The Hindenburg

I remember seeing it as a child (or parts of it.)

I was expecting another Poseidon Adventure and this wasn't it.

I'll have to look at it now as an adult.

As a child, I appreciated the ending that showed who survived and who perished, and that they included the Dalmatian in the Survived pile.

They added the dog last. Tap the photo and check the lower right corner.

It's an entertaining little drama with a helluva finish and a great cast.

Uh, I hate to break it to you R2 but the dog didn't survive in real life.

R3, there were two dogs and neither survived. What’s important is that my nine-year-old self was assured that the Dalmatian in the movie did survive.

I wasn’t really spellbound by the movie, however. As r1 pointed out, it was no Poseidon Adventure.

Side note: I teach elementary school, and one day I introduced the concept of zeppelins to the class and discussed the Hindenburg, mostly the real one with a brief mention of the film. I was unprepared for the level of enthusiasm from some of the vehicle-obsessed boys for the concept of a zeppelin (it wasn’t a blimp!) and even more so by the idea of said Zeppelin exploding.

I ended up showing a clip of the film’s conclusion to the most eager fans of airships and airship catastrophes. It was a hit.

I saw it in the theater when it was first released. Yes I'm old. I went to film school with a girl that interned on the set. She said that Robert Wise was a wonderful man. He took his time to explain everything that was going on. I've seen it a million times, a fun and exciting movie.

My late great-aunt witnessed the actual event when she was eleven, while visiting friends in Lakehurst. She was standing on a hill watching the airship arrive when it exploded into a fireball and crashed. Though she wasn’t close enough to see the victims dying, she said the entire group on the hill was traumatized by what they saw.

Only a few relatively short portions of the movie are black & white.

Gene Shalit (look it up) reduced his written review to two words: Crash Trash.

I'm fascinated by the Hindenburg. For its time, it was futuristic luxury travel. It made many successful voyages before the crash.

Watch from 2:20

I thought it was a snooze and really pushing it as a "disaster" movie. But at present I *am* emulating Miss Anne Bancroft to get through life right now - world weary and doped up.

Weren’t there two other blimp disaster movies that competed with Hindenburg? One involved the Super Bowl.

R7 OP Here...yup. You are correct..I misremembered...R11...Black Friday, maybe?

Oh right, r11, Black Sunday.

I saw The Hindenburg at this theatre. As well as Towering Inferno and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein in 3D.

The handful of good disaster movies of this era (The Poseidon Adventure being the best among them) gave you movie stars and veteran character actors playing an engaging set of archetypes. They created drama out of how these characters responded to disaster and how they attempted to survive. The ship capsizing or the fire igniting is the inciting incident, not the climax.

The Hindenburg never really figures out how to create drama from a disaster that lasted all of 37 seconds. People survived because they timed their jump to the ground just right or they died because they didn't. That's not interesting - it's just chaotic. That "DIED, SURVIVED, DIED, DIED, SURVIVED" roll call at the end is a hilarious admission of failure.

I like Gig Young as a drunk, though. True method acting there.

[quote]at present I *am* emulating Miss Anne Bancroft to get through life right now - world weary and doped up.

Oh, the humanity!

I saw this in a theater when I was young and loved it - way more than the other "disaster" movies of that time.

I think it had to do with the fact that The Hindenburg wasn't so much a disaster movie but more of a sabotage movie instead.

I like it because it had great actors and it's the rare disaster film that avoids being campy or overly soapy.

Yeah, r17....it really is more of an old school sabotage thriller movie.

Robert Wise was an excellent filmmaker. The Hindenburg is beautifully shot, has a wonderful music score, great costumes, etc, with a very solid cast. As a drama it works, leisurely, but it came out during the disaster movie craze, and it really missed the mark. As someone mentioned before, the actual disaster itself only lasted 37 seconds. I was in junior high when the movie came out and I wrote Universal Studios asking them if they could send me any information about the movie. They sent me a bunch of stills and press releases. I still have everything they sent.

R6- John Boy 👦 was traumatized when he was visiting Lakehurst New Jersey from Walton’s Mountain .

The only blimp disaster was how big my daughter got. She was a fat mess!

Chrissy Metz in a jetpack plays the Hindenburg in the remake.

Where's Ambassadress Cindy?

It seems to have been not so much a disaster movie as a movie that is a disaster

As disaster movies go, "The Hindenburg" is so brainless and so peculiarly optimistic that it could have been the work of Ross Hunter, but wasn't. It is pricelessly funny at the wrong moments. It confirms portentousness as school of cinematic art. It has George C. Scott, as a good German, saying through a mostly clenched jaw not long after the take-off, "I have an uneasy sense of disaster."- Vincent Canby NYTimes

Home Box Office? Did you see the actual Hindenburg, OP?

Get with the times, Grandpa at r25.

Anne Bancroft was the best thing in this tedious film. A true diva performance.

I saw it the week it opened. It stars some of my least favorite actors (Burgess Meredith, Robert Clary, Rene Auberjonois) but I really liked the way they did the ending in pieces......

R25 No, Cunty...but that was a lame attempt at humor. Try again.

For the dog lovers here on DL. A website advises if any pets are injured or harmed in the film or tv show. doesthedogdie dot com

I saw this on 4th of July weekend in 1975 with my family on a double feature movie day.

We started with "Jaws," which we all loved, then drove up the street and saw "The Hindbenburg."

To say it was a let down after seeing "Jaws" would be an understatement. I was so bored that I think I might have fallen asleep.

The sound design was notoriously problematic - the constant drone of the Hindenburg was too loud and just sounded like prolonged farting in some cinemas.

Also featuring "ex gay" cult member William Atherton

You mean Anne Bancroft who was married to Mel Brooks? That Anne Bancroft?

R20, you beat me to it!

As a kid I thought that episode of The Waltons seemed so raw and real — made a real impression on me. I rewatched it years ago as an adult and realized how cheesy the footage really was.

Since the total time it took for the HINDENBURG to get destroyed was about half a minute, it was difficult for the filmmakers to show how people escaped or died. It didn’t make sense to me.

I was 12 when I saw it. Even at 12 I could understand that in film, time isn't necessarily linear. You can show scenes that would all be happening simultaneously. It's not really that complex but I guess it can be hard for super literal people.