Masters of the Air, and Others
Mar. 17th, 2024 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I bought a new-to-me refurbished mini-iPhone I was offered trial periods for Apple’s subscription services. I’ve run through some of the trials and cancelled them before starting to be charged, but I did go ahead and pay for a month of “Apple TV+” to finish “Masters of the Air.”
That series hadn’t begun streaming as I approached the expiry date for starting my trial; I’d led off by watching “For All Mankind.” I’d been aware of that show for some time, but have to admit to having wondered if its “after the Soviet Union surprises the world by putting the first man on the moon, Apollo moon landings continue into the mid-1970s” storyline would feel like wish fulfilment to me. Perhaps the soap opera developments of the story avoided that, but I also have to admit that by its final episodes, some of the technological complications invoked to set up drama began to seem unlikely given my sense of what even Saturn V rockets never built in our own world would be capable of. In any case, I’d gone into the series with the slight awareness of how unbalanced towards anime my viewing habits have become, and asked myself whether the slightest exposure to “domestic live action” might somehow snap something inside me. That didn’t seem to happen.
In any case, while I hadn’t seen the previous World War II series made by the people who’d made Masters of the Air I was interested in a story about American bomber pilots over Europe. The flying effects really did look good; bringing them up first, though, might betray how easy it was to think “there’s so many characters it’s hard to distinguish some of them, and that regardless of how many of them are being suddenly killed in the air.” It was towards the end of the series, when certain moments from the opening credits were coming into context as other aspects of the story developed, that I began to get the sense the main characters, at least, were based on real people. With that thought, I had the perhaps-odd feeling that this helped justify a sense of the series not having a thoroughly focused “plot through-line.”
Along with these quite adequate excursions into live action, I got around to watching some of the old Charlie Brown specials also available through Apple TV+. I’d read storybooks adapting some of them many years ago but never seen the actual works themselves before; I also got around to watching two specials I hadn’t been aware of in my youth. In filling out the specials from what the storybooks had been able to adapt, I did notice how many extra comic strip gags got adapted. While I’ve got to admit to thinking at times the Peanuts animation had left out a big part of the comic strip by not having just used a voiceover to deliver Snoopy’s lines for whatever reason (although this would have meant having to come up with a voice that could sum him up, which could have been a pretty tall order), watching more of it at last now also got me thinking the pantomime Snoopy was a chance to present “character through animation” in an age when voice acting had risen to an importance bringing up those cracks about “illustrated radio.”
That series hadn’t begun streaming as I approached the expiry date for starting my trial; I’d led off by watching “For All Mankind.” I’d been aware of that show for some time, but have to admit to having wondered if its “after the Soviet Union surprises the world by putting the first man on the moon, Apollo moon landings continue into the mid-1970s” storyline would feel like wish fulfilment to me. Perhaps the soap opera developments of the story avoided that, but I also have to admit that by its final episodes, some of the technological complications invoked to set up drama began to seem unlikely given my sense of what even Saturn V rockets never built in our own world would be capable of. In any case, I’d gone into the series with the slight awareness of how unbalanced towards anime my viewing habits have become, and asked myself whether the slightest exposure to “domestic live action” might somehow snap something inside me. That didn’t seem to happen.
In any case, while I hadn’t seen the previous World War II series made by the people who’d made Masters of the Air I was interested in a story about American bomber pilots over Europe. The flying effects really did look good; bringing them up first, though, might betray how easy it was to think “there’s so many characters it’s hard to distinguish some of them, and that regardless of how many of them are being suddenly killed in the air.” It was towards the end of the series, when certain moments from the opening credits were coming into context as other aspects of the story developed, that I began to get the sense the main characters, at least, were based on real people. With that thought, I had the perhaps-odd feeling that this helped justify a sense of the series not having a thoroughly focused “plot through-line.”
Along with these quite adequate excursions into live action, I got around to watching some of the old Charlie Brown specials also available through Apple TV+. I’d read storybooks adapting some of them many years ago but never seen the actual works themselves before; I also got around to watching two specials I hadn’t been aware of in my youth. In filling out the specials from what the storybooks had been able to adapt, I did notice how many extra comic strip gags got adapted. While I’ve got to admit to thinking at times the Peanuts animation had left out a big part of the comic strip by not having just used a voiceover to deliver Snoopy’s lines for whatever reason (although this would have meant having to come up with a voice that could sum him up, which could have been a pretty tall order), watching more of it at last now also got me thinking the pantomime Snoopy was a chance to present “character through animation” in an age when voice acting had risen to an importance bringing up those cracks about “illustrated radio.”