Saturday, July 12

On a happier note --

While I was eating lunch today, I happened to turn on Turner Classic Movies, on which happened to be The Battle Of Britain with Lawrence Olivier and Christopher Plummer. This flick happened to be in the middle of one of the big Spitfire vs Nazi Bomber scenes, which I watched with growing delight.

"Holy Shit!" quoth I. "It's the assault on the friggin' Death Star!"

Now, it occurs to me that this is hardly unknown among all you SW geeks out there, as I seem to recall, on further reflection, having read something about that very influence in one of the old Lucas interviews.

But it was still very, very cool to come to find it unexpectedly staring me in the face.

That's all.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great movie, easily a classic of the genre. I think being a WWII aviation buff (literally just got back from an airshow) is one of the main reasons why I'm so attached to Star Wars.
Lucas's various nods to that era of air combat,in my opinion, really lend a kind of majesty and coolness to the the concept of space dogfighting. The best example I can think of is the TIE fighter assault on the Millenium Falcon with Han and Luke manning the ship's turrets. Scenes depicting skirmishes between German fighters and B-17 gunners in Memphis Belle, another classic, practically mirror that same chase sequence.
In fact, I think the reverse effect is also true. A somewhat less than stellar movie starring Ben Affleck (Pearl Harbor) copies word-for-word the flight dialouge used by Luke's X-wing Squadron in Episode's IV and VI( including such gems as "Good shot, Red Two!" and "I can't shake him!").
I guess Me-109s and TIE fighters really aren't all that different.

-Taylor

Billy said...

That was always one of my favorite things in star wars. Even though im not a WWII buff, i still find the dogfights the most amazing thing in the world. to sit in a single engine plane and try and shoot other planes down with a gun takes some balls. be it a x-wing or what have you. some of my favorite SW games are the X-wing and TIE fighter ones back in the 90's, which i play to this day!

Cyborg Fighter D said...

Sorry to go (kinda) off-topic.

http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/69035/The_front_page_of_StoverBlog,_circa_July_14,_2008.

I'm tempted to do this to every blog post you've done here, Matt. See what the real themes you talk about here are.

Anonymous said...

Off-topic, but worth mentioning. Have you seen Joss Whedon's latest project? He's doing something specifically for the web called Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog: http://www.drhorrible.com/

It's only going to be available for the next couple of days. Part one of three is up right now and it's really, really good.

Anonymous said...

Hi, it's me again... John Scalzi did a nice comment on your latest book on his blog..he does a little video review of many books and he is really excited about Caine, Black Knife..you might want to check it out.
http://scalzi.com/whatever/

MWS said...

Well, that's darn nice.

When I start reading books again, I'll have to read OLD MAN'S WAR.

Anonymous said...

You should also offer to do a "The Big Idea" piece over on his blog, where you talk about the idea behind the book to his Huge Friggin' Audience (Something like 50000 or so)
right before your two books come out.

MWS said...

http://www.dunceuponatime.com/why-i-now-love-john-scalzi

Huh. Why don't I have fans like this?

On second thought, don't answer that.

Pizzope said...

I've never seen it, but just thinking about the actual scene itself brings forth a slew of childhood memories.

On a totally unrelated note, I just saw that Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for CBK, with an October release date.

*joyous refrain*

Anonymous said...

scalzi's a good guy. i do hope you have some promotionial tours comin up matt, i mean... it pisses me off that more people don't read your stuff.

it is cool to actually see the parallels between the movie and lucas' work. makes it even harder to see what became of the legacy though. on a side note, i just read revenge in the last three hours... dude, that was literally the first novelization that made me want to punch a character more than the author ;) good shit.

go go CBK!

Unknown said...

" http://www.dunceuponatime.com/why-i-now-love-john-scalzi

Huh. Why don't I have fans like this?

On second thought, don't answer that."

What makes you think you don't, Master Bear?