Supercarrier

I was still relatively new in the Navy when this show aired, enlisting in November 1986. I remember sitting in the barracks at NATTC Lakehurst, NJ back in May 1988, going through a Navy school, and listening to the comments from my fellow sailors while the show was on TV. Not having been to the fleet yet, I didn't have a common frame of reference, but when I spent time on my first ship, it was easy to see what they meant. Throughout my ten years, it was hard to watch any movie or TV show that depicted Navy life without overanalyzing it and picking out the mistakes and contrived scenarios. I had even forgotten this aired until I followed a link for Richard Jaeckel from a movie.

"USS Vandegrift FFG 48 which is a Parry class frigate."

No, the USS VANDERGRIFT is an OLIVER HAZARD PERRY class frigate, and the word "Parry" doesn't have anything to do with it. Besides that, the Secretary of the Navy is a proper noun, and it is capitalized, instead of the uncapitalized way that he wrote it.

The TV series was awful, but that still does not justify writing "Parry" instead of OLIVER HAZARD PERRY. The real Oliver Hazard Perry was the largest naval hero of the War of 1812, and he won the Battle of Lake Erie, giving the United States control of that Great Lake during the war. Oliver Hazard Perry was also the father of the naval hero Matthew Perry of the 1850s.

The show was obviously trying to fill the gaps between commercials for people needing a Top Gun fix. I saw two minutes of one episode to confirm this. In the episode the carrier had to sail through a narrow canal, and the fear was that the enemy could be anywhere in the jungle below. Worse was that the jungle was so close that the carrier's guns couldn't depress far enough to engage them, should they appear. So the crew was just standing around in dread. I guess "hoping while dreading" can be considered a military tactic, right up there with praying and crossing fingers. I can't see how that kind of writing could engage any viewers over the age of nine. The show seemed to belong on Saturday mornings. Maybe if there was a red LED going back and forth between the bridle catchers, and the carrier's AI would converse with the crew. These are sarcastic suggestions alluding to Knight Rider.

I will never understand why Hollywood half bakes a show. If one wants to make a show about naval aviation, get people who know something about the topic, write dialog that people in the military would actually say, get the conops close to correct, and don't have any "big red levers that will destroy the reactor" or any other "the ship is in great danger again this week" formula.

I had the good fortune to have worked with the crew for the movie "Final Countdown" and managed to get a couple speaking parts and several visual scenes. One thing I can tell you is that the crew of the Nimitz edited a lot of dialog that would have been....un-realistic. Peter Douglas (producer) and Don Taylor (Director) were onboard for this and in fact encouraged our participation in the production of as authentic scenes as we could without taking away from the story line. THAT'S why the Final Countdown has become a favorite cult classic. We also enjoyed working with this crew. They treated us with respect and seemed to enjoy working with us as much as we enjoyed working with them. Peter Douglas was like a kid in a candy shop and his dad, Martin Sheen and Farentino were the same. It was a blast. I was in this show as well (right place right time......again) This show????? Not so much. The acting was weak and there was not a single big name in the cast that could hold the show together. The cast were all snotty wannabes who at no time seemed to genuinely enjoy what they were doing or working with us. The one guy that even talked with us was playing the part of an enlisted sailor whose job was similar to ours but even then I felt like it was mostly condescension rather than an interest in what we did. The premises of how the ships systems, crew and the Navy in general worked were ludicrous. I remember one scene in particular where the lead, sh!t hot, Ops Specialist had diagnosed a radar contact as being a Russian bomber and when the captain (who was in CIC despite the fact that the captain's job is on the bridge) asked "how do you know that". The dialog had the actor telling the captain something like "Do you hear that 'ping, doyng doot' sound that we're getting on the radar? That's the sound that this Russian bomber makes." First of all radar doesn't make sounds in the radar operators headset. Second only Electronic Warfare techs "listen" to RF emitters, not Op Specs. To add a humorous note to that episode: The consoles we worked from had intercom communications between them. We were all manned up making CIC look like we were on an underway footing and we all kept activating our intercom to this actor's console and telling him "ping doyng doot" over and over. We were driving him crazy and it was pretty much the only time we enjoyed doing this show. We hated this show and we hated being associated with it because it was stupid. And as was correctly pointed out in a previous comment/review the Navy did eventually pull their endorsement BUT it is important to understand that the ONLY episode that was actually filmed on the aircraft carrier was the pilot show. There were 8 episodes and none of the other 7 episodes were filmed onboard the ship. They were filmed in sets to emulate the ship. So just because the Navy pulled its endorsement there was no reason they couldn't continue to film the show. There are lots of military shows that have no military endorsement. But it was just an awful show and they knew it.

This series was never filmed on a carrier. It was filmed on the USS Vandegrift FFG 48 which is a Parry class frigate. I know this because I was stationed on the Vandergrift at the time of the filming. The entire basis of the show was BS from the beginning and the "stars" and crew made our lives miserable from the moment they stepped onto the pier. The navy pulled its support for the show due to our ships captain writing a scathing letter to the secretary of the navy outlining the way in which these people conducted themselves while guests aboard our home. The way they portrayed the men and women in uniform had nothing to do with it losing support, although it should have.