One of our cable channels had it on for a Saturday a few weeks back. We also have a DVD which is watched often especially while I work at my desk. We'll probably watch it tonigh or tomorrow. My favorite line is "Confirmation Captain, there's your confirmation." Another great from the past is Battle of Britan"
Val Kraut
Check the credits; IIRC the guy who says that in the movie is the person who said it in reality on Dec. 7, 1941. I saw a interview with the guy who told the radar men to ignore the incoming signals from the north a year or so back. He didn't even try to offer a alternate explanation for what he'd done, but simply admitted he'd screwed up really royally. In the show (Secrets Of Pearl Harbor, IIRC), they had the Naval War College do a wargame based on what would have happened if the Ward's attack on the minisub had been taken seriously, and the fleet had gotten up steam ASAP and sailed out of harbor. It was a lot worse. In all likelihood most of the battleships would still be sunk by the Japanese air attacks, and sunk in a thousand feet of water or more, so the could never be raised or repaired. We'd also have lost either Enterprise or Lexington, with Japanese losses being one or two carriers of the attacking force of six at most. Enterprise was closest during the attack (200 miles...Lexington was 400 miles out) and would be fighting the Japanese carriers at six-to-one odds. Unlike the inner battleships on "Battleship Row" all the battleships would have been able to be attacked via torpedo bombers, level bombers, and dive bombers (in the actual attack the inner battleships were only able to be attacked by level and dive bombers). More Pearl Harbor stuff here:
"Tora, Tora, Tora" was my first job in the industry. I landed a spot doing research on the American aircraft in the script. Later I got some hands on work with the Kingfisher and P-40 mock-ups and the PBYs. During production I was on the continuity crew, something I couldn't believe they actually paid for!
We actually tried to let a short scene through for fun, but it got cut in the very final can. The flag was being raised a few seconds before the attack begins (just a tiny bit of poetic license). The camera zooms slowly until it's focused on the soldier's watch, showing that the attack is but seconds away. Pretty tense, huh? Everything looked right, but there was something that took five rewinds to find. The flag was right, uniforms right, even the background was right and the flagpole was in the same location as on 12/7/41.
It was the watch. A Japanese-made 1970 Seiko (IIRC) with a sweep second hand!!!
My favorite scene was the B-17 crashlanding when one main wheel wouldn't come down. It was an actual incident during the filming, caught in B/W by a cameraman who raced to the field to catch it. Something similar happened on 12/7/41, but it was in a cane field. The B-17s were coming in from Hamilton Field, CA, with no armament and very little fuel. Somehow the B/W footage in the middle of a color film felt just right.
The mmodels used for the Japanese carriers were huge. One survived for many years in Stinson Beach, CA until the building it was in burned. No idea what eventually happened to it, but I still have an AA mount from it.
Still one of my favorite movies. Watched it today on one of the history channels (I do love sattelite TV with east and west coast feeds. If I miss something I can sometimes catch it three hours later).
Tom
Pat Flannery wrote:
You know what was missing? The P-36s. They could have modified the AT-6s to look like those also. That being said, they did a superb job with the planes, and put lots more effort into them than any movie before or since. I always liked the comment someone made about the movie "Pearl Harbor". "Those poor Pearl Harbor veterens...now they've been bombed twice." Someday, someone is going to do a movie about Midway with what you can do with CGI now... and about the time Ensign Gay is peeking out from under his seat cushion while floating in the ocean, and the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu and going up in fireballs in front of him...that's going to be one _hell_ of a scene. Can you imagine what they could do with those SBDs diving through the clouds at the Japanese fleet nowadays? It would be downright awe-inspiring.
Pat
on 12/8/2007 3:49 AM snipped-for-privacy@netscape.com said the following:
For me, it was the scene where the P-40s were getting shot up while trying to take off, and the one crashing into the parked ones. That looked very real to me, but I know they would not destroy vintage planes, so the modeling was spectacular.
In the original Tora 3 there were only a couple of complete P-40 airframes. Look closely when the line explodes and you can see that there are no stbd. sides to the fuselages, wings, horizontal stabs., etc. Landing gear, engines were beat up originals that were considered not restorable to airworthy status (today, of course, that would not be the case). port fuselages, wings, etc. were fibreglass over wood frames. We had one hell of a time making the side blisters for the PBYs. Eventually we found them at Santa Rosa, CA. I had worked as a slurry loader there and remembered seeing them behind one of the hangers (there were also two F7F Tigercats which still had the Siskyou Air Service markings). Now, of course, the blisters are worth quite a bit and I could kick myself for finding them to be destroyed in the film. IIRC a couple of them survived the movie and ended up back in Santa Rosa.
Don't remember if P-36s were considered. The producers were informed of the correct types and markings and the fact that T-6s were available for convincing concersions. No P-40 owners would even consider conversion of their bird to a P-36. Recently we have seen a French Hawk 75 at airshows. Lovely.
There were also available B-18s that could have been used but were not. Numerous other aircraft were considered (S.38, F4F, etc.) but didn't make the early financial cuts.
Tom
i heard during filming that that line explosion was more vigorous than it was supposrd to be and some of the guys running on the right side are really running from fear. it was in a book on the making of t3. is it true?
There were several incidents during the T3 shoot on location in Hawaii.
Yes, the pyro loads were wrong in the flightline shootup and people really did run for their lives.
Probably the most shocking was the theft of the B-25 camera ship by a young guy who wasn't even a pilot. He buzzed the tower, mangled a wingtip on something (I don't remember what he hit) and managed to set her down without killing himself. IIRC that was Paul Mantz's B-25, used for many films.
Tom
In the scene where the damaged Zero purposely crashes into the aircraft hanger, it looks like three's a A-20 Havoc in there; how was that done?
Pat
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