Trivia / The Winds of War/War and Remembrance

• Acclaimed Flop: The miniseries adaptation of War and Remembrance was critically acclaimed and won the Emmy Award for best miniseries, but its release was bungled due to the 1988 WGA strike, and so it wound up an expensive flop for ABC and a...
• Genre-Killer: For the "prestige" Mini Series of The '70s and The '80s. The genre was already reeling with the failure of Amerika the prior year, but War and Remembrance finished the job, and for many years after miniseries were associated with cheap ratings stunts.
• Irony as She Is Cast: In War and Remembrance, Hitler is played by Steven Berkoff, a British Jew.^note In Winds of War, Hitler is played by the non-Jewish German actor Günter Meisner, who portrayed Hitler several times during his career. Oddly, though, of the two actors it is Berkoff who has the closer physical resemblance to Hitler.
• The Other Darrin: Several roles were recast between the two miniseries, often with bigger names like John Gielgud, Jane Seymour, and Robert Morley.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Herman Wouk originally planned to write only a novel about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In trying to provide background for that battle, he kept adding more and more material until he ended up having to write the entire history of the war.
  • Von Roon's original last name was "Goethe," which Wouk abandoned when a German pointed out it would be the equivalent of calling an English General "Shakespeare."

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