Fat Man or Little Boy?
– the briefest chunk of stock footage depicts a gray trusswork gantry with workers servicing a squat white missile. Knowledgeable enthusiasts will recognize that old Z-movie standby, the ever-popular V-2. The famous “vengeance weapon” was diverted to the U. S. after WW2 to provide yeoman service to the fledgling American space program. The one in this excerpt, identified by tailfin number TF-5, was launched on September 19, 1952 from the White Sands Missile Range on an atmospheric research mission. While undistorted pictures typically show a fairly sleek appearance for the German missile, here it looks oddly short and fat: likely we are seeing the effects of grafting some non-anamorphic footage into a widescreen movie. 2. Got The World On My Shoulders – the much longer stock sequences show a gleaming silvery missile poised freestanding on its launch pad, followed by shots of engine ignition, and then liftoff. Again fans will have no difficulty identifying an early version of the aptly-