@@robertlehnert4148-- thank you for accidentally reminding me of some deep lore from "Back To The Future" --> Doc Brown's parents changed their name from "von Braun" to Brown just before the First World War. Doc was born about six years later in 1920.
The algorithm just brought me to you. It wasn't wrong. I think my favorite part of this video was all the stuff you didn't say, but I heard very clearly. It betrays a nuance that I'm frankly a bit jealous of.
I really love the world building of the series even though is unrealistic, I hope some day they make a new movie or a series based in the "Fatherland" book wich a more "realistic" scenario of an axis victory (though in reality there was no way for the axis to win) . You should take a look to the "United States of Japan" book wich basically is "The Man in the High Castle" but in a Cyberpunk setting
I did read "Fatherland" way back, but I have to check out "United States of Japan." Thanks for the recommendation. Now I'm considering doing a serious history video on a couple points where the Axis actually could have won, because there are ways they absolutely could have if some relatively small things had gone a little differently.
@@feralhistorianPlay RTS’s much? The New Order : Last days of Europe is another Alternate history in an Axis victory scenario with considerable depth in its world. Alberts Speers path deconstructs his “good Nazi” image that was built post war, while Robert Kennedy and Barry Goldwater paths mirror each other on the theme of government overreach, just from opposite ends of the political aisle.
I disagree that its unrealistic, the Scfi elements are not impossible. Mind you I much prefer the book where the films are replaced with a book, and the book is just a book - showing our world as an alternate version of history as the show/book shows another possible history. If the Nazi invented the bomb, and would have if they could cap there racism (as they did with working with the Japanese) they would have won. The book is superior in that the idea itself is the threat, not some physical reality - it gives people a vision to rebel for. The greatest difference of authority is that free speech as long as it lasts, gives a great check to power.
It's amazing that so many of Philip K. Dick's works (Do Androids Dream..., We Can Remember it for you...The Man in the High Castle) have been adapted to film. Dick, a life long speed addict, was almost incoherent as a writer, especially in novels, where he had the space to include a jumble of disconnected themes and elements, most of which did nothing to advance the story.
Dicks works generally were very short novels, barely exceeded novella length. A typical movie screenplay is 80-90 pages. That makes it a lot less work to adapt.
I haven't read High Castle yet, but every Dick novel I have picked up yet has been like reading a hallucinatory dream. A Scanner Darkly came close to the surreal weirdness. The one where a federal agent in a scramble suit is maybe or maybe not investigating himself. Total Recall was overtly a movie about oxygen monopolies on Mars, with the weirdness trying to push in from the edge. Everything is a little too close to the dream Quaid ordered.
So every ADHD patient is a life long speed addict. If you are interested in an a-b plot the short stories a best. "In Milton Lumpy Territory" and "We Can Build You" are a-b eventually, although as always no happy endings
@@SusCalvin A Scanner Darkly is his most personal book also it is a great example how he wrote with thoughts of the time he was in. He wrote it at the begin of what we know as The War on Drugs which Nixon started.
As an FYI, the US had more advanced ideas and projects in rocketry that von Braun and his crew. Which was why there were initially sent into essentially a guarded exile, first in Texas and later in New Mexico. Part of this was based on an American study (underwritten by the then US Army Air Force before it became the US Air Force) which essentially said that while ballistic missiles MIGHT someday become important weapons, at the point in the late 40s air-breathing guided missiles were supposed to be both nearer term but also easier to develop. Both turned out to be wrong but coupled with the very deep cuts in military spending until the Korean war broke out the US missile effort was crippled.
Your observations on "The Man in the High Castle" are well-thought out and unsparing. I suspect this was the main reason many found this show so hard to watch; it hits a bit too close to home for comfort. Have you done, or are planning to do, a similar review on Robert Harris' 1992 novel "Fatherland" about life in a victorious Nazi Germany? (I didn't see one in a quick perusal of your video catalogue.) I realize this is a bit off-topic, (and my geeky model builder comment should be on the Dornier D0-31,) but can we give a shout-out to the swept-wing variant of the F-80 shown on the comic book cover at 7:33. (Apparently, this was actually a design that if built would have been called the Lockheed F-80E. The project was dropped due to the effectiveness of the NA F-86 Sabre. But the F-80's two seat variant, the T-33, would go on to have a long and distinguished career . . . .) Subscribed. 337th Like.
I should do one on Fatherland, though I read it back when it was new so I'd have to read through it again as a refresher. Plus there's the HBO adaptation to use as b-roll. I was not aware of a swept-wing F-80 design. I have no doubt that it wouldn't perform as well as the F-86, but a swept F-80 definitely wins on aesthetics.
