As long as they do their best to make it look like what it's supposed to look like, it's a lot better than consciously or due to total ignorance simply using another craft/weapon/tool indeed.

I'm an airplane nut. Consider "Top Gun" using Northrup F-5s/T-38s to play the part of a non-existant MiG design. That's partly understandable because MiGs weren't widely available with the movie was made. There's less excuse today.

What gets me is when a movie shows aircraft that didn't exist when the events portrayed occurred. For example, the movie "Midway" often shows clips that have F6F Hellcat fighters that didn't enter service until long after that battle.

The worst cases are when they show one type of aircraft taking off, another in cruise, and still another landing. I've seen that several times and the same thing with rockets. They just grab whatever stock footage is available and edit it in. Don't they think someone would notice?

Now that you mention Top Gun, there's no excuse for the footage of a pilot pulling his F-14 throttle towards him to throttle up...

Using painted F-5 indeed was an understandable solution for flying with an unexisting plane from a country that would not let them use any of their planes anyway, I won't do too difficult about that.

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Another scene in Top Gun had Tom Cruise say something like, "I'm supersonic; I'll be there in sixty seconds." An exterior shot showed his jet with the wings in the regular position (I'm not sure of the terminology, but it wasn't supersonic.)

Edit: Has this thread evolved from movie cliches to movie goofs?

Is there a difference?

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I can understand why a film set in WWII would use a different type of tank to substitute for an Axis vehicle as there aren't that many around. How many Tiger 1s do you know in working order? I can only think of the one at the Royal tank Museum that was captured in Africa. Same for a Panzer III. I know 2 people that have Stugs though.

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Yeah, Airplane did that, jet, prop, jet... shocking continuity

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One of the Iron Eagle movies had a line similar to "I hear the distinctive sound of the twin turbines of a Mig [something or other]" The run outside and its a couple of F-4 Phantoms landing.

Another movie/tv cliche is the highly explosive and flamnable nature of jet fuel.

In Die Harder (IIRC) they had the flames chase down and blow up the bad guys plane. What would have happend at most would be a flaming patch where the fuel was on the ground.

In an eposode of CSI Miami, some street race was killed (i think) when his engine blew up because someone had put jet fuel in it. In eality, his car would have die when the fuel hit the engine--jet fuel is (overly simplified) diesel with fancy additives. It's actually possible to run a diesel engine with jet fuel at a performance loss.

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441!!!! :)

Yeah, Airplane did that, jet, prop, jet... shocking continuity

Actually, Airplane showed a jet but it was making propellor noises. That was one of the many running gags of the movie. Surely you know that, right?

Yes I do, and quit calling me Shirley.

Then there are the (even high budget) movies where sea scenes constantly switch from the real thing to models in a tank. A few square feet of water behaves quite a bit differently than the ocean surrounding a destroyer, but I guess the producers don't expect anyone to notice, even when the water in front of the model is out of focus.

Plus, when ships are hit by enemy fire, they don't burn like plastic. The worst offender in this department was the John Wayne film, In Harm's Way. Not only are almost all the exterior shots models in a tank, but during the "battle scenes" you can actually see the plastic burning, melting, and running on the "decks" and down the sides.

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'Battle of the River plate' was good in that respect. it was made in the 1950s and used RN ships of the same class as the Cruisers that werein the actual action (I will have to check but I think 2 of them were the actual ships) My Uncle Martin was on HMS Aurialus at the time, she stood in for HMS Achillese which was sunk later in the war. An American 8" Cruiser (not sure of the class) stood in for the Graf Spee, although it didn't look much like the German Pocket Battleship it looked completely different to any RN ship so there was no mistaking it. A lot of the filmin was done on a NATO exercise in the Med.

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I think it was HMS Achilles and Cumberland that played themselves, although Achilles was INS Delhi at the time.

USS Salem played Graf Spee although the Kriegsmarine flag had to be filmed on another vessel, as the USN would not allow Nazi insignia to be flown from one of their vessels.

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By coincidence my dad was on an oil Tanker in the 60s with a guy that was on the Graf Spee as a captured crewman through the battle.

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I thought SPR did a good job, if I wasn't clear.

But wow, see "Battle of the Bulge" some day. Eeep. (Wikipedia covers it well).

CGI will help with this. [Was it Cecil B. DeMille who said movies like this (the chariot racing one) couldn't be made any more due to the number of extras required?]

[I just read a British military vehcile collectors magazine, and they complimented a "conversion" of a retired U.K. APC (FV432) to a Stug III look-alike. But the road wheels are just wrong.]

Sorry (for the OT),

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Fights on top of moving trains. Not only has this been done too much, just who would fight someone else on the top of a moving train? I can only see idiots doing something like that.

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Hey, I've seen whole song and dance routines on top of moving trains!

(Wife is Indian; movies from Bollywood...)

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All Asians know advanced martial arts.

And here's one that's somewhat related: I've noticed that most fight scene choreography in movies these days looks like Asian martial arts technique, no matter what the setting of the movie is.

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Goofs are really errors, while cliches are just overused actions or plot devices.

Let's say your average teen horror movie is set in 2002, and you see some 2006 Ford, that would be a goof. The typical scene when our teens are chased and the car doesn't start would be a cliche, it can happen but it's overused.

That was in Kelly's Heroes - It was released not long after Battle of the Bulge - At the time I saw KH I thought it strange that what was an action comedy would take the touble to create a reasonable mock-up of a Tiger but in B of the B (a supposed re-telling of a historical event) they never even bothered - mind you there was so much else wrong with B of the B it hardly surprised me that the AFVs were all wrong (even the US Army was not using Shermans and you would have thought they could have found some of those).

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I think this one is mentioned in that list of:

100 hundred things not to do if you are an Evil Overlord.

For anyone interested in movie cliches that is a good one to check out.

http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

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