Let’s try this again! We’re going over the 1984 classic “Red Dawn” and talking about some of my favorite moments, and some background on the guns used.
(Sorry for the re-upload, we had a problem with RU-vid suppressing us the first time) Thanks for watching guys! This is obviously one of my favorite movies. If you want, I will try my best to watch the 2012 remake....but only because I love you.
Fun fact: During filming, some paratroopers were blown a mile off course. Dressed as Russians. Holding AK's. One actor had to convince the population he wasn't an actual soldier.
In today's world they'd be swarmed by Che Guevara shirt wearing shitheads offering them a mocha latte and a ride to every local conservative home and business they know of.
My favorite scene is when they're panning across the town. Showing the devastation after the initial invasion. They pan down the backside of a vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads, "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." They keep panning down until you see a gun, in the hands of a dead civilian. Just the gun and hand in shot. Then a military boot comes up and steps on the hand. They then pry the gun out of the dead hand. It was so bleak, I loved it.
I liked the new one better, sure the story is pure "#¤t, but it got some nice action and pew pew scenes but that north korea would be able to take out all of USA digital and analog weapon system with a new kind of EMP is just so dumb....and then did they forget about the 2nd amendment and how many citizens in the USA are armed? even if north korea send its fantasy number of ten million strong army, how would so few hold all of USA??? not to mention all soldiers of different branches. All basic weapons were unaffected by the "emp" so all small arms were oki, tanks and vehicles might be down in this scenario, but it is still 10 000 000 to hold 300 000 000+ people......Had this been ONE town I would have liked it more, maybe north korea managed to hit one smaller town and hold it, lock it so no one can get in or out and then use the citizens as hostages while negotiating something, but nooooooooooooo, it was that north korea invaded ALL of USA and took it over lol!! That was so dumb, I think that a liberal wrote that ¤#¤# :P
@@michaelr.1709 ya know how Red Dawn is about killing commies, well in the remake China was the main bad guy, the thing is that during production the CCP told the filmmakers that the film will be banned in China for making the CCP look bad, so halfway through they changed the symbols from the CCP to North Korean DPRK symbols
"Unless you're homeschooled." I laughed out loud. Most homeschoolers I know would be picking off the Commies from the tree line. "Time for a field trip, kids."
6:16 Fun fact: In Sweden during the cold war only local police districts where allowed to keep records of private citizens that owned guns and in the event of a military attack the police had standing orders to burn those records at once.
Considering how crazy leftist the country has turned, I wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal for the police to even touch those records, much less destroy them...
3:29 "Wolverines beat the Grizzlies." poster in the background. Its kinda symbolic ain't it? The "Wolverines" represent the kids in this movie who become American guerilla freedom fighters. The "Grizzlies" which represents the Russian Bear. So in essence its the Wolverines vs the Bear. I've seen this movie so many times over the years. Always cool to notice stuff like this.
That's one of those movie moments where you just wonder what the fuck he was expecting to happen. As if it's normal for people in Russian paratrooper uniforms to drop in with weapon crates. What else could it be?
@5:10 - The event you briefly mentioned is known as the San Ysidro McDonalds massacre, which happened on July 18, 1984, roughly a month before Red Dawn's theatrical release. The film was in the final stages of post-production at that point, so when the real-life McDonalds massacre happened, the filmmakers/studios/whoever, decided to cut that McDonalds scene from the movie since the real life event was still fresh in everyone's minds.
When I was in Desert Storm, we used to spray paint Wolverines on burned out T62, T72(rare to us in our AO), and BMPs. Then we’d take photos of us doing the Wolverines pose with Republican Guard berets on.
The “Russian” equipment was actually Egyptian military Russian equipment that the USA bought from them for testing. At the time the USA had very good relations with the Egyptians. The AK-74 were Egyptian Maadi’s.