@@feralhistorian The book was much better than the HBO adaptation, though I liked Rutger Hauer's performance. (One small detail I didn't like was a quick scene of America where they showed the Mercury Redstone - which would not have been built in a A/U where Project Paperclip didn't happen.) Well, the Airfix kit of the F-80 is again plentiful, so I may consider an F-80E, one day. As for my potential Hond III; it turns out I don't have a Tamiya 1/35th scale Centurion in my stash, and they're currently out of production and averaging $75 on eBay. Fortunately, their Chieftain is plentiful, and has similar running gear. I'm going to have to scratch build the deck anyway, so I may as well scratch build the turret, too . . . . I wish you the best on any "Fatherland" analysis video!
TV / Film adaptations are basically of two types: either they try to jam an entire novel into a too-short runtime and the plot suffers, or they try to stretch out a relatively short piece of work into a long running series, and the plot suffers. The Prime adaptation just went way off the rails once they ran out of novel to adapt.
It sounds like they didn't bother much with the original novel. Like many of PKD novels Man In The High Castle feels more like a horrific slice of life story. The plot, what there is of it feels second to the ideas. As for the plot there are maybe two solid once, the first is a spy going to Japanese occupation to inform them of an evil plot by the Nazis to wipe them out. The second involves a guy who is an Italian truck driver and woman he picked up going to The Man in The High Castle who wrote a alt-history book called The Grasshopper lies heavy which tells the story of what the world would be if the Allies won. It should be noted they read samples of the book and it is nothing like how it really happened. So here were things get weird: The man in the high castle was a book published 62 and it is a book that imagines what America (mostly the west coast) would be like if the Axis won in 62 (Thing of this as mirror world from the world PKD is writing his novel) in the book there is a man writing a book about what if Allies win, this book is a mirror image of the world that author is in and looks nothing like the really world were PKD wrote the book in. Now on top of that both of PKD and the guy in his book used The I Ching (which is a major thing in PKD's book) to write their books. This is the closest thing to the main plot to the book, with the spy stuff being secondary. Not even secondary there is a whole other plot about a Jewish man living in Japan control west coat and still another story line barely connect to the Jewish guy about a angry owner of story that sells so called authentic American relics. How the hell do you stick that all into a show or movie. And it should be noted that nothing really changes at the end.
I think you give the tv show entirely too much credit, as it just kind of stumbled around not knowing what to do till it ended. I'd also like to just add that this problem with modern media is getting ridiculous as it seems to be everywhere in fiction with the idea for a show and that's it, resulting in shows that are just kind of blah. It would be one thing if these shows were meant to be friends, or M.A.S.H. or the simpsons but they're not which is why it's unsurprising to see modern shows start off strong, realize they've gotten thru all their prepared ideas and then just kind of wander around till someone puts them down.
I think part of the problem is that US tv seasons are generally 22 episodes each, which means you end up with a lot of episodes where the writers were too rushed, or so harried that they just phone it in, or are writing episodes that are nothing more than timewasting fluff. The Brits do a better job with a lot of this, because their equivalent of a TV season is usually around 8-12 episodes.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee I think its more along the line that the show producers (Not the writers) get offered millions of dollars during the middle of a season to extend the show because it's doing well and suddenly the writers are on the hook to rewrite and patch together a story using ideas they initially discarded if they're lucky. All you need to do is look at something like Game of thrones, when Dan and Dave ran out of Martin's content he'd written the story just went to absolute shit, not only the basics with people basically teleporting around the realm instead of actually travelling but just the story and dialogue took a big hit as well. This is the issue, you can't just alter and rewrite a fabulous story that took years to write by a talented author on the fly and not expect the quality to goto shit.
Man in the High Castle was a show I liked up until the last few minutes of the series finale. By Season 4, I was less interested in Juliana Crane's storyline and more on the Pacific States and John Smith's story. The ending of the penultimate episode, in which John Smith and Wilhelm Goeetzmann dividing the RUclips Empire (does the algorithm demonetize videos based on comments?) between themselves like Roman Caesars, was a more suitable ending for the series than what we got.
The thing i dislike about axis victory stories is simply that they try to extrapolate wartime nazism into a cold war setting without learning from history. The soviet union was arguably much worse than nazism, and they became a lot more benign after stalin died. Theres nothing to indicate that the comparatively more civilized germans wouldnt have done the same, or at least eased up on the genocides a bit
@@MarcoLandin this happened in our timeline too. Dont forget that the soviets almost completely exterminated crimean tatars, the remaining circassians, chechens, and basically every german outside of postwar germany. Sorry but no ww2 outcome would ever have been wholesome
The question of collaborators was even greater in Europe. Germany was never strong enough to completely administrate all the occupied territory at its height of expansion. They manage to shake out thousands of collaborators virtually anywhere. Most places had at least some scrappy local fascist party that could be elevated to a puppet. People did fill volunteer units of security units. My impression of them is a mixed bag of people who either shared the fascist ideas ditectly, saw an opportunity to get back at other rivals and targets, simply wanted the perks of being on the winning side, got a chance to loot and torture with heer protection or to further some ethnic/nationalist goal of their own.
