Valkyrie

The accuracy, he's a big guy that's going to, you can still add a little bit of weight, he's going to get stronger.

His knowledge of the game is exceptional, and that kind of shows up when you watch him on film.

It would not surprise me as well, and then Matthew Stafford as well, the quarterback for Georgia.

Detroit's going to need a player at that position, so one of those two would definitely be okay.

He's trying like lions for lambs.

He's trying Valkyrie, which also has some action.

But then at some point he's like, I mean, I don't know.

I've never interviewed the man.

Bryan Cantante.

He has directed X-Men, X2, Superman Returns, Valkyrie, um, Bohemian Rhapsody, uh, the one about Queen, and, well, many, many other amazing movies.

And last but not least, this guy was born in nineteen forty-eight.

He was awesome in Three's Company.

Yeah.

Well, is, uh, does any of it have to do with the story of, um, Claus von Stauffenberg, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the guy that Tom Cruise played in the movie Valkyrie?

Yeah.

And that was a, uh, 'cause he was, he was, his, his tenure in the German military predated, uh, predated Hitler's rise, right? And as, uh, that's part of the myth, right, that's a lot of those guys were proud German military men that had nothing to do with the Nazis, and then the Nazis came in, so they got folded in, but they weren't Nazis.

Gross stuff.

Also maybe has a thing for Nazis because he made Valkyrie too with Tom Cruise, which is not a bad movie, but he jumped back into the Nazi pool as well.

Yeah.

All right, Manster, let's go over for a minute and talk about the visit with the guidance counselor because Todd's grades are starting to slip because he's balls deep in Nazism.

With that all said, let's just talk about it from the start.

2008's film Valkyrie.

The cultural touchstone, I think, for most people and their knowledge of the bomb plot of July 1944.

It's a damn good film.

And instead we got an action hero, which is not really what he was.

I mean, that's part, I think was part of the problem.

But generally, if that's the only thing you're going to know about Operation Valkyrie and Klaus von Stauffenberg, then, you know, it's fine.

Go for your life.

Mayday pays homage to Top Gun in various ways, from how Troy and other pilots are treated as heroes in the USA to Nick quoting lines from the 1980s classic After Many Viewings of his bootleg VHS copy.

Brandt, age 65, who co-starred with Cruise, and the 2008 World War II thriller, Valkyrie, has fond memories of seeing Top Gun for the first time as well.

It seemed to me the epitome of movies, he recalls.

People in Europe would go, why do you call it a movie? It's a piece of cinema.

He goes, obviously, just straight up Tom Cunn.

I'm just going to hang off the side of this plane and I'm going to show you that I did it for real.

And Bran has a fun story about how Cruise freaked out everyone by embracing his inner maverick and flying a plane a little too close to a catering tent on the set of Valkyrie.

He buzzed the tower, and we were just having lunch in a quiet airfield in Germany, Bran says.

I mean, all of these things.

So I think the films, interestingly, I think the operations which might have changed the course of World War II, which have been tackled in films, are things like, to go back to our friend Tom Cruise, The Valkyrie movie.

And I think, you know, there is a counterfactual way in which the war turns out differently if Hitler is killed in 43.

And, you know, there is a more realistic German leadership takes over.

And we should be clear that, you know, the Valkyrie lot were very conservative Prussian army officers.

They weren't sort of, you know, cuddly liberal Democrats.

And I don't think the Germany they wanted, they'd been allowed to have.