After writing about B-17s and the 1990 “Memphis Belle” film the other day, I looked at this video once more, remembering that my takeoff from the National Warplane Museum grass strip featured the same wide leftward swing of the B-17’s tail into the wind that’s in the sequence starting at 2:28 – rather exciting when you’re inside the aircraft:

I lamented that the DVD I have, from the following year, is in that old “widescreen, but not – ha ha!” format, where there’s black stripes not only top and bottom but left and right, just as you see when you play the above, so the actual resolution of the video is horribly limited, to put it mildly – maybe one-quarter of full HD quality. It doesn’t look very good on my 42″ set, where it’s reminiscent of those first postage-stamp videos Windows 3.1 could play. But then I noticed in the YouTube recommended video list Memphis Belle – Take Off – Available May 6, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that the film was released on Blu-ray just a few months ago. This weekend, I’ll be able to watch it properly for the first time since I saw it in the cinema.