ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: Kiwi on November 27, 2014, 08:25:22 AM
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The following information is provided solely for the education and enlightenment of ApolloHoax members and visitors, and no responsibility is accepted for any medical misadventures that may ensue.
The Nazi Bell, Antigravity and the Secret Apollo Space Program. Published in Nexus magazine, October - November 2014, page 39.
Downloadable PDF (http://forums.thechaniproject.com/index.php?app=core&module=attach§ion=attach&attach_id=7604)
Excerpt:
There is no mathematics needed to explain the basic theory of gravity. You just need to teach it correctly. Unfortunately, the connection between plasma and gravity was not known until World War II. By then, it was classified as a military secret and kept locked up that way for over 70 years.
Researchers into nuclear plasma ball effects at Sandia National Laboratories and other laboratories have made great progress in this technology since it was first discovered during the testing phase of the atomic bomb in World War II.
During the war, this effect was first discovered by scientists while working on the German atomic bomb program, commonly known as the Nazi Bell Project. It was later weaponised and tested at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre for use in a potential spaceflight program by Dr Wernher von Braun and company. After the war, the technology was transferred to the USA under Operation Paperclip.
The early research into this technology was first assigned to Larry Bell of Bell Aircraft Corporation. After Bell's death, North American Aviation and Grumman took over the research. Both companies were the prime contractors for the Apollo Command/ Service Module (CSM) and Lunar Module (LM).
The very-high-voltage generator circuitry—called a Marx generator—that produced this effect was hidden in the upper section of the CSM within the emergency escape rocket and acted as the upper electrode for the system. The rocket body acted as the lower electrode. This was part of the so-called "Apollo weight reduction program".
Edward Leedskalnin of "Coral Castle" fame once said: "If you put my invention into the nose of a rocket, you will have no problem going to the Moon." Apparently he had no idea as to how correct he was.
With the LM, the entire system worked by charging its outer skin to an extremely high voltage in the millions of volts. The system could not be tested on Earth due to the capacitive plates shorting out—unless they were placed in a total vacuum chamber.
For this reason, NASA constructed an extremely large vacuum test chamber, called the "environmental test chamber" as its cover. To hide the system in full view, they came up with the story of covering the LM with a "micrometeorite shield". This was in fact the outer capacitive plates used for charging the LM up to the power levels needed in order to repel the magnetic lines of force and the electron cloud potential (charge) of the Moon.
It took over three minutes to fully charge up the LM before zero gravity was reached. The term used during the spaceflights was to "warm up the LM".
The very-high-voltage power supply, called a Wimshurst generator, was disguised as the central gyroscope for the spacecraft in order to ensure flight stability. This is why the LM and all UFOs can only move in an up–down, left–right, forward–backward motion while in flight.
It was centred directly over the 500-pound [~227 kilogram] kick motor that could run for only a maximum of 30 seconds before burnout. With both the kick motor and the on-board magnetic buoyancy system in operation, the LM had to be able to dock with the CSM within three orbits.
If the weight reduction system failed to work, the LM could not take off; weighing in at over 3,000 pounds [~1,361 kilograms] with only a 500-pound kick motor to lift it, it would be futile.
About the Author.
Jeff Smith has a degree in electrical engineering, applied science and physics. He is a former a nuclear weapons specialist with the US government and a former UN weapons inspector specialising in nuclear nonproliferation issues. He is now semi-retired and works for a private nonprofit research library as a cryptographic curator and historian, preserving restricted documents that are of historic and scientific value. Correspondence for Mr Smith can be emailed to [email protected].
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Outstanding! Finally the whisper is becoming the watery belch.
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I'll leave the debunking of the pseudoscience/engineering in this gem of an article to our resident experts, but even this layman knows they jettisoned the LES rocket and tower at ~55 miles altitude! :D
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The article fails at:
There is no mathematics needed to explain the basic theory of gravity.
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The idea could make a fun sounding story if you made it about an original attempt to land on the moon rather than debasing Apollo. A lot of good science fiction takes the premise 'Yes, this is impossible, but what if it wasn't . . .?"
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The woo-woo is strong in this one....
So the LM DID go to the Moon, albeit using magic. I do wish that these people would make an effort to get their stories a little bit consistent.
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This is why the LM and all UFOs can only move in an up–down, left–right, forward–backward motion while in flight.
