Well, calm yourself and resign yourself to a lifetime of disappointment, because it ain’t gonna happen. But here’s the next best thing: the old Jimmie Stewart movie “Strategic Air Command” is now available on Blu Ray. The image quality is surprisingly good, as is the audio. Absolutely nothing in the way of extras, sadly, but the ability to see some great footage of the B-36 in glorious Technicolor is worth it on its own.
Because the world is an unjust place, I don’t have the ability to take screenshots from Blu Rays. So… here are some craptacular cel phone photos of my TV screen showing, if not the resolution, at least the formatting of “SAC.” The frame fills the screen top to bottom, but *not* *quite* from side to side. I *assume* that this was the original aspect ratio of the film… nothing looked out of place or cropped.
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Also newly available on Blu Ray is another Stewart aviation classic, “No Highway in The Sky.” A surprisingly prescient 1951 tale of metal fatigue taking down brand-new four-turbine-engine airliners, this one features Stewart as an aeronautical engineer studying the failure of the type of airliner he happens to actually be on. Stewart used to play a lot of eccentric or downright screwy characters; this one must have been one of his oddest back in the day. But today his character – and that of his characters daughter – would probably be readily recognized as being pretty deeply steeped in Aspergers. “No Highway” is pretty distinctive not only in having a seemingly autistic engineer as the hero (of course, at the time the character would not have been seen as being “on the spectrum,” but rather just “absent minded” or “weird”), but also in spending a fair amount of both effort and money on building a filming model and a full-scale-modified-real-aircraft. Sure, the “Rutland Reindeer” doesn’t make a lick of sense, and the claim that the metal fatigue is due to *atomic* issues is pretty silly, but ya gotta give ’em props (get it?) for making an extra effort in an era when major motion pictures were happy with stock footage. “No Highway” was based on a novel written by Nevil Shute, author of the fun-filled, laugh-packed, sunshine, puppies and bunnies-filled “On The Beach.” It was also made into a radio play starring Jimmie Stewart and Marlene Deitrich, and since this is the internet and all, it’s available for downloading as an MP3.