Elegidos para la gloria

The secret story if why Chuck Yeager couldn't get into his plane for the test flight:

Yeager was a drinker and when he drank he liked to cheat on his wife. After a night of boozing and hooking up with women he went home to his angry wife. An argument ensued and Yeager jumped on to his horse and took off, he shortly fell off the horse and broke his ribs. The test flight was either the next day or very soon after and due to the broken rib Yeager was unable to open the hatch of the airplane. If he couldn't open the hatch on his own the entire thing would have been canceled. But the flight manager took a broom handle and broke it so Yeager could use this to open the hatch. This resulting in Charles W Russell earning the nickname of Hatch.

How is it that writers & directors continue to try to pass off alternative/revisionist crap as historically accurate? While the events themselves may be accurate, the portrayals of the astronauts, NASA employees, their combined families, etc., is severely myopic and filtered through today's politically correct & fragile viewpoints. None of them were perfect, none of their families were...but they did what had to be done at a time when death could be all but guaranteed. I give it a D for this very narrow and shallow take on a classic novel & reality.

Tom Wolfe's focus in his book The Right Stuff (as it was in Phillip Kaufman's 1983 film) was on the status structure of the test pilot fraternity, with Chuck Yeager at the top, as well as the nature of celebrity in America. With more time available than in a film, it's surprising that this series cuts out that backstory of the 40s and 50s, which would have told us where these men came from - and what they put their wives through - before they became astronauts. While the rivalry between the prim-and-proper John Glenn and the fighter jock Alan Shepard is well known, a particular surprise is that we've so far only seen the 'Ice Commander' side of Shepard, and not his other 'Smilin' Al' side, both of which Scott Glenn portrayed so well in the film. Far from capturing the excitement that everyone must have felt at the time, it all seems pretty grim.

The Disney juggernaut has once again ruined something great. First the Stars Wars franchise and now The Right Stuff. This miniseries almost got me hating John Glenn, for crying out loud because it painted him as a weasel. The political correctness angle is a tired one that Disney keeps playing for the millennial crowd, but even they may tire of it eventually.

This series is a trip into the Disney Alternate Cinematic Universe where the Mercury astronauts are actually self-absorbed millennial frat boys. I truly believe the the Wolfe book and the 1983 film sat unread and unviewed next to the writer's lap top. You can avoid the rest if you wish.