What-If 0100: "WWII Films"

[vortighast]

WWII Films

Some random movie will invariably get tagged soon...

[Reecer6]

Argh, I had never made one of these threads and I was SO CLOSE to finishing mine before I saw this one...

Anyways, I wonder how that ratio would be affected if you included the buttloads of video games on WWII? The data could easily be affected by that one hypothetical time I left a game on over night to see if the time would change at all, but even then, would it make any sort of dent in the ratio?

[rhomboidal]

I so hope this isn't the real reason behind Hitler dragging out the war, refusing to surrender.

[biggles1]

If you counted all the hours people have spent playing the WW2 call of duty games, the WW2 medal of honour games, and all the WW2 video games generally, that probably far outshines the 2191 days that WW2 lasted.

[mitchwyle]

Did Becky explicitly state "not YouTube videos" when she asked about "film?" Because there are probably many hundreds or thousands of hours of those.

[Sir Lunch-a-lot]

If we included all the footage shot during WWII (footage actually pertaining to the war, mind you: e.g. Battlefield Footage, Propoganda, etc), I wonder how that would change the ratio.

[Mikeski]

If you counted all the hours people have spent playing the WW2 call of duty games, the WW2 medal of honour games, and all the WW2 video games generally, that probably far outshines the 2191 days that WW2 lasted.

If you're gonna multiply (time played x number of players), you have to be fair and multiply (time warring x number of warriors) as well. Your call if that's just the military, or if the civilians working in weapon factories and such count, too.

[Reecer6]

I'd go ahead and say the number of people who fought in World War II is smaller than those who have played it. Even if that means considering a person playing each game as separate lives. However, I'm not the one planning to do the math here.

[D-Bot]

There was a brief civil war in Australia referred to alternatively as the Eureka Rebellion, or the Eureka Stockade (so named because of the stockade erected at the site of the battle).

The fighting itself only lasted about 10 to 15 minutes, but a film about the events (called "Eureka Stockade") was made in 1949. Wikipedia gives its running time as 103 minutes, meaning it could edge out WW2 in terms of ratio. I suppose it depends on what you classify as "war", and whether the build up to the actual battle counts towards overall length.

[keithl]

The 2009 war movie "Attack on Leningrad" is in the IMDB database and tagged "world war two". Someone asked in the discussion forum for that movie why there weren't more made-in-Russia films about The Great Patriotic War. The Russians on the list said there were a great many awful ones that weren't worth preserving. I imagine there were many more made in other Eastern block countries, as well as many made in China - Mao was quite the film fan. That may add another year's worth beyond the IMDB list.

Then there were all the 12 year old boys with Daddy's movie camera making their own back yard war movies. Count up all the rolls of 8 mm film sold between 1946 and 1966, multiply by an estimated 2%, and the run time adds up to far more than the Europe-centric official six years.

Perhaps long enough to include the 1937 beginning of the second SIno-Japanese war, or even the 1931 Japanese conquest of Manchuria, when the more-or-less continuous Asian conflict started. If we count the Japanese stragglers in the mountains of the Phillipines, the real non-ethnocentric WW2 may span two decades.

Were any kids still making WW2 back yard movies in the video tape era? Are any now? It is strange to think that I was born closer to the Spanish American War (1898) than some teenagers are to the official end of WW2.

Now get off my lawn, and take your cameracopters with you!

[ManaUser]

Seventy-seven movies are tagged world-war-three. So that's at least a good three days of footage about a war, that lasted zero seconds (so far).

[Caturday]

I was wondering why the Thirty Year's War wasn't mentioned within the What-If. If not the conflict itself, at least the French intervention from 1635 to 1648 should be the longest ongoing war in my opinion.
And Imdb lists only 10 titles for the corresponding tag.

[peregrine_crow]

I was wondering why the Thirty Year's War wasn't mentioned within the What-If. If not the conflict itself, at least the French intervention from 1635 to 1648 should be the longest ongoing war in my opinion.
And Imdb lists only 10 titles for the corresponding tag.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about history, but 30 years doesn't sound like a good candidate for longest war when both the Eighty Years' War and the Hundred Years' war are things. It might be that both of those had periods without fighting though.

