top gun gave world fame to F-14 Tomcat and convinced an entire generation to want to become fighter pilots. However, it was another film that gave Grumman’s fighter his first big role. We talk about The Final Countdown, which premiered in 1980; yes, six years before Tony Scott’s classic with Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer and Kelly McGillis hit the big screen.
For many, The Final Countdown it remains an unknown production, and it has its reasons. The most important, surely, is that the feature film It was not very successful at its premiere. and that prevented it from staying current beyond its original release. It is true that over the years it has gained a kind of cult status for its spectacular flight sequences and for the recognition of the collaboration of the United States Navy during filming, but it has been far from achieving the impact of top gun.
To this we must add that the film did not present a script with a conventional war story, but was more inclined towards science fiction. After all, the story centered on a modern time traveling aircraft carrier after encountering a thunderstorm that took him back to December 6, 1941, the day before the Japanese attack on the US naval fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The argument was not necessarily bad, because it was out of the ordinary. Also, The Final Countdown featured a cast led by Kirk Douglas —his son Peter was the producer—, Martin Sheen (who in 1979 had won acclaim for his work on apocalypse now), Y katherine ross, who by then had already won the Golden Globe twice. However, the general execution of the idea did not end up being good; though it did provide a first glimpse of the F-14 Tomcat—and the rest of the USS Nimitz’s naval arsenal—in all its glory.
The F-14 Tomcat had its first major cinematic deployment in The Final Countdown
As mentioned earlier, the premise of The Final Countdown it’s a bit quirky. The film focuses on the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, which travels back in time after passing through a storm and appears in 1941, just one day before Japan’s attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. Thus, the protagonists are left at a crossroads: intervene to prevent the massacre or let history take its course to try to interfere as little as possible in it.
One of the most memorable scenes in the film directed by don taylor shows two Mitsubishi A6M Zeroa fighter that served the Imperial Japanese Navy between 1940 and 1945, in close dogfight (dogfight) with two US F-14 Tomcats. The aerial sequence is simply spectacular, not only because of the generational and technical disparity of the aircraft involved, but also because of the production. The plans are great and give life to one of the highest points of this production. It is true that the shots close to the Japanese planes do not correspond to maneuvers in flight, but the rest of the action is real and has a great impact, even when seen more than 40 years after filming.
But dogfighting quickly proved challenging for all parties involved. Not only because there was a world of distance between the capabilities of the planes used, but also because of the requirements that the director intended to fulfill during the shooting of the sequences.
An interesting point to mention is that the Mitsubishi A6M Zeros that were fighting the F-14 Tomcats were actually two North American T-6 Texan. This was not the first time that this technique was used to represent the Japanese aircraft in question, as it had already been done in the film. Torah! Torah! Torah! from 1970 and in the series Baa Baa Black Sheep on NBC that aired between 1976 and 1978.
The main problem faced by both the pilots and the film’s production team was the difference in speed between the planes. Director Don Taylor wanted the T-6 pilots to fly with the cockpit open, which affected their top speed; while he intended to film the F-14 Tomcats with their wings fully retracted because he considered that they looked “cooler”.
The problem was that the variable geometry wings of the F-14 Tomcats automatically retracted only when the fighters were flying at very high speeds; otherwise, they remained extended. And while pilots could move the wings manually, retracting them during low-speed flight was risky.
“The first days of filming we fell from the air. It was a disaster,” he said. Alan ‘Shoes’ Mullenone of the F-14 Tomcat pilots in The Final Countdownin an interview with the youtuber and former fighter pilot C.W. Lemoine.
A change of strategy for filming
The difference in speed between the fake Mitsubishi A6M Zeros and the F-14 Tomcats forced a change in how the film was shot. Originally, aerial scenes were shot from a helicopter; but the static setup quickly became a difficulty to deal with the different speeds of the other aircraft. As Mullen explained, the T-6 could fly at a maximum speed of about 180 knots, which was far less than that of Grumman’s fighter, whose pilots juggled keeping it in the air flying at 200 knots with wings closed.
“It was like trying to drop three billiard balls on the table at the same time,” explained the former aviator. The solution was to get rid of the helicopter and replace it with an old bomber. North American B-25 Mitchell modified. The rear section was adapted to accommodate the cameras, which simplified taxiing and allowed closer shots of other aircraft. “So the B-25s and the T-6s were going at the same speed and flying in formation, and the F-14 Tomcats were going through it,” Mullen added.
In any case, filming a scene with such different planes was not without moments of anxiety. The most notorious came when one of the F-14 Tomcats maneuvered behind a slower, lower-flying T-6. The perspective of the image gives the feeling that Grumman’s fighter almost ended up in the water, which fortunately did not happen. The pilot Richard ‘Fox’ Farrellthe protagonist of the same, controlled the aircraft about 30 meters above the ocean, in a spectacular image that, in fact, appears in the final cut of The Final Countdown.
The scene was so shocking that over the years it fueled somewhat contradictory stories. One of them says that the sound effect of the plane’s engines during the recovery maneuver was actually the sampling of a scream from Farrell’s wife upon seeing the F-14 Tomcat “plunge”. In fact, the anecdote is included in this clip where the pilots remember the scene (in English).
However, the passage of time has led to dispute its veracity. In the aforementioned interview with CW Lemoine, Mullen indicated that, as explained to him by one of the sound engineers who participated in the film, what was added in post-production to make the sequence even more impressive was, in truth, the derivative of the recording of a cat’s roar.
more challenges
The shooting of the aerial scenes of The Final Countdown took place in the Florida Keys, taking advantage of Naval Air Station Key West. But filming the close air combat between the F-14 Tomcats and the T-6s not only proved complex because of the stunts themselves, or because of the aforementioned generational differences between the aircraft; but also because it was impossible to review at the moment the quality of the shots achieved in each deployment.
“Those were the days of shooting on film, not the days of digital recording. So we flew into Key West and came back to the hotel with nothing to watch. The film was shipped to New York, where it was developed, and brought back. So if we flew on Monday we could only see it on Thursday; meanwhile, we continued to fly on Tuesday without knowing what we were getting and on Wednesday the same thing. When Thursday rolled around and we received what we had recorded on Monday, there was only blue sky, a few clouds, and occasionally a few dots flashing across the screen. It was terrible,” explained pilot Alan ‘Shoes’ Mullen.
In retrospect, this gives an even more outstanding value to the final quality of the aerial scenes of the film.
But not only those starring the F-14 Tomcat, but also the other aircraft that participated in the production. In fact, The Final Countdown includes a sequence of a massive takeoff of aircraft from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier that is also formidable. You can see it below.
The F-14 Tomcat knew how to amaze before stardom in Top Gun
It is clear that the popularity of The Final Countdown has no point of comparison with the top gun. Despite this, director Don Taylor’s work with the aerial scenes is impeccable. In some cases, even further enhances the wonders of the F-14 Tomcat than Tony Scott’s work in the film starring Tom Cruise.
“It wasn’t a terrible movie. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either, and the Navy got a lot of good publicity. Recruiting Command loved it because they welcomed so many who signed up to be F-14 pilots, and overall the response from the Navy was favorable. […] But what I think this film did do was lay the groundwork for Top Gun, which was the big hit for Army recruiting,” Mullen concluded.