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~~ GUEST COLUMN
BY BRICK WALZ
Against my better judgment, I've been watching, off and on, Baa Baa Black Sheep, the NBC series starring Robert Conrad as WWII air ace Greg “Pappy” Boyington, since it came on the air in September claiming to be firmly rooted in fact, In the episodes I've watched since, it has become increasingly evident that the series is, instead, firmly mired in bullshit. I won't go into the usual song and dance about how such a series does a disservice to the men who fought and, in many cases, died during the Pacific campaign; Boyington himself, who was there and spent several years in a Japanese prison camp, is on the series as
"adviser" and obviously is adhering to the old policy: "Take the money and run,
To its credit, the series has a handful of wellpreserved Corsair fighters, the sight of which is guaranteed to turn an aviation buff to jelly, but nonetheless, Baa Baa Black Sheep is irksome on a number of counts, not the least of which is glaringly mismatched stock footage, In this week's episode, Greg and the boys go on an apparently suicidal mission to bomb a Japanese ship at precisely the right time to bottle up the Jap fleet, Never mind that they go through a lot of plot padding involving deadstick landings on a Japanese-held island; when the attack comes, on a Japanese freighter, mind you, we are suddenly confronted with a dazzling array of sundry vessels, including an aircraft carrier, having the bejeezus blown out of them, After the supposed suicide mission, in which not one of them suffers so much as a scratch, the group then is supposed to land on an American carrier, Not only does the program not even try to recreate the proper WWII method of guiding carrier pilots to a landing, it shows a type of carrier--with an angled flight deck--that didn't even exist then, Furthermore, while the stock footage used to show the Black Sheep's Corsairs landing is accurate enough, when the script calls for one of them to skid to the edge of the deck, the plane involved suddenly turns into a Grumman Hellcat,
So what?, you say. And you may be right. Who the hell cares whether it's accurate or not, right? So what if the series has reached the point where it never shows anyone-American or Japanese being killed--and even has an entire contingent of Japanese "commandos" surrendering after a few shots are exchanged. Let the kiddies have their fun, their Rat Patrol with wings,
But, I ask you, if historical and technical accuracy doesn't matter a damn, how about a TV adventure series set during the Vietnam war, with these gallant Yank jet pilots using all sorts of Yankee know-how and ingenuity and just plain guts to carry the fight to the enemy. Hmmm, how about that?
CAPTAIN GEORGE'S PENNY DREADFUL, a weekly review established in 1968, is published by the Vast Whizzbang Organization, 594 Markham Street, Toronto, Ontario.