Presuming that these can be taken in combinations, doesn't that pretty much cover all possible directions?
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This is why the LM and all UFOs can only move in an up–down, left–right, forward–backward motion while in flight.
Presuming that these can be taken in combinations, doesn't that pretty much cover all possible directions?
I was thinking that too. It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch- ".. apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?" ;D
Rotation about an axis is the only thing that I could think of?
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Oh man. It is scary to think that despite the numerous documents and things like Scott Sullivan's books, these types of articles expect to be taken seriously.
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I am getting a little Poe-ed, because I am not 100% sure it *is*. It mentions several actual Apollo procedures and operations, it just lies through its little wooden teeth about what they were for.
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This article read like a piss-take to me....
"Surely, you can't be serious!?"
"Yes I am, and don't call me Shirley!
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I was hoping it was a gag by the cartoonist Jeff Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Smith_(cartoonist)). Alas from the bio it appears this is the same as the Jeff Smith on the editorial board of Veterans Today (http://www.veteranstoday.com/staff-writers/). A web site that bills itself as "the true voice of the worlds clandestine community."
That explains the stupidity and conspiracy angle.
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The woo-woo is strong in this one....
So the LM DID go to the Moon, albeit using magic. I do wish that these people would make an effort to get their stories a little bit consistent.
I've suggested a debate between the Apollo hoax-nuts and the NASA/alien/Apollo cover-up crowd. And let's throw in Mr. Smith, here, who believes we used alien technology to do Apollo. And then there are the ones who believe Apollo was fake, but humans secretly went to the moon way back in the 30's, using alien technology.
Such a debate would be a real treat, wouldn't it? I would love to moderate it, but I believe Adrian would be better, since he believes Apollo was faked and that it discovered alien artifacts on the moon. He probably believes the other two as well.
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The article fails at:
There is no mathematics needed to explain the basic theory of gravity.
Yes, it was at that point I thought there was no further benefit to be gained by reading the rest of the article. There's plenty of mathematics in the Einstein field equations, although not basic, they do describe gravity very well. They even reduce to Newton's equations for a weak field.
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To borrow from Blazing Saddles, "That was a fine exanple of authentic [final] frontier gibberish."
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To borrow from Blazing Saddles, "That was a fine exanple of authentic [final] frontier gibberish."
And no sidewinder, bushwhacking, hornswoggling...cracker croaker, is going to ruin my biscuit-cutter!
Now who can argue with that?
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To borrow from Blazing Saddles, "That was a fine exanple of authentic [final] frontier gibberish."
And no sidewinder, bushwhacking, hornswoggling...cracker croaker, is going to ruin my biscuit-cutter!
Now who can argue with that?
Rarah!
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To borrow from Blazing Saddles, "That was a fine exanple of authentic [final] frontier gibberish."
And no sidewinder, bushwhacking, hornswoggling...cracker croaker, is going to ruin my biscuit-cutter!
Now who can argue with that?
Rarah!
What in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? I joined this forum expecting to join in some serious debunking - instead I find you lot lollygagging around like a bunch of Kansas City f******!
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To borrow from Blazing Saddles, "That was a fine exanple of authentic [final] frontier gibberish."
And no sidewinder, bushwhacking, hornswoggling...cracker croaker, is going to ruin my biscuit-cutter!
Now who can argue with that?
Rarah!
What in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? I joined this forum expecting to join in some serious debunking - instead I find you lot lollygagging around like a bunch of Kansas City f******!
Well, if somebody throws up some obvious joke, hilarity ensues.
Don't worry - if an actual hoax believer shows up, he'll be shown the path to enlightenment in short order.
Welcome onboard, btw.
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What in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? I joined this forum expecting to join in some serious debunking - instead I find you lot lollygagging around like a bunch of Kansas City f****ts!
Well, we shall get into the "serious debunking" when there is some "serious debunking" to do!
The dwindling HB community have yet to come up with a single new piece if evidence, to support the claim that the Apollo missions were faked, that has not been thoroughly debunked multiple times already on multiple occasions. In short, there nothing new to discuss, because the HBs have run out of lies and falsehoods to make-up! All they have left is to regurgitate the same old same old.
In the mean time, we can at least have some fun while we wait for next certifiable, 100% pure Froot Loop to make an appearance with a "new claim:!
