"The ceiling would have to be SO high, and the light SO bright."
April 12, 2021 4:45 PM   Subscribe

The Corridor Crew is a (very) popular visual effects-centered YouTube channel, and among their many projects is the series VFX Artists React, where they watch famous and obscure clips from movies and TV, breaking down how they were done. Their April Fools video had their reaction to the footage of the Apollo moon landings.
posted by Sokka shot first (15 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- Brandon Blatcher



 
I love their moon landing review, particularly when they reference the lack of dust vortices/turbulence in the moon footage, which I hadn’t considered before.

Also: “The technology required to fake these shots would almost be more difficult than actually going to the moon.”
posted by darkstar at 5:26 PM on April 12, 2021 [9 favorites]


Oh, this was great! I’m going to be looking for curlies in every space movie I ever watch now...
posted by brook horse at 5:49 PM on April 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


The hats were a nice touch.
posted by Wretch729 at 3:12 AM on April 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


It's a good topic for them, I'm sure a lot of dudebros that like Corridor Crew are also into bonkers conspiracy theories. Just commenting anything liberalish on their sites will earn you abuse so I hope they keep tackling those weird OTHER corridors on the internet.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:59 AM on April 13, 2021


There’s definitely a dudebro energy that makes me never want to get within 10 feet of the comments area, but their passion and excitement about all this stuff is like crack for me.

I just watched their review of the Snyder Cut, and when they rewind a clip of Steppenwolf stepping in a mud pit for the fifth time to be dazzled by the movement of a twig, it can’t fail to bring joy to my heart.
posted by bjrubble at 7:46 AM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


“The technology required to fake these shots would almost be more difficult than actually going to the moon.”

That and the Soviets exposing the fake landing would have been the biggest propaganda coup in the world, yet somehow they missed that. Do Moon landing conspiracy types believe that the USSR was in on it too?
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:47 AM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


I’m not sure how many of the modern moon-landing conspiracy types know about the Soviet Union.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:02 PM on April 13, 2021 [4 favorites]


This is great breakdown of the footage from people who know what they're talking about.
I have also really enjoyed their series of Stuntmen React videos.
posted by subocoyne at 2:28 PM on April 13, 2021


What You Didn’t Know About the Apollo 11 Mission — From JFK’s real motives to the Soviets’ secret plot to land on the Moon at the same time, a new behind-the-scenes view of an unlikely triumph 50 years ago, Smithsonian Magazine, Charles Fishman, June 2019:
...So if John Kennedy had not been assassinated, would Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have stepped off the ladder of the lunar module Eagle onto the Moon on July 20, 1969?

It seems unlikely...
JFK’s tape recordings of his meetings with NASA’s James Webb and other officials show he was more interested in beating the Russians and politics than space exploration. After Kennedy’s assassination, Republican spending objections and inventing new rocket science remained big challenges, but space fanboy President LBJ saved the day by approving necessary funding.
posted by cenoxo at 3:04 PM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


Loved the subject matter! SO fascinating. Agree that there is a serious dude to feeling and am also avoiding the comments. Thanks for posting!
posted by WalkerWestridge at 9:10 AM on April 14, 2021


Also I note the carpal tunnel brace on one of the guys hands. I can only imagine how common that injury must be in their industry!
posted by WalkerWestridge at 9:32 AM on April 14, 2021


JFK’s tape recordings of his meetings with NASA’s James Webb and other officials show he was more interested in beating the Russians and politics than space exploration.

There is just SO MUCH going on with the history of this era between the Space Race, the Cold War, nuclear weapon and ballistic missile development, just so many weird threads and pieces of concurrent history happening that it makes the freaky Super Science of the Venture Brothers sound entirely plausible, and so much of it points back to Werner von Braun and Project Paperclip.

If there's any real hoax about the Space Race it's the veneer of pseudo-scientific For All Mankind nobility obscuring what it was really all about, which was ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and technological supremacy at almost any cost, and there's still so much of that era we're piecing together as documents become declassified and connections made.

I can almost see and have sympathy about why people are drawn to conspiracy theories about the Space Race because in reality there was a whole lot going on behind the scenes in the classified world under the cover of the Space Race and it includes secretly classified space operations under the guise of or concurrently with public NASA missions.

I mean just start with Project Paperclip and it dives off into dozens or hundreds of weird space race and military aerospace rabbit holes.

There's so many examples of this. Like the X-15 was technically the US's first suborbital spacecraft. Project Agena wasn't about testing docking maneuvers for the moon shot but for orbital manned military space stations and photographic reconnaissance - I can't remember if this was done under some of the Agena-Gemini flights or the first Corona flights or what.

There's so many terrifying things about particular points in the history of the Space Race. One point in time in particular is what actually was going on during 1962 and leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In the few years leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis you have the Soviet Union resuming testing and breaking the test ban treaty in 1958, the SOSUS submarine network being operationally deployed, Tsar Bomba being tested, nuclear powered rocket engines being developed in Project NERVA and SNAP and then the super scary high altitude tests of Starfish Prime and Project Fishbowl and all kinds of industrialized madness.

The SOSUS network was at the instrumental in the Cuban blockade and so while all that public, in the news stuff was happening on the surface with ships, there were US and USSR submarines playing cat and mouse and the USSR slowly realizing and freaking out about how the US could suddenly track all of their subs all over the Atlantic theater.

