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YMMV / The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

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  • Adaptation Displacement: Very few people now remember the original Colonel Blimp, a pugnacious, reactionary caricature of a retired military officer in a popular newspaper cartoon of the time. Clive resembles him physically (pot belly and distinctive mustache) but is otherwise unrelated.
    • Michael Powell said that the film was never really about the Blimp cartoons. The original idea came when (then) editor David Lean removed a scene from One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, about a conversation an Old Soldier who tells a young man that he doesn't know what it means to be old. While Lean removed the scene because it didn't fit the film, he did like it and told Powell that he should make a movie around that theme. Blimp was more a general metaphor for Good Is Old-Fashioned then anything else.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Spud boasts that should he live to see 1983, he will at least be an old gentleman. His actor, James McKechnie, didn't get to be that old, dying in 1964 at fifty-three.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Although uncredited, a very young Patrick Macnee can be briefly seen near the beginning of the film as one of the British soldiers who abduct Clive Candy from the Turkish bath and bundle him into the back of the army truck whilst Candy protests that "The war games haven't started yet". Macnee's distinctive voice also says a couple of words in this scene which helps identify him. He would have been approximately 21 years old when this scene was filmed.
  • Values Dissonance: The sequence where time passes between Candy's return from Germany and WWI is shown by him filling the walls of his aunt's empty house with many prize animal heads. At the time, not so much a big deal. But now? A number of those animals are threatened or outright endangered thanks to hunters like Candy. The sound effects don't help.

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