer-run places scattered all around, including one in a place nearby called Old Buckenham, where Jimmy Stewart and Walter Matthau were stationed.

Dang it, *to* East Anglia

oh that sounds cool!