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Welcome Bertie, :) :)
PS The cute little one from the hospital (Summer) has got a really smelly nappy tonight, we are drawing lots too see who changes it. Now if you feel like getting some practise in, you're not that far away. ;)
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The dwindling HB community have yet to come up with a single new piece if evidence, to support the claim that the Apollo missions were faked, that has not been thoroughly debunked multiple times already on multiple occasions.
Well Adrian came up with a theory about radiation in the Van Allen Belts yesterday.................Oh Wait! Panic over, back to sleep all. :D :D
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Welcome Bertie, :) :)
PS The cute little one from the hospital (Summer) has got a really smelly nappy tonight, we are drawing lots too see who changes it. Now if you feel like getting some practise in, you're not that far away. ;)
The little chap arrives on Monday.
Talking of nappies - I came across a HB who was convinced that Apollo was fake because the CM didn't have a toilet. I told him about the 'fecal containment garment' that the astronauts had to use and even showed him a picture of one. He thought that was fake too.
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Talking of nappies - I came across a HB who was convinced that Apollo was fake because the CM didn't have a toilet. I told him about the 'fecal containment garment' that the astronauts had to use and even showed him a picture of one. He thought that was fake too.
Sounds like someone has caught the late Dr Socks' "poo" obsession!
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What in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? I joined this forum expecting to join in some serious debunking - instead I find you lot lollygagging around like a bunch of Kansas City f****ts!
Well, we shall get into the "serious debunking" when there is some "serious debunking" to do!.............In the mean time, we can at least have some fun while we wait for next certifiable, 100% pure Froot Loop to make an appearance with a "new claim:!
I guess I over-mangled Slim Pickens' "lollygagging around" quote from Blazing Saddles so that it was unrecognisable. :-[
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What in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? I joined this forum expecting to join in some serious debunking - instead I find you lot lollygagging around like a bunch of Kansas City f****ts!
Well, we shall get into the "serious debunking" when there is some "serious debunking" to do!.............In the mean time, we can at least have some fun while we wait for next certifiable, 100% pure Froot Loop to make an appearance with a "new claim:!
I guess I over-mangled Slim Pickens' "lollygagging around" quote from Blazing Saddles so that it was unrecognisable. :-[
Yeah. Probably totally lost on someone like me, who has never seen the film.
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Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do. :)
Dated, but still funny!
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Talking of nappies - I came across a HB who was convinced that Apollo was fake because the CM didn't have a toilet. I told him about the 'fecal containment garment' that the astronauts had to use and even showed him a picture of one. He thought that was fake too.
Sounds like someone has caught the late Dr Socks' "poo" obsession!
On the subject of this thread, but maintaining the scatalogical theme, here's John Young on Apollo 16:
Maybe John could've levitated the LM all by himself if anything went wrong with the APS. ;D
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It is rather disappointing to have extremely well-documented parts of Apollo brushed off so easily by some folk. The cries of "fake" seem to be nearly always accompanied by a lack of proper knowledge or understanding of what was involved in developing the mission. Some of my favourite DVDs are the ones detailing how the AGC was developed, or the food prep, for example.
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...Some of my favourite DVDs are the ones detailing how the AGC was developed, or the food prep, for example.
Would that be the Spacecraft Films DVD Set, "Mission to the Moon"? If so, I was so intrigued by the extremely good part about the AGC that I did a full typescript or everything that was said. Sample below.
If anyone would like a copy PM me with your email address. It's five pages of Arial 9-point in Open Document Format (.odt). It is very informative about how the AGC was made and about the rigorous testing of the parts.
The documentaries on this DVD set are old (probably early- to mid-1960s) black-and-white TV broadcasts. They are very quaint with a few of the engineers interviewed looking very uncomfortable and as stiff as a board. Not uncomfortable because they are faking anything, but uncomfortable about the camera and being on TV. Definitely not their usual line of work.
Unformatted sample:
Spacecraft Films DVD Set — Mission to the Moon — Disc 1
Computer For Apollo
0:00:00 Chapter 1.
0:00:02 John Fitch: These test engineers are checking out a sophisticated collection of telescopes, gyroscopes and electronics for Project Apollo. This guidance and navigation system will be mounted in an Apollo spacecraft, to aid our three astronauts on their voyage to the moon and return.
