Apollo11
Posts: 24082
Joined: 6/7/2001 From: Zagreb, Croatia Status: offline
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Hi all, quote:
ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58 quote:
ORIGINAL: AW1Steve quote:
ORIGINAL: Apollo11 quote:
ORIGINAL: witpqs I didn't get to catch but a bit of either series. What did you think of them? The books are massive and quite OK... war, history and romance... something for everyone... The miniseries are also OK - they were from early 1980's though! The books were big, but easy reading. "Mind-candy". Except for the fact that Mitchum was rather "long in the tooth" for the role , it was not a bad series. Fairly historically accurate, and it had a respectable budget. I read both, saw WOW once, have WAR on VHS. It's as you say. But I'd guess "huge budgets." They are from the pre-cable era of great mini-series ("Roots", "Rich Man, Poor Man") when the form was a staple, bookend feature of network fall scheduling. WOW especially was shot largely on location in Europe, although WAR has a lot of European and Asian scenes as well (the whole concentration camp arc for example.) There is a very large romance aspect (Mitchum/Pug's slow-motion divorce and taking up with a much younger, beautiful woman; his wife, actress Polly Bergen's affair with actor Peter Graves of "Mission Impossible", who just "happens" to work on the Manhattan Project, etc.) For viewers with only a smattering of history it did a lot to illustrate the flows, particularly with Hitler's rise, and, once the war started, with some of the battle strategies, especially in the Pacific. Outside of the romance features, both mini-series and both books reminded me of Woody Allen's great "Zelig", with Pug as Zelig, a man who just happens, by sometimes tortured plot contrivance, to be present at Every Major Historical Event. It's not every four-striper who is FDR's go-to guy with the world. But if you can overlook that bit of novel mechanics needed to make the thing hang together, I'd recco both to forumites. Yep - wholeheartedly recommended to both read and watch! I think I read it twice when I was younger (1st time when I was 13-14 and then again at 17-18)... it might be good time to read it again... BTW, I think that the miniseries (I watched it, I think, in mid to late 1980's) prompted me to re-read the books the 2nd time... Leo "Apollo11"
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