Now I wonder what war had the lowest film time/actual time ratio. IMDB shows 80 titles for the Hundred Years' war which (if both of these wars were accurately named, which I know they aren't) means it has a higher ratio than the Thirty Year's War. The Eighty Years' War does not have an IMDB tag, but I might be overly literally translating the name from Dutch.

[january1may]

I'll ignore the Anglo-Zanzibar war for a while (it's probably the actualy winner simply because it's so ridiculously short) and consider what a theoretical war most likely to win this record (or at least second place after the Anglo-Zanzibarese) would be like:

1) it has to be short enough to be in the top several on that alone (ideally shorter than the Six-Day War);
2) it has to be unusual and unexpected enough to get lots of surprised news reports, lots of controversy surrounding these reports, and ideally also some controversy about that controversy;
and 3) it has to be recent enough that the Internet is involved, and that video cameras are very common - at least as opposed to their relative rarity in 1971 and earlier.

I'm talking, of course, about the Russo-Georgian war.


Seriously, that's actually a pretty strong contender. Had Randall continued to use Wikipedia for his sources, he would've probably been forced to admit that this was the record - there are 3 movies about the war listed in the Wikipedia article, all pretty long; my calculations give a ratio of 1:21 (films to war), which is more than can be said about WWII (using, again, Wikipedia only).
And if we include all the official news footage (which, I might add, is much more available than that of the 1970s and 1940s, and in video form naturally also much more common), this one might well have more than a 1:1 ratio of films to war (and beat even the Zanzibarese that way).


On lowest ratio, I suspect the Montenegro-Japanese war (1904-2006). The 335 years' war between Netherlands and Scilly could also take this place, but it's both more famous (and thus more likely to have films about it) and a lot less likely to actually count as a war (the other one at least saw some fighting, under the command of the Montenegrin general Jovan Lipovac).

[Envelope Generator]

Quicksand enthusiasts! I'm hoping Randall has a fractal map of human subcultures in the works.

[strix99]

Some quick back of the envelope math indicates that the TV series MASH accounts for about 10% of the length of the Korean war, so it may be able to do better than 7:1, although there will obviously be less films about it.

[mathmannix]

Seventy-seven movies are tagger world-war-three. So that's at least a good three days of footage about a war, that lasted zero seconds (so far).

Hmmm, but none tagged World War Four. That's some short-sightedness, that is.

[Spoe]

How about the 1969 Football War between Honduras and El Salvador. About 100 hours long. Only need about 14 hours 20 minutes of film to have a higher film:war ratio than WWII.

And what if we count all the Hitler documentaries the History Channel used to show?

[mathmannix]

Some quick back of the envelope math indicates that the TV series MASH accounts for about 10% of the length of the Korean war, so it may be able to do better than 7:1, although there will obviously be less films about it.

M*A*S*H:
Film, 116 minutes.
TV series, 256 episodes totalling 6,695 minutes.

Other films: IMDB lists 258 titles tagged "Korean War", including both the MASH film and TV series. If the other 256 have an average of 95 minutes, then that's an additional 24,320 minutes. We're up to around 31,131 minutes.

The actual war lasted - well, technically it's still going on, but for all practical purposes, it lasted from from 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953. That's 1128 days, or 1,624,320 minutes, give or take. We have approximately a 1:52 ratio.

(Edited once I got IMDB's keyword search to work; I think maybe a lot of people had been trying a search on "korean-war".)

[rmsgrey]

Seventy-seven movies are tagger world-war-three. So that's at least a good three days of footage about a war, that lasted zero seconds (so far).

Hmmm, but none tagged World War Four. That's some short-sightedness, that is.

Nah, after number 3 gets poor viewing figures, the fourth one will be a reboot or an alternate universe prequel or something, and have a new number sequence, or a catchy subtitle, or something.

[cellocgw]

I so hope this isn't the real reason behind Hitler dragging out the war, refusing to surrender.

Oh, wait: what if we include all the y**t*b* shorts redubbing "Hitler Finds Out..." ?

[cellocgw]

Seventy-seven movies are tagger world-war-three. So that's at least a good three days of footage about a war, that lasted zero seconds (so far).

... that you know of

[Various Varieties]

'grave' 'graveyard' 'possible victim of quicksand'

'shirt-wearing corpse'

Or 'shirt, wearing corpse'.

Maybe even 'shirt wearing-corpse'?

