![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/glover7.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/gillan.jpg)
It’s a killing machine
A couple of items from the desk of our trainspotting department.
British TV series SAS Rogue Heroes is a WW2 action/adventure drama based on “mostly true” events. What it lacks in historical accuracy, it makes up in the entertainment value. And a very anachronistic soundtrack. Season 2, episode 5 features a convoy of said rogue heroes spiritedly driving behind the enemy lines to blow something up, accompanied by the studio version of the Highway Star. It was a big chunk of the track — from the main riff to just after Jon’s solo, then skipping to the end.
From the other side of the pond, an upcoming episode of a “tough guy in a pickle” series Reacher (season 3, episode 6) is titled Smoke on the Water. No further details yet. The episode is scheduled to be released on March 13, 2025.
[Update March 16]: Soap Central has an update on the Reacher S03E06, and it is chock-full of spoilers. Suffice to say, there is water, there is fire, and there is smoke in there.
Thanks to Mad Hatter and Kick Koopman for the info.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Crap, not available for streaming in the Vaterland currently. Not because I want to listen to Highway Star – I have other options for that 😂 – but because I take an interest in WW II cinema and history as some of you might have noticed here by now. 😎
February 20th, 2025 at 21:05& then there’s this unusual item…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QjNvHsSacg
Different, Shocking! So how come I like it?.
February 20th, 2025 at 23:25I saw the same about ‘Smoke’ being featured in that Season 3 episode. That’s a kick-a** series. Love it. Should be grand.
February 21st, 2025 at 01:26P.S. One of my favorite rock albums from the 1970s: Black Oak Arkansas’ “Ain’t Life Grand” with Jim Dandy on lead vocals and Tommy Aldridge on the kit.
Both series’ are highly recommended, and a great barnstorming watch with an excellent rock music soundtrack. Series 2 Episode 5 is where Highway Star is used to great effect for a couple of minutes, as the SAS blaze cross-country, casually shooting up roadblocks and checkpoints.
February 21st, 2025 at 09:51John @2: Wow, that is extremely well done, capturing the essence of Glenn’s singing and songwriting plus also creaming the WS original into the ground of mediocrity.
This stuff is getting dangerous, it really is.
You may like or disdain Glenn, but both his singing and his songwriting is immediately recognizable. As is his bass playing.
February 21st, 2025 at 16:18Long Gone win Gillan has just been fixed up a bit and is really good 🤩
https://youtu.be/KKkhyai50Uw?si=UqnfHwOMfeSDBQAP
February 21st, 2025 at 17:04Uwe @1:
do not despair, in terms of cinematic history, it aims more towards Inglourious Basterds rather than Band of Brothers or Stalingrad.
February 21st, 2025 at 19:55I liked all three movies/series! Though Band of Brothers probably best.
Inglorious Basterds was good fun, it wasn’t attempting to be Saving Private Ryan, another good WW II film. Tarantino films are movie art, they don’t pretend to depict realism.
I even liked Fury though the tank battle action on that frozen field … 😂 (A German heavy tank in close combat with a much more agile US medium tank half its weight which it could have lethally knocked out with its 88 mm gun from 2 km or more away with ease while the US tank didn’t have the gun range to shoot back and pierce the Tiger’s armor? Or the not yet electronically barrel-stabilized Tiger I firing while in motion on rugged ground? 😏 88 ammo was expensive and Germany had few of it due to the raw material shortage, the crew would have been court-martialed for such a reckless waste with zero chance of hitting anything and the added risk of permanently damaging the Tiger’s notoriously fickle gun positioning.) No matter, at least for the first time in any WW II movie they used a real Tiger I, and the film was brave against easy typecasting in quite a few scenes [the shooting of a German POW who wore a US Army coat against the cold, the harassing of the German women, or the very young SS soldier (at that late stage of the war, you could be conscripted into the Waffen-SS at a younger age – 15+ – than you could be into the more conservative Wehrmacht), probably scared shitless himself, who showed mercy/looked away in one of the final scenes].
February 22nd, 2025 at 03:22RE: “at least for the first time in any WW II movie they used a real Tiger I…”
My biggest pet peeve about WW II films; all of those damn M48’s and later, M 60’s, masquerading as Panzers, Tigers & Mein Gott, even passing them off as Shermans. I want realism!!!
February 22nd, 2025 at 23:26I know, but it was impossible to get them at the time. Those dreaded German Panzers needed constant repair and servicing by ace mechanics (unlike a Sherman which was easily repaired or a T-34 which was only expected to last slightly more than 24 hours under field conditions to be then promptly replaced by a new one because that was more efficient than any repair), most tank museums have only come to grips with the mechanical issues (Tigers and Panthers are especially delicate) in the last two decades or so.
Spielberg at least used a T-34 chassis with a mock Tiger I superstructure to make them credibly look like German armored vehicles, but even he couldn’t get a running German tank for Saving Private Ryan.
Fake “Tiger-34” from SPR:
https://preview.redd.it/huwleuscp2281.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=71938d1a2dcef76fff70d61c59d5256fe4d3c707
Real Tiger 1 as used in Fury:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bf19276259fe7086927df61b2f8a5052213e53c2/0_0_460_276/master/460.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none
The intricately interleaved and overlapping road wheels of the original were the giveaway. Still, pretty well done and Soviet T-34s were after all based on a German pre-war design plans the Russians were legitimately using as Versailles Treaty Germany had tanks produced in secret there.
The Jagdpanther in Band of Brothers was pretty good too, but it was again a prop built on a Russian chassis, this time a T-55 one:
fake “Jagdpanther-55” as used in BoB:
https://www.ww2incolor.com/api/image/80d0308d-635f-4fa2-af0f-33d8bb43fa4d.false
Real thing (again look at the telltale intricate road wheel set-up):
https://www.weltkrieg2.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Jagdpanther-frueh.jpg
It’s complex. Once you start watching for period-correct uniforms, insignia, camouflage and equipment variants as actually employed in a certain theaters of war at any given time by Heer, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, no WWII movie passes the test. I try not to get carried away with stuff like that. We’ve come a long way, even cheaper movies have realized by now that Waffen-SS soldiers didn’t fight on the front in fetching black uniforms, but in Flecktarn camouflage (which Wehrmacht soldiers regularly did not have, the Waffen-SS was privileged regarding procurement):
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4ff3e2063035497df5659a07d523c303-lq
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Harald-Dill/publication/384051456/figure/fig5/AS:11431281281736126@1727984972273/Abb-4-Unretouchierte-Kopie-des-Portraets-eines-Unterscharfuehrers-der-Waffen-SS-gemalt.png
(Believe it or not: That WWII period German painting is publicly displayed in the US Military Academy of West Point!)
and that not every WWII German soldier in a uniform with skull lapels is a Waffen-SS guy, but rather a member of the Wehrmacht Panzertruppe:
https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Uniformen/PanzerUniform/schutzm.jpg
February 23rd, 2025 at 05:28As the initial Band of Brothers “T-55 made to look like a Jagdpanther” didn’t work …
https://64.media.tumblr.com/8f82444079c23d6c4766e8faf9ad7fda/tumblr_ounklb5VrJ1qj6sk2o1_500.gif
February 23rd, 2025 at 12:49Yes, I deleted the political stuff. It will get dirty, it always does. Stick to the music, please.
March 2nd, 2025 at 00:56@12
Svante, in Denmark there is this proverb:
“Just as you don’t want to know how sausages are made, you also don’t want to know how politics is made.”
I guess that covers it all 😃😄
March 3rd, 2025 at 07:12