ee161agt@sdccs5.UUCP (11/18/83)
I've posted this before, but I am told that it didn't make out of our local net I apologize in advance to those who have seen it before. Comments and some things you might not know about The Right Stuff: The Real Chuck Yeager is actually in the movie!!! He's in the background playing a scruffy old bartender named Fred in Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club, actually a bordello on the base that test pilots used to frequent until it burned down. Rumor has it that the officer's wives paid an arsonist to torch it because of the interest their husbands had taken to the place. It's strange that the fact that Pancho's was a whorehouse was omitted from the movie, but in one of the scenes I remember Yeager saying something like "If you want to know why we hang around here, you better ask Pancho." The ruins of the Happy Bottom Club are still on the base, and are the site of an annual party that celebrates the date that Pancho's burned down. My brother who is a flight test engineer, went on his first supersonic flight the day after he saw the movie. He works at Edwards AFB. so he got to see the movie for free at the base. He reports no strange blue clouds appearing from nowhere or any other interesting effects. Breaking the sound barrier is a rather mundane process, and is marked only by the airspeed indicator and perhaps some vibration. I suppose the movie-makers wanted to make a symbolic point of breaking a barrier, but most of the special effects in the film are more gee-whiz make-the-jump-to-hyperspace stuff than "real world" simulation. Two exceptions are the falling of the experimental jet and the re-entry of the Mercury capsule, both done without the hokey mysticism of air and space flight that permeates the movie. Oh well... give the public what they want, but I'll take realism any time. Happy net news reading... Paul van de Graaf sdvax!sdcss5!ee161agt U. C. San Diego