You are correct my friend, lots of the vehicles that were used were Enemy training Vehicles, used at Fort Carson, Colorado, for mock war games and simulated battles, They had to get special permission to use them in movie, the vehicles are not Hollywood mock ups but genuine Russian built equipment, All the uniforms and guns are all period correct, well most of them, but they did such a great job with this movie, Ive been to the town where they filmed lots of this movie , in New Mexico, we found the exact locations where lots of scenes were shot, and most of the extra's used in the movie were from the town.
@@brooksbrown580 There was a gun magazine at the time that had pictures of the equipment and told about the way it was purchased and used. It stated that the people who made the movie had access to it.
no I kinda agree. There is one scene that surprised me, well maybe two but I'm with Brandon on this one. Let's just leave that remake alone. It REALLY tarnishes this movie.
@@John_Conner222 especially give the fact that the enemies were supposed to be Chinese the studio went bankrupt and was bought out by Chinese investors and the Chinese were changed to north koreans in post production
If I remember right, they built fiberglass mockups of the T-72 hulls and turrets and mounted them on U.S. Walker Bulldog tank chassis. That was what freaked out the F.B.I. who came by to ask where they got them.
This movie shaped my childhood, it came out 7 years before I was born. My friends and I still pretended to be wolverines both with our G.I. Joes and in our back yards with our air soft guns. Still one of the greatest movies ever made, it still amazes me that there are kids/people above the age of 12 who still have not seen this amazing piece of cinematography. Anyway, love the series, love the channel, am really enjoying learning more about AK’s. Thank you brother!
I just went to watch Red Dawn again after watching this, it was literally just on there! How come Netflix can leave garbage up for years but they have one of my all time favorite movies on there for only like two months
Red Dawn (1984) offers insight into something, where a 9 year old me (I saw it when it came out in theaters and I was easily the youngest person in there) took note of something that has stuck with me forever, and it was just 4 numbers.... 4473. When I initially read the translated caption, my first thought was "do those things really exist?" 16 year old me found out, they most certainly do. I didn't have the internet back when I was 16, and one day while in the public library, I started looking into firearm laws. It was the very nature of a child who read encyclopedias for fun, thought most fiction was garbage, and then picked up his first copy of 1984, which was VERY hard to read, due to the fact that you had to WANT it. There was nothing fun about it, and then, to have the anticlimactic ending it did.... it was a warning, not a book for conspiracy theorist entertainment. At 18, my position on firearms was cemented. All gun control laws are unconstitutional. They never serve any benevolent purpose. Back during 1984, the Brady Bill was not yet a reality, but it was about to become one. Background checks also became a thing in my childhood. So, all those times I had looked at the 5th Amendment, and saw "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...", a background check does all those things, without even accusing a person of any crime. The assumption of innocence until guilt is established is curtailed wholesale by background checks. That became the subject of my senior year history essay, and lo and behold, I failed it, until I took that paper to the Principal, who reversed the grade, put the History teacher on leave, where he ultimately was fired, and an equally bad history teacher was put in his place. I have spent my entire 48 years of life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, and to my credit, it made me miserable. The truth doesn't always set you free. Sometimes, it makes you aware, just how shackled you truly are, in spite of the fact that you can't see the shackles, that doesn't mean they are not there. Good video, and yeah, I'm watching the remake next.
6:10 My Dad paused this movie the first time that he, my brother, and I watched it to lecture us about the government and why we shouldn't trust them, I didn't trust them before, why the fuck would I trust them now?
I knew that when I was 14. My Dad called me into the kitchen and handed me a form to fill out. We had to get something new to get hunting licenses that year, a FOID card. My first thought was this was against the Constitution. Illinois still has the FOID card, as they don't have to know what guns you have, just that you do.
I got my mom hooked on war movies with Enemy at the Gates. When we sat down to watch Red Dawn, she asked my dad if he'd seen it. "Seen it? I could quote you the dialogue!" was his reply
I was born in 1967. This is not a movie. It's a training film. In the 80s it was not IF the soviets were coming. It was WHEN are the soviets coming. We were contingency planning before we knew it even was a thing. We all knew where our parents guns were and where the ammo was. We dug hides out in the woods. Some of those hides were super unsafe, but it was the 80s and nobody cared about that.