@SusCalvin When you dig into the ideology of Lebensraum, you understand how German high command thought. In each new conquered territory, they planned to exterminate the vast majority of the population, but elevate a portion of the native population to the status of "honorary German" and then send settlers from Germany to rebuild the population. That's how they ended up with so many willing collaborators in places like Finland and Ukraine who were so zealous in their support for the German War effort that they eagerly formed death squads and SS units. Understanding their reasoning is not to excuse them, however. A Fascist is a Fascist, after all. An SS soldier from Finland or Poland is just as guilty as one from Germany.
@@stephendaley266 A part of it is necessity. As the war starts to go badly, they seem to get less picky about the purity. Through the war they apply a sort of racial grading. I think the heer was pretty good at turning a perfectly good anticommunist area into a hotbed of antifascist partisans.
For some reason the J Edgar Hoover character creeped me out the most. I think it was just how easily I could have pictured him seamlessly sliding into the roll of head of the American Gestapo.😎✌️
Honestly, I think the show would be better if it was just about John Smith. Because in the end, he pretty much becomes the "Man in the High Castle" in his own right.
Yeah, he was also the character that should scare you. Just a small shift in what happened and he is a great American hero in our timeliness. Or maybe he becomes some big-time politico. Or maybe a highly successful entrepreneur. Or maybe just some normal Joe. The name John Smith is so generic as you must realize it could be you.
What's funny is in the original book the focus was on the Pacific States and there wasn't a whole lot about the contemporary Reich except snippets of news about the Fuhrer dying and which of the former inner circle had led a coup that week. The book deals a lot more with cultural diffusion and appropriation, most notably shown by the Japanese obsession with pre-war Americana that mirrors the American post-war obsession with samurai, ninjas, karate, and other more ancient aspects of Japanese culture. The book is more a thought experiment of flipping the roles of cultural assimilation and showing that it's never really an equal relationship, it's one side fetishizing the other with a veneer of respect. Also Japan deserves its own look with regards to post-war politics. While there was never really an analog to Operation Paperclip in the Far East, Unit 731's work notwithstanding, Japan's governing elites and apparatus wasn't sanitized in the same way Germany was and most of the high officials remained more or less where they were suitably chastised but not really repentant. The most glaring example besides the Emperor being Nobsuke Kishi who during the war had managed Manchuria with all the leniency Imperial Japan was known for and rather than being executed or locked up for life he became Japanese Prime Minister in 1957. Which is basically like if Albert Speer had become the West German Chancellor in the 1950's.
The book is so wild. I never saw the show but I could never see it getting anywhere close to the book. Like most of PKD books there's barely if any real action and it more about the many ideas he has such as the one as you pointed out as well as the idea of what is and what is not authentic. And then there is the whole stuff about the book the grasshopper lies heavy imagine what the world would have gone if the Allies won.
You make it so interesting, because so many of P K Dicks concepts were. However the execution is poor. I did try the TV show and found it boring and gave up after a few episodes. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is passable and is improved upon by the film. A more accurate retelling of A Scanner Darkly is a slog to match the book. The Man Who Japed is unreadable.
About 3 years ago I visited an old friend who had moved to Huntsville AL; we visited the space and rocket center - slightly more than a mile from the Von Braun center. There, beneath the Saturn V was a V2 rocket. When I commented that this was war crime evidence that belonged at the Hague, she shushed me and replied "We don't say the N-word here."
When I read the novel over thirty years ago I was left with an impression of how little difference there is between the alternate post war reality and the actual reality, which I think is unfortunate, since it's likely that a third reich dominated world (with Japan playing a secondarily dominant role) would have wrought far more death and destruction than the U.S. has. We don't have to believe the narrative of the US as the world's savior, but by the same token there was absolutely nothing morally uplifting about the holocaust. It likely would not have ended if the allied nations had not intervened.
I really wanted to like this show. It had a great premise, excellent world building, and fantastic production design. But I quit it in season 2 because I found Frank and Juliana to be two of the most despicable and boring protagonists I've ever seen.
Nazi America in the series (I didn't finish the book) is plain stupid, the concept and imagery so wrong. Alternative version of history where America is divided like Germany was is intriguing, but it's very odd here.
The timeline hopping actually put a lot of strain on what had a lot of potential as a world and story to me. Like the author got embarrassed or something and needed to bring it back to our universe. It didn't have to be a bad plot device and ramps up the Sci fi elements for sure, but I kind of wish it committed to the initial worldbuilding a bit longer
Haven’t seen the GoT finale but yeah I agree the ending sucked. They really could have told this story as a mini series or tops 2 seasons. It just meandered for too long before ending.
I hated the concept of the show once I saw two groups of governments based on race superiority would be sharing the U.S...... The Japanese had no chill when it came to dealing with conquered countries that it felt were inferior. Patton wanted to rearm the German Army and immediately attack Russia after Germany surrendered........ Germany and Japan were only allied due to "The Enemy of my Enemy".