Spoiler:

... On second thoughts, depending on how the IMDb keywords system handles hyphens and other punctuation, I suppose all those versions would point to exactly the same keyword.

[peregrine_crow]

Seventy-seven movies are tagger world-war-three. So that's at least a good three days of footage about a war, that lasted zero seconds (so far).

Actually, I think most of those are about different (hypothetical) wars that all happened to be called world war three. I wonder what fictional war has the most movie-time attributed to it?

Lord of the Rings has the war between Gondor and Mordor which lasted for all three movies, so that's at least 10 hours, but series have a serious advantage over movies here. In Game of Thrones we have

Spoiler:

the war of the 5 kings, which arguably started with Ned's beheading and is still ongoing. Which means that as of last Sunday there are 30 episodes of at least 50 minutes covering it

for a total of about 25 hours.


Edit: While writing that, I thought of something else. If we count wars on a noun as actual wars (which we shouldn't btw) then the war on terror will be a pretty strong contender. IMDb has slightly over 1000 title tagged terrorist and another 1000 tagged terrorism (though a cursory scan through the result shows a lot of dubious hits and obviously there is a lot of overlap). You can argue a bit about when the war on terror actually started and whether it has ended yet, but I doubt it lasted less than WW2's 6 years, so never mind .

[semioldguy]

So from this I have wasted my own time playing a game of trying to narrow down to one specific movie which I think of at the outset by picking increasing numbers of tags. In doing so I believe the plot tags to be rather unreliable.

For instance, one of the more surprising results is the movie Europa Report, summarized in a sentence on imdb as "An international crew of astronauts undertakes a privately funded mission to search for life on Jupiter's fourth largest moon" yet it doesn't even have the plot keyword tag: mission. This, among other movies about rebellions that don't have a "rebel" tag or movies with the main character as a convict that don't have a "convict" tag, all top-5000 movies, makes me think the tags on imdb are not very reliable.

[CharonPDX]

What's frightening about the Anglo-Zanziabar War to me is that it took me longer to read the Wikipedia article about it than the war itself took to fight.

(Admittedly, I got interrupted a couple times, so the article took longer to read than it should have.)

[mathmannix]

Does anybody else think that ANGLO-ZANZIBAR WAR sounds like a one-volume encyclopedia of wars?

I mean, sure, Anglo-Zulu would be better...

[solacelost]

http://www.imdb.com/keyword/covered-in- ... le-nudity/

Machete is now my favorite movie.

[SuperSteve]

Per Wikipedia: "Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991 – 28 February 1991) was a war waged by coalition forces from 34 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait."

That's just six weeks.

If we count television broadcasts as movies, then it beat the WWII record almost from the start:

At first, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN were each showing war news all day, without even breaking for commercials.

After just two days of war, the four networks had shown a combined total of more than six days of war coverage.

Six days:six weeks is a 1:7 ratio.

[willpellmn]

I would almost certainly watch Michael Bay's Sister Act 3: Mother Superior Firepower.

More seriously (though not by much), I seriously question how you can count the Anglo-Zanzibar conflict as a "war" if it lasted less than an hour. That sounds much more like a "battle" to me.
EDIT - Wikipedia makes it clear that it was a war, but appears to indicate that it lasted much longer than 38 hours, though admittedly I only read a few choice paragraphs and not very attentively that. But it seems as though confining it to such a short time means drastically constraining the definition of what counts as "the war" and what's "buildup to" or "aftermath of"; even if the combat was that short, the conflict lasted for months if not years.

[henrypijames]

The Chinese Anti-Japanese war, which is part of the WWII, is THE major topic of contemporary Chinese television (not least because it's one of the safest topics politically). Several TV series are produced every year, each running several dozen hours. That's several hundred hours of TV each year, for ten to twenty years (obviously, there has been movies and TV series about the Anti-Japanese War ever since the People's Republic of China started producing movies and TV series, but there wasn't this mass amount of production until recent years).

All in all, I would estimate the total runtime of entertainment film (excluding documentary, that is) produced in mainland China about the Anti-Japanese War to be over 10,000 hours. I don't have sourced to backup this estimate, but someone should definitely look into it.

