TV/Movies Megathread

[mongers]

'Tomorrowland', I liked it, a lot. 

[Archy]

'Tomorrowland', I liked it, a lot. 

Yeah I know the festival is worldwide reknown. I never went though not my kind of music.

[jimmy olsen]

Well, that primarily worked because the Japanese didn't know how to manufacture the guns. Also, muskets and arquebuses weren't quite as dominant as modern firearms.

They knew how to make them.

[Syt]

I suggest entering:

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away

into Google.

[Eddie Teach]

Well, that primarily worked because the Japanese didn't know how to manufacture the guns. Also, muskets and arquebuses weren't quite as dominant as modern firearms.

They knew how to make them.

OK. Few enough did that the shogun could bottle it up, more or less.

[jimmy olsen]

They made hundred of thousands.

[celedhring]

One of my former classmates at Columbia is one of the writers of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rgzmQ_vpSo

She also wrote several Flash eps. I didn't like Flash, but I'm glad she's doing well.

[Sophie Scholl]

I'm enjoying all of the CW's DC shows so far.  I'm looking forward to Legends.

[Liep]

That looks about as bad as all the other superhero series/movies*.

* Some notable exceptions.

[Drakken]

I meant the Tokugawa-era gun control - not present day.  The Tokugawa Shogunate won the wars of the 16th-17th centuries with armies armed largely with guns

The Tokugawa shogunate won because Kobayakawa Hideaki and his 15,000 soldiers, holding the higher ground on Mount Matsuo and Ishida Mitsunari's right flank, changed sides and rolled down into Otani Yoshitsugu's flank at Sekigahara, with swords and spears.

Unless you are thinking about Nagashino and the image of Takeda cavalrymen and infantry being mowed down by rolling volleys like it was the Somme. This is a myth. At most the Oda-Tokugawa had 3,000 gunners (and even that number is under question), protected behind fences and moats aiming to break and funnel advances, but they still needed to be supported by spears. The use of the guns at Nagashino was to keep a rotating fire to break the cohesion of advancing Takeda units, not to mow them down with volleys like machine-gunners. The battle lasted several hours, and Takeda numerical inferiority, bad intelligence, and terrain perpared to counter charges played as much (if not more) in the defeat than gun volleys.

Even the reality of the 'famed' Takeda cavalry is also contested. We now know that horses bred and used during the Sengoku era were in fact too small to support fully-armored humans during charge; they were really oversized ponies. Theory is that cavalry was used more as dragoons than shock units.

then deliberately got rid of them and had them mostly outlawed (except for a small number of hunting pieces)

The sword hunt (and the four-class hierarchy that came with it) was proclaimed under Hideyoshi's rule way before Sekigahara. It was the social basis of the bakuhan system that Ieyasu founded his shogunate on, but that didn't in itself ban guns from being used in warfare. It banned peasants (and priests) from being armed for war, and from being warriors altogether. Hence why no more guns for either of them.

In fact, the biggest contribution from Hideyoshi's sword hunt was not disarming the peasantry and closing next-to-all chances of social mobility, but pulling the samurai off their land properties (and local power bases) and cantoning them into castle towns where they were retributed in stipends based not on their land's rice output but estimations of the total economic yield of their assigned fiefs (in koku).

and reintroduced the samurai sword as the main weapon (commoners were also forbidden swords). 

The sword never stopped been the main weapon of a samurai. Not before, not during, not after. The gun never was the main weapon of the samurai, shooting guns was left to year-round paid and trained ashigaru. Those either had to choose between returning as peasants and be disarmed, or becoming bottom-feeder samurai with (very low) stipends.

Most samurai after the immediate generations who had experience fighting either in the late Azuchi-Momoyama era or the war in Korea barely knew how to use a sword, let alone a gun. Many of them didn't even know how to fight with a sword at all. They were bureaucrats, courtiers, magistrates, and servants wearing swords as indicator of social status, not unlike the noblesse d'épée of the French Ancien régime.

In short, men wielding swords enforced gun a gun ban ... but as far as I know, that is the only case.

This is all so wrong.

