Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

(Reply) (Thread)

Someone said something very similar to this in a fancy and articulate way, and since just about anyone else is more credible than I, I've been dying to figure out who and just how they put it.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

ha! that was a good description of the Hitler Channel offerings :-)

(Reply) (Thread)

That's the best anewsr of all time! JMHO

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

:D

(Reply) (Thread)

Mitchell and Webb point out how ridiculous it is to put skulls on the uniform of the bad guys. Hello? They don't actually think of themselves as the bad guys! They think they're the good guys!

(Reply) (Thread)

What type of good guys put skulls on their uniforms?

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

Do you mind if I link to this rant? It's some kinds of awesome.

(Reply) (Thread)

Of course I don't mind. But I wouldn't recommend you watch the original show - they totally leave out Ireland, under the guise of it being "neutral".

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

Surely and a little counter normal history, the war really lasted from 1914 - 1945 and if the German generals had been a little more competent Berlin would have been reduced to a large nuclear hole in the ground...

(Reply) (Thread)

Coming from Germany myself your thoughts seem a little strange. Well maybe I´m not getting them at all, but yes u are right about the history channel documentations .. but u can take any documentation about WW II they are all mostly exaggerated. On the other side WW II was fact and even if some or many things are corrected by the winners to make them appear in a better light ... let´s not forget who where the victims of this war and that the nazi were a fucking bunch of human "slaying" assholes. I don´t know if you have ever met some of the old nazis but I have encountered some of the so called neo nazis and they are not the funny type ... They have a total fixed sight on things and are willing to use force to terrorize you for the smallest fault.

But as stated at the beginning of my comment, maybe I´m not getting what you are pointing at, at all. So I´m sorry if I understand your post wrong, no offense ;)

@Ciphergoth: They actually did wear skulls ... That were the so called SS Totenkopfverbände. There is even a not so bad wikipedia articel about them ...

(Reply) (Thread)

You have to read the article in a funny way, I'm afraid: it's deliberately written as if WWII were a TV series instead of a real event.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

I've seen some spin-off stuff based around the development of that Deus Ex Machina 'superweapon' and it's just as bad rubbish. Real scientists doing real science are nothing like that.

The story is they get all these leading scientists together, and they all work on one single project, all at the same time, with nobody worrying about grants or publications. Yeah, right. And they have this one joker guy Feynman, obviously there for comic relief, and he goes around picking generals' safes, sneaking secrets and contraband off the base where they're developing it, and generally being a PITA about everything, but even though this is the Most Secret Project Ever, and it's Total War, they never court martial him or anything and just let it all go because ... well to be honest it's never really addressed as a problem. He even gets his own spin-off spin-off series where they imply he was some kind of genius, but he clearly wasn't a key figure on the superweapon project, and really you can't take this later stuff remotely seriously - it jumps the shark very near the beginning where he gives pick-up advice to young men based on his extensive experience in topless bars, and just gets worse until towards the end there's this really silly bit where he gets called in to investigate a huge space disaster like he's Sherlock Holmes and "proves" his point by doing this really cheesy trick with smashing a bit of rubber that he's frozen in liquid nitrogen.

(Reply) (Thread)

Also, did you notice that later on they became so desperate that they tried to reinvent this Feynman character first as a musician, then as a painter? I mean, come on! At its worst, "The Big Bang Theory" was never as ridiculous as that.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

I approve of this message!

-The Gneech

(Reply) (Thread)

I got to this via BoingBoing, and I think it's an excellent post!
Thank you so much!

(Reply) (Thread)

Wait a second...MY BLOG WAS ON BOINGBOING??!?!?!
...guess that explains the 62 comments to this entry. Cool, and thanks for telling me.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

Great post! Thanks!

(Reply) (Thread)

This post is made entirely of epic win. :)

(Reply) (Thread)

This is the first time I've ever even come close to having a decent explanation of that part of history. Thanks!

(Got here via Reddit.)

(Reply) (Thread)

...and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

they totally ripped off X-Men

(Reply) (Thread)

So the big head US Army guy in the Pacific Ocean is chased off a couple of islands by the Japanese, and what does he say?

"I Shall Return!" And, yeah. You can even see the uppercase letters as he's saying it.

And over in England, there's some US reporter who's standing on a rooftop in London during a nighttime bombing raid by the Germans and he's doing a live radio report as bombs are dropping all around him.

Oh, and lets not forget the episode with the heroic PT boat captain whose boat is sheared in half by a Japanese destroyer. The captain then swims to an island, while carrying a wounded crewman, and once he gets TO the island, sends a message to come rescue him to the Navy. Written on a coconut! He then gets elected President and sends men to the moon!

Really, who ARE these hacks writing the WWII series for History Channel?

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

Thank you, this just made my day.