Europe in late 1940 is a burned out husk. The victors are deep in debt and only starting to rebuild using the Marshall aid. Rationing, homelessness, bouts of starvation and shortages will remain for the next decade or two. The USA has a very ambitious plan for the denazification of Germany. The obvious ones at the Nuremberg trials? No issue. They use a sort of ranking system, basically how close to war crimes and the state apparatus you had been. How involved you were. Lower tiers that weren't on trial could be barred from offices etc. They run into scale. The NSDAP had been working for over a decade to nazify the country. And how should these millions of nazis be handled. Anything from demobilized heer troops to NSDAP mayors to medical staff to company managers supervising slaves. The other allies, UK and France, are pushing for increased focus on rebuilding. The ongoing homelessness, winter fuel shortages etc. And a lot of these people being processed are becoming necessary. A hospital or police completely free of ex-nazis is looking more like an ideal dream. And stateside, there is a push for demobilization of the staff on garrison in Germany, or at least refocusing on Stalin. They think the nuclear monopoly might have decades left, until Stalin has his own bomb.
@SusCalvin America in the late 1940s suddenly confused about who was worse: Nazis or communists. Even though Nazis had just finished murdering tens of millions and enslaving half the globe. Meanwhile communists had done more to defeat Nazi Germany than the rest of the world combined. This is when the CIA officially rewrote history, downplaying the USSR's contributions to the war efforts, and retroactively labeling the Soviets Axis-collaborators because they signed a non-aggression agreement before the war started. It's pitiful that American Conservatives have been allowed to rewrite history.
@@stephendaley266 Stalin is not a very nice bloke. I think it hit the same reason why a state is hard to just lop off and replace. A lot of the people needed to run stuff will have been part of the old regime, and Germany had been nazis. They are struggling to figure out how to run a hospital or court without nazis. There was a scant, small democratic opposition in '45 Germany. Germans did not form SS partisan units on a large scale as the allies had sometimes feared but they did not immediately retract from a decade of nazification. The allies still put in a lot of safeguards so the Weimar years with an antidemocratic state fighting itself did not repeat.
@SusCalvin Compare German "de-nazification" post WW2 with what West Germany did to former communists after German reunification. After WW2, thousands of literal Nazis were given high-level government positions, while a token number of them faced any legal repercussions for their wartime activities. By contrast, after German reunification, former communists officials from East Germany were ruthlessly purged from government, military, police, etc. It was supposed to be a peaceful reunification of Germany. Instead, West Germany staged a hostile takeover of East Germany. If you've never asked yourself why the West was so quick to forgive and forget when dealing with Germany and Japan but willing to hold a 60 year grudge against communists, you haven't been paying attention. Capitalists have been waging an ideological holy war against socialism and Communism for over a century. They have gone so far as to rewrite history textbooks using CIA cold war propaganda. Surely you're clever enough to see that?
Operation paper clip is a hell of a drug
And Paperclip is the mostly-harmless tip of that iceberg.
"Don't call him hypocritical/Just say he's apolitical/"I send the rockets up, and where they come down, is not my department"/Says Werner Von Braun
@@robertlehnert4148-- thank you for accidentally reminding me of some deep lore from "Back To The Future" --> Doc Brown's parents changed their name from "von Braun" to Brown just before the First World War. Doc was born about six years later in 1920.
@feralhistorian : This comes to me as a surprise. What is more in the iceberg?
@@johnanita9251Shiro Ishii
The algorithm just brought me to you. It wasn't wrong.
I think my favorite part of this video was all the stuff you didn't say, but I heard very clearly. It betrays a nuance that I'm frankly a bit jealous of.
I really love the world building of the series even though is unrealistic, I hope some day they make a new movie or a series based in the "Fatherland" book wich a more "realistic" scenario of an axis victory (though in reality there was no way for the axis to win) . You should take a look to the "United States of Japan" book wich basically is "The Man in the High Castle" but in a Cyberpunk setting
I did read "Fatherland" way back, but I have to check out "United States of Japan." Thanks for the recommendation. Now I'm considering doing a serious history video on a couple points where the Axis actually could have won, because there are ways they absolutely could have if some relatively small things had gone a little differently.
@@feralhistorianPlay RTS’s much? The New Order : Last days of Europe is another Alternate history in an Axis victory scenario with considerable depth in its world. Alberts Speers path deconstructs his “good Nazi” image that was built post war, while Robert Kennedy and Barry Goldwater paths mirror each other on the theme of government overreach, just from opposite ends of the political aisle.
I disagree that its unrealistic, the Scfi elements are not impossible. Mind you I much prefer the book where the films are replaced with a book, and the book is just a book - showing our world as an alternate version of history as the show/book shows another possible history. If the Nazi invented the bomb, and would have if they could cap there racism (as they did with working with the Japanese) they would have won. The book is superior in that the idea itself is the threat, not some physical reality - it gives people a vision to rebel for. The greatest difference of authority is that free speech as long as it lasts, gives a great check to power.