The Edo bakufu never gave up the gun. That assertion is pseudohistory, based on a single book, published 35 years ago by a romantic Westerner English teacher, with no basis in fact nor credible Japanese sources (since he couldn't read them anyway) to create a narrative frame through which we could "give up the nuke" like the Japanese "gave up the gun".

http://www.sengokufieldmanual.com/2013/02/giving-up-myths-part-i.html

http://www.sengokufieldmanual.com/2013/02/giving-up-myths-part-ii.html

I'll just quote this nugget :

It would be easy to ignore it, as most of the Japanese history community has done. In Japan, for instance, the Japanese edition of the book was published with a disclaimer in it, stating that the book was "not based on historical events." The book is an anti-nuclear weapons manifesto, masquerading as a history book. The author himself admits he isn't an expert on Japanese history, and can't even read Japanese. And yet, somehow, people not only read this, but I've seen academic presentations where allegedly intelligent individuals are citing his book as a source in their research. This should not be, yet it is.

For various reasons, both political, military, and social, gun production was limited and was severely controled (because, obviously, no more war and no willingness to arm potential rebels with rifles), but stockpiles of both guns and gunpowder were kept, maintained, and stored in armories (and yes, even in tozama daimyo armories, especially the Shimazu who were the first to enter in contact with western guns in 1543).

Japanese were no fools; they knew the Russians and the Dutch (and by extension Westerners like the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the English) all had guns, and lots of guns at that. They also knew that guns were deadly used in mass volleys. While they didn't need guns to wildly circulate, since people who weren't samurai retainers had no business owning a gun or a sword or a spear or a bow anyway, they needed to defend themselves against both foreign and internal threats, so they kept stockpiles of guns in reserve.

What they ignored is the extent and the pace firearms would suddenly improve in the West after the 19th century, and so they found themselves outgunned both quantitatively and qualitatively when the Black Ships came knocking on their door.

[Drakken]

Well, that primarily worked because the Japanese didn't know how to manufacture the guns.

Bullshit. In short order after 1543 they had reverse-engineered those they had seized and within a few years a profitable network of factories was established to manufacture them, most notably in Sakai. A major part of the guns Nobunaga and others used were "made in Japan".

Japanese never forgot how to build muskets. That idea in itself is nonsensical. It's like saying that we Westerners have "forgotten" how to build arbaletes and catapults, or that if we banned nuclear weapons we would forget out to build nukes. Factories were simply closed due to lack of demand with warfare being over, except a few kept under bakufu control. They kept themselves updated with scientific advances through yearly contacts and exchanges with Dutch traders stationed at Dejima.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangaku

[FunkMonk]

Okay, finished the Man in the High Castle.  Major weakness is that three "main characters" who part of a love triangle are not very interesting, and the gal is particularly dimwitted.  The first half of the episodes drag a little bit, and a lot of the plot doesn't go anywhere.  It really picks up toward the end.

That pretty much agrees with my analysis...I thought the "villains" were the most interesting characters (and superior actors)...including Tagomi.  The "heroes" were pretty dull...and completely agree on the girl.

Most interesting character was Japanese secret police man.  On the rare occasions we see actual members of the resistance they are interesting.  Juliana is the least interesting, and least sympathetic character.  And this is a show with Hitler in it.

It's funny, because Hitler... [spoiler]is actually portrayed as being somewhat reasonable...and implies that a potential Heydrich or Goebbels succession would be far worse...i.e. nuclear war.[/spoiler]

The unique thing about this show is that by the end [spoiler]I'm actually rooting for Hitler and Obergruppenfuhrer Smith. [/spoiler] 

I agree that the bad guys in the show are the most interesting, which makes a certain amount of sense given that they have the most to lose.

[dps]

At most the Oda-Tokugawa had 3,000 gunners (and even that number is under question), protected behind fences and moats aiming to break and funnel advances, but they still needed to be supported by spears.

Western infantry tactics went through that stage, too.  The Spanish tercio and similar formations started out as a way to allow pikemen to protect the gunners.  I don't know the details off the top of my head, but IIRC, initially, there were relatively few gunners being protected by a large number of pikemen, and over time the ratio of firearms to pikes steadily went up.

[celedhring]

That looks about as bad as all the other superhero series/movies*.

* Some notable exceptions.

I liked the first two seasons of Arrow, the second one in particular. It had a weird mix of terrible things and great things in it. It became lamer in the third.

[jimmy olsen]

The man is a genius