Just had to look this one up. Yup, definitely a “it’s so bad, it’s good” feature. An NBC Studios made-for-TV movie starring an all-star cast and some script writers who should be very, very ashamed.
He WAS in “Under Siege II” which used a set of cars modified by Colorado Railcar from SP gallery cars to look a bit like Superliners, and had “stunt hatches” to allow people to climb over the outside of the train.
That wasn’t really accurate either, and obviously used models for the final scene.
I enjoyed Atomic Train when it first came out because, well, it had trains in it and I was young and didn’t know any better about the details then, although I still knew there was a bunch wrong, there always is. I just enjoyed watching the trains.
We taped it on VHS when it was aired on TV, although it aired in two parts and the second part didn’t record properly. Oh well, that was after the derailment, so the train watching parts were over then…
Someone mentioned “Emperor of the North” with Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine?
I’ve seen it, it’s a great train movie, but I’ve only watched it once. Borgnines portrayal of “Shack” the conductor is so terrifying I just don’t WANT to watch it again.
Ironic, because those who knew him said Ernest Borgnine was one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, a real prince. Shows what a good actor he was!
For those who don’t get the Convicted One’s sarcasm, it’s another incompetence of the IT “programmers” who wrote (or improperly maintained) some of the site code. If users leave, or are banned, the software still needs to ‘identify’ the post with some sort of monicker or whatever. When it can’t find a valid identifier to a registered member, it defaults to ‘anonymous’, even though the site is registration-only to post and ‘anonymous’ shouldn’t even be in the default options list. Then the code that updates post count is too stupid to recognize that ‘anonymous’ is a catchall for a Very Large Number of orphan posts… and just tots and tots and tots it up. This is not exactly GIGO, it’s more like the old parable about the barrels of wine and sewage.
Actually, Anonymous logins were allowed in the past when the Kalmback forum software did not require a login account.
As for ‘programmer incompetence’, you must look a little further up the food chain. Kalmbach has a very small IT staff and no doubt has to purchase what software will be least expensive to maintain for its modest needs. Non-IT saavy management will often hire some overpriced consultant with a pretty sloppy ‘statement of work’, hence this current forum.
One of the Kalmbach people explained it a while back, I forget if it was on this Forum or the Classic Toys Trains one, but it was explained that there’s a time limit on posters. If there’s no activity from a poster for a certain length of time (I forget how long) the posters “nom de plume” is changed from whatever it was to “Anonymous.”
No deep mystery here.
Oh, and “Anonymous” mentioned “Hogan’s Heroes.” When I was a kid I loved that show, all the kids did. However, one of my uncles, a World War Two Army Air Force vet absolutely HATED it. Why? Because it made the Germans look stupid. NOT that he was a fan of the Germans, far from it. He said the Germans weren’t stupid, they were smart as whips and damn dangerous and the only reason we beat them was because they “ran out of fuel.” A bit of an over-simplification, but I could see what he was getting at.
A long-ago friend of the family was a POW in Germany. While he didn’t regard his captors as stupid, I believe he did say that the personnel staffing the POW camps weren’t the sharpest tacks in the box (which is why they were at the camps and not on the front line). I don’t know that he lived long enough to see “Hogan’s Heros”, but I heard that he had said that Stalag 17 (the movie) was fairly accurate.
“Stalag 17” is a great film. It should have been accurate, the two playwrights ( I forget their names) who wrote the play that became the movie were POW’s in a German Stalag.
I love “Stalag 17!” “Animal” and Harry Shapiro are my heroes! Steal every scene they’re in!
As an aside, the crowd I ran with in school were all World War Two history buffs, and were fascinated by the various POW escape stories that came out of the war. So much so we called the junior high school we attended (they call 'em middle schools now) “Stalag 17.” The high school was down the road a bit and on top of a hill. We called it “Colditz Castle” when we got there.
Anyone who watched Hogans Heroes and expected historical accuracy needs to smacked hard upside the head and told to “snap out of it”. HH was a SITCOM, a silly 60’s sitcom at that, the entire point was to make people laugh, anyone crying inaccuracies is like someone watching I Dream of Jennie and be-hitching that Nasa wasn’t portrayed correctly or whining about inaccurate Railroad operations on Petticoat Junction, there TV shows, there not documentaries. I will say one thing HH did do right was to play up the Nutzies often hilariously uptight, officious and by-the-rules nature, and that many Nutzies were right off the farm and not the sharpest tools in the shed. It was the first media to portray the Nutzies in a manner to take the horror of the third retch and instead play up the aspects that made them laughable buffoons, which in some respects they were. Remember HH was two years before Mel Brooks put the goosestepping boot right into Hitlers groin with The Producers. HH helped demistify the Nutzies for millions of Americans and showed they were not all supermen but could be as stupid and major screwups like anyone. As Brooks says (paraphrasing) How do you deal with a monster like Hitler (nutzies), by mocking them incescently until they loose their teeth and your left with a short angry paperhanger with a silly moustache.
And Atomic Train was SO bad I wish I could neuralize it!
Don’t forget “The great Escape”, another good POW movie. Based on real events. Several years ago on PBS some archeologists unearthed the escape tunnel at the old camp. All very interesting. Not the most talked about part of WWII, but still…
Don’t forget “The great Escape”, another good POW movie. Based on real events. Several years ago on PBS some archeologists unearthed the escape tunnel at the old camp. All very interesting. Not the most talked about part of WWII, but still…
The story behind the “Great Escape” was talked about quite a bit in the years immediately following WW2. The December 1945 issue of Reader’s Digest had a version of the story.
It’s weird talking to my kids about WW2 as thay don’t have anywhere near the same knowledge that my classmates and I had at their age. The big difference is that WW2 was their grandparents generation, where my dad and a good number of my friends’ dads were WW2 vets.
Yes. A quote from James Michener’s book “Tales of the South Pacific”, “Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge”.