0:00:20 Fitch: The miniaturised computer at the very heart of this system is our story today on Science Reporter.
0:00:29 NASA Presents
0:00:33 Science Reporter
0:00:37 Computer For Apollo
0:00:41 Reporter: John Fitch, MIT
0:00:47 Fitch: Hello, I'm John Fitch, MIT Science Reporter. Today we're at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which has been given design responsibility for this guidance and navigation system, which will direct our Apollo spacecraft on the way to the moon and back.
0:01:04 Fitch: At one time, the direction of the rising sun or perhaps a winding riverbed was all that man needed in his restless search for new land. Centuries later the quadrant and the magnetic compass guided his way, even across the open sea, even after familiar landmarks had long since disappeared.
0:01:23 Fitch: But today we speak of traversing a million miles of empty space, where there is no north nor south, no rising nor setting sun, not even any up or down. It's an extremely complicated path requiring many, many measurements and millions of calculations.
0:01:41 Fitch: As you can see from this Apollo flight plan, there are several critical manoeuvres that have to be performed. After the Apollo spacecraft reaches its earth orbit, it must be injected into a translunar trajectory at just the right place in time and space.
0:01:58 Fitch: Someone has compared it to shooting at a moving target from a revolving platform, which is mounted on a train, which is going around a curve.
0:02:08 Fitch: Then at the half-way point, along about here, the programmed course must be examined for errors and possibly a mid-course correction made. There are many other similar manoeuvres, and to learn about the guidance and navigation system which will make this possible, we talk with Mr Eldon Hall, Deputy Associate Director of the Instrumentation Lab.
0:02:30 Eldon Hall: The guidance and navigation system consists of two measurement elements, controls, the computer, and the computer display and control. The inertial measurement unit, shown up here but normally down at the back, consists of gyros and accelerometers. It measures the angles and velocity of the spacecraft in this fashion.
0:02:56 Hall: The spacecraft rotates and the inertial measurement unit holds the reference, so the angles can be measured. The sextant is an instrument very similar to that used by the sailors to navigate on the surface of the earth.
0:03:10 Fitch: Now what kind of a problem might you have to solve on the way to the moon?
0:03:14 Hall: The most basic problem is to determine the position at any point in time, and that can be illustrated in these charts. The sextant shown here represents the spacecraft, and to determine the position an angle must be measured, between a point on the earth and a star. And you can see that as you move away from the earth, this angle would narrow down, thus giving the distance between the earth and the spacecraft.
0:03:48 Hall: The astronaut first positions the spacecraft so that a point on the earth, a landmark, is visible through the sextant. Then he positions the sextant angle so that the star is superimposed upon this landmark.
0:04:05 Fitch: Now what kind of a landmark might this be?
0:04:07 Hall: This one is San Francisco Bay, as you can see here. However, the Great Lakes, or Cuba, or Cape Cod, the tip of Florida — any of these points make suitable landmarks.
0:04:20 Fitch: Then through some system of mirrors you actually superimpose the star on that feature.
0:04:24 Hall: That's right. The mirrors inside the sextant will bring the star within the field of view so that we can superimpose it on the landmark.
0:04:33 Fitch: Now how is this angle actually measured?
0:04:36 Hall: It's done automatically by the computer. The astronaut must first identify to the computer the star and the landmark he is planning to use. Then, as he's positioning the spacecraft and the sextant, the computer is measuring the angle between the two.
0:04:54 Hall: When the astronaut is satisfied that the star is superimposed upon the landmark, he pushes the Mark button, telling the computer to record these angles and the time of the measurement. From that information the computer can compute the position of the spacecraft in space.
[Snip]
0:13:51 Fitch: The Apollo computers are manufactured by the Raytheon Company in Waltham, Massachusetts. The computer itself consists of two trays, one containing logic modules, the other memory modules.
0:14:04 Fitch: To learn how these modules are put together, we talk with Mr Jack Poundstone, Raytheon's Apollo engineering manager.
0:14:12 Poundstone: In this room, John, we run all of the electrical components through a screening and burning process. You know there are over 30,000 parts that go together to make this machine.
0:14:23 Poundstone: Every part is put through an electrical test and then a series of environmental stresses. Now, as an example, this girl is placing the micrologic units into a fixture that will be used in this centrifuge.