@@greatguytv Without the Second Amendment the First Amendment will Quickly if not Immediately Cease to exist!!! 🤠👍
The Axis only needed to make the bad guys surrender. It would have been real easy if the public knew about the bankers.
How does this not have more views?
I know right? There are 4k subscribers yet less than 2k views. This channel is amazing and deserves far more subscribers and views.
I'm old enough to remember: I Reach for the Stars, a biopic of Wernher von Braun designer of the V2. He was on the Walt Disney show.
Don't remind me. I hate that that was a thing. Although, after everything we've learned about Walt Disney, it tracks.
It's amazing that so many of Philip K. Dick's works (Do Androids Dream..., We Can Remember it for you...The Man in the High Castle) have been adapted to film. Dick, a life long speed addict, was almost incoherent as a writer, especially in novels, where he had the space to include a jumble of disconnected themes and elements, most of which did nothing to advance the story.
I've always considered movies from Philip K. Dick's work to be "inspired by" rather than adaptations. As you say, his stories are a bit disconnected.
Dicks works generally were very short novels, barely exceeded novella length. A typical movie screenplay is 80-90 pages. That makes it a lot less work to adapt.
I haven't read High Castle yet, but every Dick novel I have picked up yet has been like reading a hallucinatory dream.
A Scanner Darkly came close to the surreal weirdness. The one where a federal agent in a scramble suit is maybe or maybe not investigating himself.
Total Recall was overtly a movie about oxygen monopolies on Mars, with the weirdness trying to push in from the edge. Everything is a little too close to the dream Quaid ordered.
So every ADHD patient is a life long speed addict. If you are interested in an a-b plot the short stories a best. "In Milton Lumpy Territory" and "We Can Build You" are a-b eventually, although as always no happy endings
@@SusCalvin A Scanner Darkly is his most personal book also it is a great example how he wrote with thoughts of the time he was in. He wrote it at the begin of what we know as The War on Drugs which Nixon started.
As an FYI, the US had more advanced ideas and projects in rocketry that von Braun and his crew. Which was why there were initially sent into essentially a guarded exile, first in Texas and later in New Mexico. Part of this was based on an American study (underwritten by the then US Army Air Force before it became the US Air Force) which essentially said that while ballistic missiles MIGHT someday become important weapons, at the point in the late 40s air-breathing guided missiles were supposed to be both nearer term but also easier to develop.
Both turned out to be wrong but coupled with the very deep cuts in military spending until the Korean war broke out the US missile effort was crippled.
Your observations on "The Man in the High Castle" are well-thought out and unsparing. I suspect this was the main reason many found this show so hard to watch; it hits a bit too close to home for comfort.
Have you done, or are planning to do, a similar review on Robert Harris' 1992 novel "Fatherland" about life in a victorious Nazi Germany? (I didn't see one in a quick perusal of your video catalogue.)
I realize this is a bit off-topic, (and my geeky model builder comment should be on the Dornier D0-31,) but can we give a shout-out to the swept-wing variant of the F-80 shown on the comic book cover at 7:33. (Apparently, this was actually a design that if built would have been called the Lockheed F-80E. The project was dropped due to the effectiveness of the NA F-86 Sabre. But the F-80's two seat variant, the T-33, would go on to have a long and distinguished career . . . .)
Subscribed.
337th Like.
I should do one on Fatherland, though I read it back when it was new so I'd have to read through it again as a refresher. Plus there's the HBO adaptation to use as b-roll.
I was not aware of a swept-wing F-80 design. I have no doubt that it wouldn't perform as well as the F-86, but a swept F-80 definitely wins on aesthetics.
@@feralhistorian The book was much better than the HBO adaptation, though I liked Rutger Hauer's performance. (One small detail I didn't like was a quick scene of America where they showed the Mercury Redstone - which would not have been built in a A/U where Project Paperclip didn't happen.)
Well, the Airfix kit of the F-80 is again plentiful, so I may consider an F-80E, one day. As for my potential Hond III; it turns out I don't have a Tamiya 1/35th scale Centurion in my stash, and they're currently out of production and averaging $75 on eBay. Fortunately, their Chieftain is plentiful, and has similar running gear. I'm going to have to scratch build the deck anyway, so I may as well scratch build the turret, too . . . .
I wish you the best on any "Fatherland" analysis video!
That song about Van Braun by Tom Lehrer was a hit for its time. So yeah your point is well taken.
🎶"Ven ze rockets go up / Who cares ver zey come down / "That's not my department" / Says Werner Von Braun"🎶
TV / Film adaptations are basically of two types: either they try to jam an entire novel into a too-short runtime and the plot suffers, or they try to stretch out a relatively short piece of work into a long running series, and the plot suffers. The Prime adaptation just went way off the rails once they ran out of novel to adapt.
