65th anniversary of the Dambusters raid

nitpick: The Derwent Reservoir is in Derbyshire, and is where 617 practiced before the raid.

Derwent Reservoir

Derwent Water Derwent Water is in the Lake District, Cumbria, 100 miles away, and has no dam.

cool. just ordered the dvd before I saw this post....weird timing... great movie!

Craig

the special effects are a howl. the machine gun bursts are scratchees on the film. the lancs and dams aren't too bad and the actors are very good. for a war time film, i give it a solid A.

I think I read once that Disney did the FX for the movie..

seems way below even wartime dis...

they don't look bad, they just crack me up. we swiped the idea for a student film/star wars parody.

It's one of my faves and I don't think the gunbursts look all that bad. The sound of all those Merlins was a highlight, too. Watching Bob Hoover at air shows, I can tell those were real Merlins they recorded.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

I liked how they opened the bomb-bay doors... even though the Dambuster Lancaster's didn't _have_ bomb-bay doors. That being said...boy, but was that one astounding attack operation!

Pat

Keep an eye on all the AA tracers coming up at the planes as they attack, as well as getting into the exact attack position as their targeting devices converge before releasing their bombs at the dams. "Dambusters" and "633 Squadron" formed the entire basis of the attack scene on the Death Star in "Star Wars".

Pat

The bouncing bomb that they used was the wrong shape. That is because in

1954, when the film was made, the design of Upkeep was still secret.

I seem to remember one of the crew being interviewed about a previous anniversary flypast possibly just a couple of years ago over the Derwent dam being 'a bit hairy' as the Lanc disappears over it, losing altitude somewhat and we hear some popping (sounds more like flapping or fluttering in the engines). It's seen clearly in news footage of the day.

Richard Brooks said the following on 19/05/2008 20:55:

I remember now! It was something to do with a sudden downdraught hitting the aircraft.

If you haven't seen it already, check out this melding of 'Star Wars' audio and 'Dambusters' video.

Regards, Ralph

Note the Y-Wings getting annihilated in their futile attack, like the Devastators at Midway. When Lucas stole (and boy, did he outright steal a lot*), he stole from the best. :-D

• Which neatly explains why the three prequels suck. He could grab a chunk here and there from existing stories and movies and combine them, but trying to do something original completely defeated him. Melkor ran into the same problem in Tolkien's "The Silmarillion"... he could do hybrids and and warped versions of anything that existed in Middle Earth, but making something original and new was completely beyond his abilities. And let's not even get started on where Tolkien took a lot of his goodies from in LOTR, except to say that as much as he hated "The Wizard Of Oz" there's a lot of similarities there.

Pat

that tolkien book was the best sleeping pill ever. 10 pages and zonk!