If I'm recalling correctly part of this story and timeline includes the newer, vastly quieter top secret US subs constantly shadowing the USSR subs and having multiple tense close encounters leading up to the suspicion or revelation of both the status and some of the capabilities of the SOSUS system as well as the nearly silent US subs and it's also right there in the Cuban Missile Crisis timeline of around and leading up to October, 1962.

I can't find the citations for this off hand but have gleaned this from several articles and documentaries, but at one point things were so tense between the US and USSR that there were unofficial back channel discussions between higher level project leads and military brass on both sides sharing information about various upcoming tests - as I recall Starfish Prime in particular, because there was concern about what it might do to the USSR's early warning systems and radar and response strike command and control system - and that they were generally asking each other if this was all a good idea what with all the escalating tensions going on.

Paraphrasing, it was apparently bad enough that both sides went as far as expressing some frustration along the lines of "We should probably call these tests off but we're having difficulty in doing so because of the sheer institutional momentum, investments and costs. Good luck to all of us."

If you pay attention to the dates of a lot of this history and start putting it together, it gets scary, fast.

The Cuban Missile Crisis? October 16-29, 1962.

Starfish Prime high altitude tests Bluegill Double Prime (failed) and Bluegill Triple Prime? October 15th and 26th, 1962.

So much WHAT THE FUCK. During that super dangerous blockade and brinksmanship they were still shooting off nukes into space like bottle rockets for shits and giggles just a hop, skip and a jump from Cuba over in the Pacific? And they've already been at it for most of the year?

Meanwhile the A-12 and SR-71 is flying, 50 megaton superbombs are being tested, nuclear rocket engines are being designed for both space craft and long range supersonic cruise missile doomsday machines with deployment plans that involve dispensing a bunch of nuclear bombs and then loitering over enemy territory to spread as much additional radiation as possible before intentionally crashing into a target to use the now spent reactor as a dirty bomb.

Yeah, no wonder it's easy to believe in space race or general space conspiracy theories. There is so much going on during all of this, and the reality of it is often too weird and fucked up to even handle or integrate.
posted by loquacious at 12:34 PM on April 14, 2021 [3 favorites]


Interesting loquacious, I'd been thinking the whole space race and moon landings were just about a the propoganda coup, but I suppose it also had military undertones in terms of rocket development and so on.

It's certainly true that scientific research wasn't the motivating factor behind landing people on the moon, since the science the astronauts did could've been done for a fraction of the cost with uncrewed craft. Conspiracy believers always say "Why haven't we been back? If they could do it then, it should be easy for us to do now." The point is there's no cold war on now so no politician can justify the extravagant expenditure.

Of course, a conspiracy believer I have spoken too believes the cold war itself was a hoax. There's literally nothing they won't believe, as long as it gives them ammunition for their hatred of the establishment and justification for their feelings of self-righteousness.
posted by mokey at 11:56 AM on April 15, 2021


Considering the military angle, once you had a rocket that can make it to space and orbit the globe, and you already have mastered the atomic bomb, there was functionally nothing preventing a foreign power from dropping a nuke on any city or military target at will.

I can imagine that senior brass were scared $#!%-less by the prospect of their enemy using an orbiting platform, or even the Moon, as a point from which to launch a nuclear attack.
posted by darkstar at 3:28 PM on April 15, 2021


Interesting loquacious, I'd been thinking the whole space race and moon landings were just about a the propoganda coup, but I suppose it also had military undertones in terms of rocket development and so on.

Yeah, the Space Race was a lot more than propaganda. It helped provide a lot of the engineering knowledge, tooling and vast budgets to make the Cold War financially possible and technically feasible, and the investigation of rocketry was entirely weapons based until Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and the so called "missile gap".

When we start examining the history of Werner von Braun we find a story of someone who was effectively ready and willing to sell off all of their ethics and morals to the highest bidder even if it used prison camp slave labor so he could build rockets and follow his obsession about putting humans into space, on the moon and beyond.

He kept on doing weapons development in the US after Project Paperclip - with the knowledge of nuclear weapons. He would have learned to speak Russian if they got to him first and they wanted him to build rockets but preferred to go to the US, and I've always wondered if that had more to do with his admiration of the industrial and manufacturing juggernaut that was post WW 2 US and a lot less to do with political beliefs.

He was totally space crazy. The hagiography of Braun is that he was just a hapless, boyish character that just really wanted to go to space, that he was unwillingly forced to be an officer or member of the SS while blithely ignoring the fact that there were many, many other rocketry hobbyists and experimenters that didn't do the same ruthless things that Braun did in pursuit of his goals, like turning to willingly designing weapons.

Somewhere in all of this real history there's the existence or potential for one hell of a dystopian Philip K. Dick novel about how the Nazis actually "won" WW2 through a feint and the trojan horse of Werner von Braun and sending Germany's two main rivals in WW2 into a tail spin of paranoia and totalitarian actions and behaviors in the name of that paranoia.

And here we are with both the US and USSR with a long post WW2 history of global power projection, endless warfare and an alarming increase in racist and fascist ideologies.
posted by loquacious at 1:16 AM on April 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


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