It sounds like they didn't bother much with the original novel. Like many of PKD novels Man In The High Castle feels more like a horrific slice of life story. The plot, what there is of it feels second to the ideas. As for the plot there are maybe two solid once, the first is a spy going to Japanese occupation to inform them of an evil plot by the Nazis to wipe them out. The second involves a guy who is an Italian truck driver and woman he picked up going to The Man in The High Castle who wrote a alt-history book called The Grasshopper lies heavy which tells the story of what the world would be if the Allies won. It should be noted they read samples of the book and it is nothing like how it really happened. So here were things get weird: The man in the high castle was a book published 62 and it is a book that imagines what America (mostly the west coast) would be like if the Axis won in 62 (Thing of this as mirror world from the world PKD is writing his novel) in the book there is a man writing a book about what if Allies win, this book is a mirror image of the world that author is in and looks nothing like the really world were PKD wrote the book in. Now on top of that both of PKD and the guy in his book used The I Ching (which is a major thing in PKD's book) to write their books. This is the closest thing to the main plot to the book, with the spy stuff being secondary. Not even secondary there is a whole other plot about a Jewish man living in Japan control west coat and still another story line barely connect to the Jewish guy about a angry owner of story that sells so called authentic American relics. How the hell do you stick that all into a show or movie. And it should be noted that nothing really changes at the end.
I think you give the tv show entirely too much credit, as it just kind of stumbled around not knowing what to do till it ended.
I'd also like to just add that this problem with modern media is getting ridiculous as it seems to be everywhere in fiction with the idea for a show and that's it, resulting in shows that are just kind of blah. It would be one thing if these shows were meant to be friends, or M.A.S.H. or the simpsons but they're not which is why it's unsurprising to see modern shows start off strong, realize they've gotten thru all their prepared ideas and then just kind of wander around till someone puts them down.
I think part of the problem is that US tv seasons are generally 22 episodes each, which means you end up with a lot of episodes where the writers were too rushed, or so harried that they just phone it in, or are writing episodes that are nothing more than timewasting fluff. The Brits do a better job with a lot of this, because their equivalent of a TV season is usually around 8-12 episodes.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee I think its more along the line that the show producers (Not the writers) get offered millions of dollars during the middle of a season to extend the show because it's doing well and suddenly the writers are on the hook to rewrite and patch together a story using ideas they initially discarded if they're lucky.
All you need to do is look at something like Game of thrones, when Dan and Dave ran out of Martin's content he'd written the story just went to absolute shit, not only the basics with people basically teleporting around the realm instead of actually travelling but just the story and dialogue took a big hit as well.
This is the issue, you can't just alter and rewrite a fabulous story that took years to write by a talented author on the fly and not expect the quality to goto shit.
Man in the High Castle was a show I liked up until the last few minutes of the series finale. By Season 4, I was less interested in Juliana Crane's storyline and more on the Pacific States and John Smith's story. The ending of the penultimate episode, in which John Smith and Wilhelm Goeetzmann dividing the RUclips Empire (does the algorithm demonetize videos based on comments?) between themselves like Roman Caesars, was a more suitable ending for the series than what we got.
Journalistic integr… what ?!
I don’t know this term.
I love how you lend nobility and depth to sometimes rather mid fiction!
I've read most of these books and movies. I love your takes on all of them. Thank you!
Brilliant! This is what I had been looking for but had no idea until I got here. Thank you! 😍
Video thumbnail goes hard
The thing i dislike about axis victory stories is simply that they try to extrapolate wartime nazism into a cold war setting without learning from history. The soviet union was arguably much worse than nazism, and they became a lot more benign after stalin died. Theres nothing to indicate that the comparatively more civilized germans wouldnt have done the same, or at least eased up on the genocides a bit
Agreed. I once said (to much ridicule) that by 1980, Nazi Germany would have been known for budget deficits and vague apologies.
@@feralhistorian Sure, because there was no one else left to commit genocide on.
No thanks.
They only needed to get revenge on the Communists, which was introduced by their former masters during the Weimar years.
@@MarcoLandin this happened in our timeline too. Dont forget that the soviets almost completely exterminated crimean tatars, the remaining circassians, chechens, and basically every german outside of postwar germany. Sorry but no ww2 outcome would ever have been wholesome
What genocides?
“I only make the rockets go up…”
The question of collaborators was even greater in Europe. Germany was never strong enough to completely administrate all the occupied territory at its height of expansion.
They manage to shake out thousands of collaborators virtually anywhere. Most places had at least some scrappy local fascist party that could be elevated to a puppet. People did fill volunteer units of security units.
My impression of them is a mixed bag of people who either shared the fascist ideas ditectly, saw an opportunity to get back at other rivals and targets, simply wanted the perks of being on the winning side, got a chance to loot and torture with heer protection or to further some ethnic/nationalist goal of their own.
@SusCalvin When you dig into the ideology of Lebensraum, you understand how German high command thought.