0:14:37 Poundstone: Here the fixture is spun at a very high speed and 20,000 g's of force is placed on each component.
0:14:43 Fitch: That's a lot more than it will ever experience, isn't it?
0:14:45 Poundstone: Yes, that's true, but we put more forces on, more stresses than we really expect, to ensure the high reliability.
0:14:51 Fitch: So this is really sort of a torture chamber.
0:14:53 Poundstone: That's right. In addition, we run all the parts through a leak test, to make sure there is no leaks in the can. The part is put into a high-pressure helium tank, and if there is a leak, the helium will be forced into the can.
0:15:05 Chapter 4.
0:15:08 Poundstone: Then we put it in a vacuum chamber and evacuate and test for the amount of helium coming out.
0:15:14 Poundstone: In the final phase of the screening and burning process, the girl puts the parts, as she's doing here, into a test socket. Then those parts are placed on this burning rack.
0:15:28 Poundstone: Here they will be operated for almost a week at a over-voltage stress condition.
0:15:34 Fitch: You actually are operating them.
0:15:35 Poundstone: Yes, we are operating the parts. Now any failure, any significant failure of any of our tests is cause for rejection of the entire lot of 5,000 parts.
0:15:46 Poundstone: After we've ensured that we have good components, then we want to make a module.
0:15:50 Poundstone: Now, the little cans, here, are placed in these holes in a component holder. Then we take a matrix, which is a complex wiring pattern. It's placed on the back, and the wires are folded over and welded to the leads of the micrologic unit itself. I'd like to show you now, how we make a matrix.
0:16:15 Poundstone: Here we see an operator who is placing a piece of Mylar insulator that has been heated on both sides, and this insulator has previously had a pattern of holes punched onto it. Now this is placed on this longitudinal wire winder. Now as the piece advances, strips of nickel ribbon are laid down in a longitudinal direction on the Mylar.
0:16:39 Poundstone: Next, it's taken to the vertical wire winder. Here the operator is placing it on the machine, and as the drum rotates, wires are laid down on the opposite side of the Mylar in a vertical direction. The wires will be laying down right over the areas where the holes have been punched.
0:16:57 Fitch: Some running one way on one side and others running the other way on the other side.
0:17:00 Poundstone: That's right, John. Now the next operation is to perform the welding. This is done on a automatic welding machine. With this machine we are advancing the matrix underneath these weld heads, and whenever a hole appears under a weld head the weld is commanded to drop and perform a weld, and this makes a feed-through connection from one side of the insulator to the other.
0:17:27 Poundstone: In the final operation, this girl uses a cutting tool to remove the excess pieces of wire, to give us the final configuration of our precise wiring pattern.
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Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do. :)
Dated, but still funny!
If you enjoy certain types of humour. If you don't, it's awful and tedious.
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Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do. :)
Dated, but still funny!
If you enjoy certain types of humour. If you don't, it's awful and tedious.
Comes into the top twenty, of nearly every all time comedy list, and is number 1 in many. Not my personal no 1 but certainly in a top 10 with Life of Brian at the head.
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If you enjoy certain types of humour. If you don't, it's awful and tedious.
To be fair, you can say that about anything, can't you? Especially humour.
De gustibus non est disputandum and all that.
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Kiwi, you got it on the nosie! I also like the Moon Machine series!
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Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do. :)
Dated, but still funny!
If you enjoy certain types of humour. If you don't, it's awful and tedious.
I can forgive a lot for this scene:
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It's twoo, it's twoo!
(OK, Young Frankenstein, but still. Actually, I think I like that one better myself, for all the effort it goes into making it an authentic feeling parody/homage.)
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...Some of my favourite DVDs are the ones detailing how the AGC was developed, or the food prep, for example.
Would that be the Spacecraft Films DVD Set, "Mission to the Moon"? If so, I was so intrigued by the extremely good part about the AGC that I did a full typescript or everything that was said. Sample below.
If anyone would like a copy PM me with your email address. It's five pages of Arial 9-point in Open Document Format (.odt). It is very informative about how the AGC was made and about the rigorous testing of the parts.
<snipped>
Kiwi was kind enough to send me a copy of his excellent transcript. But as I started reading it, I realized I had seen this documentary somewhere, and figured it had to be on YouTube. I searched for it, and sure enough, there it was Computer For Apollo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIBhPsyYCiM).
