Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow ! ! !

WOW! What a GREAT movie! This thing was a big love letter to the action of the sci fi and adventure serials of the 30s and 40s. I found myself excited through the whole thing, wondering ‘how are the going to get out of this’ and just wound up to see what was coming around each corner. Now THAT is what a movie is supposed to do to you.

It also didn’t hurt that I got a few of the homages and references that stood out to me:

The “Carriers” are a 30s, prop driven version of the Heli-Carrier from Nick Fury,
Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The robots were from the AWESOME “Mechanical Monsters,” a Superman Cartoon of the 40s by Max Fleischer.

1138 pops up as an address and is a reference to THX 1138, George Lucas’
1st movie.

A “co-ordinance” given was a (local) zip code for one of the locations where shooting was done.

Joe Sullivan’s plane (a souped up P-40) was one of the “Flying Tigers” that fought the Japanese in Manchuria prior to WW2 but not actually as U.S. warplanes.

In the Newspaper Headline Montage you can see the outline of Godzilla in the Tokyo paper.

The Empire State Building/zeppelin docking in the beginning was an homage to reality and King Kong (1933). The movie shows zeppelin moorings in the last scene. Originally the building’s top spire was actually designed to allow zeppelins to dock and unload their passengers. Besides being an utterly terrifying idea, it
was completely impossible to do and thus abandoned.

The Electrical Security Device at Totenkopf’s door was an actual thing called a ‘Tesla Coil’ designed by Nikola Tesla. Tesla actually worked to create an electrical ‘Death Ray’ for the U.S. Government before WW1, but was unsuccessful...so we hear.

Things that were neat but I had NO IDEA about until later:

The villan’s name is Dr. Totenkopf, which roughly translates to DeathHead (thanks La Federala).

Dr. Totenkopf is played by Sir Lawrence Olivier, who died in 1989. He was CGI’d from archive footage.

The Tree bridge is a reference to King Kong (1933).

When Polly is on the phone w/ her editor as the robots attack, the words she uses to describe their approach are the same lines used by a reporter character in Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds” broadcast of 1938.