In each new conquered territory, they planned to exterminate the vast majority of the population, but elevate a portion of the native population to the status of "honorary German" and then send settlers from Germany to rebuild the population.
That's how they ended up with so many willing collaborators in places like Finland and Ukraine who were so zealous in their support for the German War effort that they eagerly formed death squads and SS units.
Understanding their reasoning is not to excuse them, however.
A Fascist is a Fascist, after all.
An SS soldier from Finland or Poland is just as guilty as one from Germany.
@@stephendaley266 A part of it is necessity. As the war starts to go badly, they seem to get less picky about the purity. Through the war they apply a sort of racial grading.
I think the heer was pretty good at turning a perfectly good anticommunist area into a hotbed of antifascist partisans.
For some reason the J Edgar Hoover character creeped me out the most. I think it was just how easily I could have pictured him seamlessly sliding into the roll of head of the American Gestapo.😎✌️
Hoover would have 100% embraced the role
Honestly, I think the show would be better if it was just about John Smith. Because in the end, he pretty much becomes the "Man in the High Castle" in his own right.
Yeah, he was also the character that should scare you. Just a small shift in what happened and he is a great American hero in our timeliness. Or maybe he becomes some big-time politico. Or maybe a highly successful entrepreneur. Or maybe just some normal Joe. The name John Smith is so generic as you must realize it could be you.
Great presentation , dude.
What's funny is in the original book the focus was on the Pacific States and there wasn't a whole lot about the contemporary Reich except snippets of news about the Fuhrer dying and which of the former inner circle had led a coup that week. The book deals a lot more with cultural diffusion and appropriation, most notably shown by the Japanese obsession with pre-war Americana that mirrors the American post-war obsession with samurai, ninjas, karate, and other more ancient aspects of Japanese culture. The book is more a thought experiment of flipping the roles of cultural assimilation and showing that it's never really an equal relationship, it's one side fetishizing the other with a veneer of respect.
Also Japan deserves its own look with regards to post-war politics. While there was never really an analog to Operation Paperclip in the Far East, Unit 731's work notwithstanding, Japan's governing elites and apparatus wasn't sanitized in the same way Germany was and most of the high officials remained more or less where they were suitably chastised but not really repentant. The most glaring example besides the Emperor being Nobsuke Kishi who during the war had managed Manchuria with all the leniency Imperial Japan was known for and rather than being executed or locked up for life he became Japanese Prime Minister in 1957. Which is basically like if Albert Speer had become the West German Chancellor in the 1950's.
The book is so wild. I never saw the show but I could never see it getting anywhere close to the book. Like most of PKD books there's barely if any real action and it more about the many ideas he has such as the one as you pointed out as well as the idea of what is and what is not authentic. And then there is the whole stuff about the book the grasshopper lies heavy imagine what the world would have gone if the Allies won.
Love to open a Zima but it's not sold in the UK. Great video, again, by the way.
I think you can only find them in Japan these days. From what I recall, you're not really missing out.
This show is visual defernd then this time line but narrativly same F.K.D was awesome writer one of my favorite
The book is rather short and rather oblique
I wonder how quick they'd be to chase after the alternative history, if the film reels showed the 21st century.
9:02 Have to admit this went over my head when I watched it!
The ending with the tunnel didn't make sense (I can't remember why, it's been a while since I watched it, but I remember that it didn't make sense).
I forgave much of the plot's imperfection in favor of the fantastic, dystopian worldbuilding.
I thought season one was pretty good. Season 2 was OK, but it started going down hill fast after that.
Lore of The Man in the High Castle : An American Cultural Memory momentum 100
the portrayal of Reinhardt Heydrich to me was terrifying to see. The most evil man within the Nazi regime.
You make it so interesting, because so many of P K Dicks concepts were. However the execution is poor. I did try the TV show and found it boring and gave up after a few episodes. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is passable and is improved upon by the film. A more accurate retelling of A Scanner Darkly is a slog to match the book. The Man Who Japed is unreadable.
No, No, no. Well ok, just opinions.
Thanks for this vid
Most people would prefer Man in the high castle viche France over modern Paris.
Lebensraum is a myth.
3 words Military Industrial Complex.
I want the mothership to arrive soon and take me back to my home planet.
Gosh.
About 3 years ago I visited an old friend who had moved to Huntsville AL; we visited the space and rocket center - slightly more than a mile from the Von Braun center. There, beneath the Saturn V was a V2 rocket. When I commented that this was war crime evidence that belonged at the Hague, she shushed me and replied "We don't say the N-word here."
You are a killjoy.
@@dansmith1661 You're welcome.
I live nearby Huntsville. The Von Braun Center is more the stranger thing, in my opinion. The V2 is just war loot.