(Reply) (Thread)

In case you haven't heard bu now, Hacker News linked to your LJ post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1507526

Nice job, BTW. I'm sending that to a few WWII buffs I know. :-)

(Reply) (Thread)

Nifty. Thanks for telling me.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

You could also question the credibility of their casting. I am sorry but a small dark haired man as the leader of the Aryan race? They should have chosen a tall, strong, blond man.
It makes you seriously wonder why the Aryans would obey to leader that obviously wasn't one.

(Reply) (Thread)

If you're only counting American and Allied dead. But it was a civil war remember, civil wars are bloody. Try several hundred thousands dead.

(Reply) (Thread)

try millions if you count civilians

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

Russia was not allied to Germany, but rather to the other side, the "Allied Forces."

Is this your mistake, or is that really what THC says?

(Reply) (Thread)

It's true. Germany and the Soviet Union had a treaty.

Up until Germany launched Operation Barbarossa. (wiki article)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

I believe that there WAS a scene shot in which there was debate between the American military and civilian leaderships about using the mystic superweapon in Vietnam, but it was cut from the DVD release. But forget about that... go to conventions and find yourself a bootleg VHS copy of the 1983 Christmas special, "Able Archer," it's hilarious!

But give the writers some credit. You would EXPECT that when the Germans started building the new high-tech fighter plane late in the series, you'd have an elite squadron of photogenic young men who change the balance of the conflict, as if this was a Japanese giant robot show. But do you see that happen? Nope! The new super-plane just isn't enough and dozens of similar superweapon programs are scuttled to focus on bare essentials in a desperate attempt to keep the empire from collapsing.

Keep circulating the tapes...

(Fun fact: the reCAPTCHA word for this post was "jackboot".)

(Reply) (Thread)

I just want to point out a slight error in your piece: the Churchill character was actually First Sea Lord, which is a kind of admiral according to the series' bible, in the first series. What's interesting in a total breakdown of continuity kind of way is that his back history has him in the army before this. So it's easy to see how you made your mistake in calling him a general. It's what you'd expect, after all, if the writers hadn't been more concerned with the Rule of Cool than realism.

Also, has anyone noticed just how many superweapons there were in this series? Every time things get slow, they pull a secret weapon out of nowhere. Early on, when the good guys are facing the invasion, it looks like it's all over for them? They unveil this super-secret invisible detection system out of nowhere to track the enemy bomber squadrons. And it works perfectly, in contrast to the bad guys' secret weapons which when they work aren't used properly, and when they are used properly are just too big to use, incredibly delicate or melt their users. The only weapons that work well and are used properly are those undersea boats and that magic 88mm gun (which tends to get used in everything).

(Reply) (Thread)

Totally implausible prototypes and superweapons, and from a power that was struggling to produce enough fuel for its mechanized forces! Totally unbelievable, and already been played to death in giant robot anime, thanks.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

A) This is incredibly clever and witty
B) Actually, this sort of exposes how much the Nazis have influenced fictional villains!

(Reply) (Thread)

To the point of being tremendously cliche, you might say. :)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

This is brilliant.

If I had the chops, I'd follow it up by critiquing the Gulf Oil Spill as a clichéd disaster movie. (As someone else has pointed out, they even cast a black actor as president.)

(Reply) (Thread)

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

You know, what pisses me of is the fact that they decided to call it World War II. I mean, at that point there wasn't any World War I, but instead they take the Great War series and renames the whole thing!

And just the Great War, the plot leading out to the outbreak is so cluttered and confused nobody really knows what happened or whose fault it was, but everyone tends to blame Germany. Then they have this boring long almost four year arc on the western front where almost nothing happens apart from people dying and almost everyone seems to be a poet. I also find it almost unbelievable the way they always portray the British Generals as almost stupid and out of touch with reality and continuing to do the same kinds of attacks time and time again. Strategy doesn't work that way!

And not to mention that they solve that arc by an "America saves the day!" when they join in the last year after some line-cruiser or something sank. And those "secret weapon" "tanks", supposedly named such to fool German spies into believing they were water tanks, which were so slow that artillery could home in on them easily.

(Reply) (Thread)

Then the Korean War series came along and they bring back one of the World War II characters in a leading role. The first season is really exciting with things going back and forth (but that Inchon episode was so unrealistic - that would never work!). But its almost like the writers didn't expect the show to be renewed after that first season so they used up all their good ideas. After they resolve the cliffhanger finale with the Chinese attacking, the series just goes nowhere and nothing much happens. It just finally ends randomly after several more seasons without any real resolution. And they wrote out the main American general character (the one that reprised his big role from World War II) for no real reason.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

No, you've got it all wrong. World War II was that rarest of programs: a sequel far more interesting and complex than the original. Remember the first series, World War I, when the Germans rebooted the concept of war? Four years of endless trench warfare. Ratings were abysmal.

(Reply) (Thread)

Yep! At least WW2 was interesting, if not realistic.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)