[Moose Anus]

I seriously question how you can count the Anglo-Zanzibar conflict as a "war" if it lasted less than an hour. That sounds much more like a "battle" to me.
EDIT - Wikipedia makes it clear that it was a war, but appears to indicate that it lasted much longer than 38 hours, though admittedly I only read a few choice paragraphs and not very attentively that. But it seems as though confining it to such a short time means drastically constraining the definition of what counts as "the war" and what's "buildup to" or "aftermath of"; even if the combat was that short, the conflict lasted for months if not years.

war
noun
°A conflict involving the organized use of arms and physical force between countries or other large-scale armed groups. The warring parties hold territory, which they can win or lose; and each has a leading person or organization which can surrender, or collapse, thus ending the war.
°By extension, any conflict, or anything resembling a conflict.
verb
°To engage in conflict with someone or something.

The battle itself fits this definition of war.

[Plasma_Wolf]

One follow-up question would be to find out which battle has the largest Film time: Battle time ratio. The best contender would be the decisive battle in the Kettle War. The conflict took several months, but it's only shot was fired from a Dutch Ship to a ship of the Habsburg Monarchy, that hit a soup kettle and as a result, the crew promptly surrendered. The rest was just a diplomatic conflict that lasted for some months.

A great and heroic battle could be filmed, with a chef, cannonball and soup kettle would be the three main roles to cast.

[brenok]

One follow-up question would be to find out which battle has the largest Film time: Battle time ratio. The best contender would be the decisive battle in the Kettle War. The conflict took several months, but it's only shot was fired from a Dutch Ship to a ship of the Habsburg Monarchy, that hit a soup kettle and as a result, the crew promptly surrendered. The rest was just a diplomatic conflict that lasted for some months.

A great and heroic battle could be filmed, with a chef, cannonball and soup kettle would be the three main roles to cast.

I like the casualties section on Wikipedia - "Habsburg Monarchy: 1 soup kettle (And presumably all the soup held within)"

[mathmannix]

One follow-up question would be to find out which battle has the largest Film time: Battle time ratio. The best contender would be the decisive battle in the Kettle War. The conflict took several months, but it's only shot was fired from a Dutch Ship to a ship of the Habsburg Monarchy, that hit a soup kettle and as a result, the crew promptly surrendered. The rest was just a diplomatic conflict that lasted for some months.

A great and heroic battle could be filmed, with a chef, cannonball and soup kettle would be the three main roles to cast.

I like the casualties section on Wikipedia - "Habsburg Monarchy: 1 soup kettle (And presumably all the soup held within)"

Yeah, I like that too, but I bet it doesn't survive long. Too tongue-in-cheek for Wikipedia's Official Rules or whatever.

[Mikeski]

I like the casualties section on Wikipedia - "Habsburg Monarchy: 1 soup kettle (And presumably all the soup held within)"

Yeah, I like that too, but I bet it doesn't survive long. Too tongue-in-cheek for Wikipedia's Official Rules or whatever.

...all the soup held within)^{[citation needed]}

[rmsgrey]

I like the casualties section on Wikipedia - "Habsburg Monarchy: 1 soup kettle (And presumably all the soup held within)"

Yeah, I like that too, but I bet it doesn't survive long. Too tongue-in-cheek for Wikipedia's Official Rules or whatever.

...all the soup held within)^{[citation needed]}

Nah, it'd be tagged as Original Research

[Kaiman]

The real question is what count as a "war movie". Does it just have to be set during the war? Actually involve something about the war in the plot (i.e. Casablanca)? Or does it have to include actually fighting, or even be *about* the actual fighting. And if it has to be about the actual war, what about something like Life Is Beautiful which involves the concentration camps, which were part of the Nazi Regime but not technically the war since the ones in that movie aren't POW camps?

[Steve the Pocket]

On the subject of the quicksand thing, I got to roughly the halfway point in that article when it dawned on me that (A) the documented community of obsessives cataloging and sharing clips of quicksand scenes in movies isn't as ridiculous as Slate writing such a dry article on the subject of the rise and fall of the quicksand trope in media that makes TV Tropes look like Wikipedia, and (B) holy shit I am only halfway through this thing are you kidding me even I have better things to waste my evening on than finishing this.

[azule]

I skimmed this thread (but not previous WI threads) and didn't see it mentioned if this is any longer a What If. It sounds like a What Is, where statistics are presented as they exist...not a what would happen if...

Am I wrong? Did this start with an earlier What If? Does it matter? Should the name be changed?