Discuss Tora! Tora! Tora!
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Just saw this again today.
posted by strntzSTAFFMOD on February 28, 2017 at 6:17 PM
I am blown away by the FX in this film, particularly that this was made before CGI. A lot of the battleship action are clearly models in water tanks, but the mockups of the P40s are amazing. They had an awful lot of airworthy vintage piston engine craft in the air at the same time.
Reply by lantzn
on February 28, 2017 at 6:59 PM
The models were probably Japanese, those guys were amazing back then. Just look at the cities Godzilla destroyed years earlier in films. The amount of detail was mind boggling.
Reply by Patrick E. Abe
on March 23, 2018 at 11:24 PM
I was home in Wahiawa when "Tora! Tora! Tora!" was filming the "attack on Wheeler field" aerial segments. The "Japanese" aircraft were/are "reel/mockups" due to the rarity of flyable A6M2s and the like. The flying P-40s are the real thing or "reel/mockups" for the "blowing up on the ground" scenes. In the 1960's SFX was optical, so it was "real pilots flying airplanes for the camera" as in Howard Hughes' days. I later saw the "Pearl Harbor" aerial flybys after Y2K, and it was "deju vu all over again." The story lines between the two movies are "night and day" different, focusing on "Hollyweird beauties doing 'Gray's Anatomy" vs. "letting the facts speak for themselves." I have "Tora! Tora! Tora!" on DVD, and it's time to look at what happened just miles from Wahiawa once again as a tribute to "reel history."