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Kiwi, you got it on the nosie! I also like the Moon Machine series!
Thanks for that post Dwight, I have revisited this series over the last couple of days. I really like the focus on the development of the Apollo hardware and how the story of development is interlaced with the missions. The CM episode is particularly sad as the engineers involved talk about the Apollo 1 accident.
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I love the human stories that are told, like the lady working on the spacesuits jabbing the lady who left a colour coded pin in one of the suits in the sit-upon. ;) Or the engineer who, for security reasons, had to sleep with the spacesuits in his motel room when he was on route delivering them to NASA.
My biggest gripe is the freaking narrator. I don't watch many documentaries, but he sounded so bored and lethargic, I thought he was going to fall asleep.
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I'll leave the debunking of the pseudoscience/engineering in this gem of an article to our resident experts...
There really isn't much to debunk. First, the design and operation of the lunar module according to ordinary principles of rocketry is well established and well documented, and has contributed extensively to ongoing space engineering. Proposing it to be an elaborate ruse belies that it would have to be a very elaborate ruse -- so elaborate, in fact, that it would have worked as advertised, and is believed and consulted by every practicing space engineer out there. The 3,500-lbf Aerojet ascent motor that this author says wasn't used managed to work as an upper-stage motor in launch vehicles well into the 1980s. The guidance system he said wasn't installed (covering for a 200-year-old electrostatic generator design) managed to operate a U.S. military jet well into the 1970s.
Second, the scenario proposed is pure technobabble. It alludes to a few principles in high-voltage physics, but provides no "meat" that would necessarily come from an expert on the subject. It's clearly meant to fool laymen.
Veterans Today has a particular brand of stupid. Their modus is to handwave a bunch of nonsense above the name of someone with nebulous or ill-fitting credentials and assert that you have to believe the "experts." This is the outfit, for example, that publishes James Fetzer's anti-Semitic rants and Dimitri Khalezov's nonsense about nukes on 9/11.
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Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do. :)
Dated, but still funny!
I think it has actually withstood the test of time pretty well. Ever since Richard Pryor (one of the primary writers) died there's been a long drought in well-done racial satire. Sometimes I think Key & Peele are channeling his ghost. They certainly demonstrate, as Pryor did, that sometimes the best way to get a very serious message across to people is to make them laugh themselves silly.
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A lot of good science fiction takes the premise 'Yes, this is impossible, but what if it wasn't . . .?"
I'd change that a little: A lot of good science fiction takes the premise "This is possible, though we haven't figured out how to do it yet. But what if we did...?"
Most of what passes for 'science fiction' these days is really fantasy. IMHO, real science fiction, sometimes called 'hard' science fiction, doesn't run roughshod over the known laws of physics. It makes one or two imaginative extrapolations (eg., an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence) but otherwise stays within the bounds of known physics.
It's much harder to write. Not only do you have to know your physics, you can't just change it willy-nilly to get your characters out of whatever jam they've gotten into. For a while it seemed that Star Trek: The Next Generation discovered a new subatomic particle every week, usually some form of tachyon.
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Sometimes I think Key & Peele are channeling his ghost.
Example: Obama Teaches Malia to Drive. It's on Youtube. If you don't think this is one of the funniest things you've ever seen, well...
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The hardest I ever laughed at Blazing Saddles was one time it was shown on TV. When the beans scene came on, it appeared that the network had decided that bodily function humour was not appropriate. Instead of cutting the scene entirely, they decided to remove the noises. So, the viewers got about two minutes of cowboys sitting around a campfire, in complete silence. Absolutely nothing funny occurred. For some reason, this was hysterical to me.
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The hardest I ever laughed at Blazing Saddles was one time it was shown on TV. When the beans scene came on, it appeared that the network had decided that bodily function humour was not appropriate. Instead of cutting the scene entirely, they decided to remove the noises. So, the viewers got about two minutes of cowboys sitting around a campfire, in complete silence. Absolutely nothing funny occurred. For some reason, this was hysterical to me.
