This would be an interesting modern movie if it ever gets made, but the spirit of the Trailer they managed to piece together from various sources isn't bad. TRAILER for proposed Flying Tigers-China-WWII movie Click: The Flying Tigers
Thanks for the pointer! As you probably know, the trailer is cobbled together from a bit of AVG home movies and a lot of John Wayne's 1942 epic from Republic motion pictures studio. Funny thing is, that old movie got one thing right: the Japanese planes that the AVG met in combat. They were mostly Nakajima Ki-27 fighters with fixed landing gear and two rifle-caliber machine guns that Republic clipped from Japanese feature films of the late 1930s, showing its army in combat in China and on the Soviet border. But in the trailer, they're always cropped close, so you can't see how old-fashioned they seemed. And when you do see a Japanese fighter (or a hundred, as in one computer-generated scene) it's always a Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a navy fighter that the AVG never met in combat. Oh yes, and the Flying Tigers weren't given their name by the beleaguered Chinese, but by the young bureaucrats at China Defense Supplies in Washington DC. For more about all this, see Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and his American Volunteers, 1941-1942 (Daniel Ford) for the definite history, and the Annals of the Flying Tigers for online resources. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
Thanks for the interesting details on the planes involved in the proposed trailer. The movie producer would certainly need a consultant such as yourself to keep the historical and technical details of the movie accurate. I also believe the movie should encompass the continuing legacy of the Flying Tigers under Chennault including the CATF and the 14th Air Force and their ultimate domination of the skies in China. If they found an actor to play Chennault as good as who they found for Patton, it would be some movie. With China in the headlines, now would be an opportune time for a movie to showcase the Flying Tigers of WWII.