When I read the novel over thirty years ago I was left with an impression of how little difference there is between the alternate post war reality and the actual reality, which I think is unfortunate, since it's likely that a third reich dominated world (with Japan playing a secondarily dominant role) would have wrought far more death and destruction than the U.S. has. We don't have to believe the narrative of the US as the world's savior, but by the same token there was absolutely nothing morally uplifting about the holocaust. It likely would not have ended if the allied nations had not intervened.
Did you read the history of the chosen people? Jesus called them satanists. It was moral and Christian.
@@dansmith1661 I don't know what you're talking about and I doubt that I'd want to know.
The book was much better than the series
Nice zima drop
the first 3 seasons were okay. the last season was terrible.
The book wasn't perfect but the series lost me at the end of Season 1.
I really wanted to like this show. It had a great premise, excellent world building, and fantastic production design.
But I quit it in season 2 because I found Frank and Juliana to be two of the most despicable and boring protagonists I've ever seen.
It's not fantasy: it has happened to Eastern Europe under communism.
Nazi America in the series (I didn't finish the book) is plain stupid, the concept and imagery so wrong. Alternative version of history where America is divided like Germany was is intriguing, but it's very odd here.
ee
It could have been a great series but man that ending was terrible. This ending was almost as bad as GoT’s
The timeline hopping actually put a lot of strain on what had a lot of potential as a world and story to me. Like the author got embarrassed or something and needed to bring it back to our universe. It didn't have to be a bad plot device and ramps up the Sci fi elements for sure, but I kind of wish it committed to the initial worldbuilding a bit longer
Haven’t seen the GoT finale but yeah I agree the ending sucked. They really could have told this story as a mini series or tops 2 seasons. It just meandered for too long before ending.
I hated the concept of the show once I saw two groups of governments based on race superiority would be sharing the U.S...... The Japanese had no chill when it came to dealing with conquered countries that it felt were inferior.
Patton wanted to rearm the German Army and immediately attack Russia after Germany surrendered........
Germany and Japan were only allied due to "The Enemy of my Enemy".
Zima! Wtf
Europe in late 1940 is a burned out husk. The victors are deep in debt and only starting to rebuild using the Marshall aid. Rationing, homelessness, bouts of starvation and shortages will remain for the next decade or two.
The USA has a very ambitious plan for the denazification of Germany. The obvious ones at the Nuremberg trials? No issue. They use a sort of ranking system, basically how close to war crimes and the state apparatus you had been. How involved you were. Lower tiers that weren't on trial could be barred from offices etc.
They run into scale. The NSDAP had been working for over a decade to nazify the country. And how should these millions of nazis be handled. Anything from demobilized heer troops to NSDAP mayors to medical staff to company managers supervising slaves.
The other allies, UK and France, are pushing for increased focus on rebuilding. The ongoing homelessness, winter fuel shortages etc. And a lot of these people being processed are becoming necessary. A hospital or police completely free of ex-nazis is looking more like an ideal dream. And stateside, there is a push for demobilization of the staff on garrison in Germany, or at least refocusing on Stalin. They think the nuclear monopoly might have decades left, until Stalin has his own bomb.
@SusCalvin America in the late 1940s suddenly confused about who was worse: Nazis or communists.
Even though Nazis had just finished murdering tens of millions and enslaving half the globe.
Meanwhile communists had done more to defeat Nazi Germany than the rest of the world combined.
This is when the CIA officially rewrote history, downplaying the USSR's contributions to the war efforts, and retroactively labeling the Soviets Axis-collaborators because they signed a non-aggression agreement before the war started.
It's pitiful that American Conservatives have been allowed to rewrite history.
@@stephendaley266 Stalin is not a very nice bloke.
I think it hit the same reason why a state is hard to just lop off and replace. A lot of the people needed to run stuff will have been part of the old regime, and Germany had been nazis. They are struggling to figure out how to run a hospital or court without nazis. There was a scant, small democratic opposition in '45 Germany. Germans did not form SS partisan units on a large scale as the allies had sometimes feared but they did not immediately retract from a decade of nazification. The allies still put in a lot of safeguards so the Weimar years with an antidemocratic state fighting itself did not repeat.
@SusCalvin Compare German "de-nazification" post WW2 with what West Germany did to former communists after German reunification.
After WW2, thousands of literal Nazis were given high-level government positions, while a token number of them faced any legal repercussions for their wartime activities.
By contrast, after German reunification, former communists officials from East Germany were ruthlessly purged from government, military, police, etc.
It was supposed to be a peaceful reunification of Germany. Instead, West Germany staged a hostile takeover of East Germany.
If you've never asked yourself why the West was so quick to forgive and forget when dealing with Germany and Japan but willing to hold a 60 year grudge against communists, you haven't been paying attention.
Capitalists have been waging an ideological holy war against socialism and Communism for over a century. They have gone so far as to rewrite history textbooks using CIA cold war propaganda.
Surely you're clever enough to see that?
Read the book. The series wasnt anywhere near as good.
Wokeness is necessary.
The book was fine. The TV series sucked.
I liked the first 2 seasons
👏👏👏👍