That would have tickled my funny bone too. The other one that networks do, not for Blazing Saddles, but when some real villain swears. Normally there is a close up of this real angry person holding a gun and the words, "Forget you!" come out, kills me every time, who actually thought up that replacement profanity? :D
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The hardest I ever laughed at Blazing Saddles was one time it was shown on TV. When the beans scene came on, it appeared that the network had decided that bodily function humour was not appropriate. Instead of cutting the scene entirely, they decided to remove the noises. So, the viewers got about two minutes of cowboys sitting around a campfire, in complete silence. Absolutely nothing funny occurred. For some reason, this was hysterical to me.
That reminds me of when I saw Monty Python's Holy Grail on TV. In the castle Anthrax the censors didn't like the phrase "and then comes the oral sex" so they just cut the sound on "oral". Then they didn't do anything when all the other girls repeated it.
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The guidance system he said wasn't installed (covering for a 200-year-old electrostatic generator design...
A Wimshurst machine disguised as a big gyroscope, driving a Marx generator cunningly hidden in a part of the rocket that was discarded while still in the atmosphere? No part of that makes sense. Wimshurst machines were archaic devices even then, and they use counter-rotating wheels that would provide no net gyroscopic stabilization (never mind that the described restrictions on maneuvers didn't actually exist). And Marx generators produce brief pulses, not a continuous high voltage. And neither is a terribly efficient or compact machine.
This is kind of like talking about the coal powered steam engine moving the rover and how it was limited to rolling on the rails...
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Wimshurst machines were archaic devices even then...
They date to Ben Franklin's experiments with electricity. Marx circuits are basically just capacitors in series. we use them today for things like pyro triggers. By their very nature they cannot manage a sustained voltage or current. As I said -- technobabble. It alludes to things that can be looked up, but which don't work the way the author implies they do.
This is kind of like talking about the coal powered steam engine moving the rover and how it was limited to rolling on the rails...
I was going to make a steampunk joke earlier, but it didn't seem appropriate.
Let's say all of this alleged assortment of cleverly disguised museum-piece electrical gadgets somehow magically produced a sustained high voltage. So what? As with a great deal of high-energy and free-energy woo, the line of reasoning seems to be:
1. High voltage
2. ??
3. Levitation
4. ??
5. Profit!
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The hardest I ever laughed at Blazing Saddles was one time it was shown on TV.
A lot of humor is based on violating the audience's expectations. You were familiar with the movie, so you expected crude language and farting at the campfire. You weren't expecting silence.
This wouldn't have worked for someone unfamiliar with the movie. Personally, I never even bothered to seriously watch it on TV, I knew it would be totally eviscerated. In fact, they remove so much they had to pad it out by including some alternate scenes, including footage of Sheriff Bart capturing Mongo by about half a dozen different methods not shown in the normal cut because they simply weren't as funny as "Mongo like candy"...BOOM!
I see there's a "high school edition" for Avenue Q. I just don't see how it could possibly not eviscerate the entire play.
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Mel Brooks is hit-and-miss for me. I think most of his collaborations with Gene Wilder are on par. But my respect for Brooks as a comedy groundbreaker is quite high. Even for the films that didn't work for me, I could see an audacity that few others would attempt. Brooks himself harbored deep respect for the genres he parodied: he and Alfred Hitchcock screened High Anxiety together before it was released, just so Hitchcock could have a private opportunity to object. His only objection? The number of shower curtain rings in the shower scene was wrong.
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Even for people who didn't care for Blazing Saddles, Madeline Kahn's performance of I'm Tired was one of the funniest bits of truly classic comedy I have ever seen. Her character in the movie was an absolute hoot. That whole sleazy, Germanic/New York/Jewish(?) thing,...so "Mel Brooks" and so hilarious.
SCHNITZENGRUBEN FOR ALL!!
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One of the funniest Mel Brooks scenes, is a bit from the producers. They are trying to persuade the mad old German to part with his script for Springtime for Hitler and they are all having a drink together. The mad old German comes out with this classic...
"Nobody ever said a bad word about Winston Churchill, did they? No! 'Win with Winnie!' Churchill! With his cigars. With his brandy. And his rotten painting, rotten! Hitler - there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two Coats!"
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Her character in the movie was an absolute hoot.
Madeleine Kahn was a comic genius, and not just under Brooks' direction. Gene Wilder too. About ten years ago I had the opportunity to chat for about an hour with Cloris Leachman, and she spoke very highly of Mel Brooks.