This movie was filmed in and around Las Vegas, New Mexico, my hometown. The school in the beginning was Memorial Middle School, and I was in the 6th or 7th grade. We got to watch the parachute drop. One of the paras hit the side of the school gym and broke a leg, another was dragged across a field into a barbed wire fence, and others waaaay missed the drop zone because it was windy that day. My house is in one scene where they are panning looking from the hill above. In your video it is about 5:23 or so. We got to watch a lot of the filming and I know where most of the sets were located. It was a really fun time!
Nothing in the 80s was sexier than Lea Thompson covered in dirt, lying on her stomach ripping up bad guys with an RPK. She just had the kind of face that looked sexy when her hair was an absolute mess.
...saw this when it first came out...wasn't a teenager (as Brandon says he was)...in fact, at the time, I was a Special Forces weapons guy, working in a teamroom with other weapons and commo guys...and we loved it. In fact, one of our number was a collector, and was known to spend entire paychecks on whatever he could get his hands on. And, yes, he was single. Anyway, he'd already spent a ton down at Bragg (we were at Ft. Devens) for a Vietnam bring-back SKS in beautiful condition (we surmised at the time that it was a wall-mounted trophy, but a great shooter as it turned out), and later bought at least one Valmet and two AKs, one a Mahdi. We loved all the cheating the movie company had to do to at least try to get beyond the fact that even movie arsenal companies didn't have examples to film. As to the vehicles, we'd been seeing ZSU-23/4's showing up in the news (Afganistan, don'cha'know), and so they had to include a mock-up of one of those beasts. All in all, a great movie. I remember at the time that some peacenick Lefty movie reviewer, perhaps writing for the Boston Globe, dubbed this flick "the most violent movie of all time". A point of pride, I'd say. Anyway, it holds up down the nearly 40 years since its release. I wonder what the folks in Ukraine would say about it.
My friends dad would tell us when he was in the USMC they played this movie a lot for the movie nights on the ship he was on and it always got everyone fired up.
I was little when this movie came out in the 80s. It was also in heavy HBO rotation later on. Absolutely loved it despite its cheesiness. As I got older I became way more appreciative of how the showrunners tried to replicate the look of Soviet equipment I still recall the older Battle of the Bulge movie with American tanks simply painted grey and a balkenkreuz slapped on, and they go, "Now we got a Panzer!" Even as a little kid I identified those as American tanks because I had built models of them. For Red Dawn, they tried to make it look like real Russian stuff, even the tank in the gas station scene. The ZSU-23 in the convoy. The Mi-24 Hind-A. A lot of effort. Years later when my dad got me a model of an Mi-24 Hind with the double bubble canopy, I was confused, because when I saw "Hind" I imagined the boxy canopy looking ones from Red Dawn. Actual early Hind models had those canopies. When this was out, at Toys 'R Us, there was an A-Team brand AK-47 toy. Because I recognized the gun from Red Dawn, I pestered my dad to get it for me. This was the 80s... Toy guns were made to look like the real stuff. Black plastic for the "metal" portions and brown for the "wood" handguard and all. Very cool stuff back then.
One thing they got right, which always annoys me with later movies, is when they are at the gas station and there is an explosion in the distance, they did the proper sound delay.
WELL DONE🤩 1. Thanks for letting me "re-watch' this again. I'm glad you liked it. It's been a favorite of mine as well. 2. Harry Dean Stanton(RIP) was one of the best character actors I've ever seen. Deep portfolio, including Alien, Pretty in Pink, Christine, Escape from New York and the Green Mile. He even had a part in Cheech andChong's Up in Smoke. It was when the boys went to jail and he was an inmate but the footage was cut.
Among other things that'd be a waste of an RPG. Shits heavy and you can't carry that many of them. If they ran into an american armoured column later come to relieve the state, their commissars would berate the shit out of them for wasting an RPG rocket on a bunch of schoolkids as they are machine-gunned to death by the oncoming abrams
@@maxspinks2181 I'm pissed off because I don't remember if it was a Challenger 2 or an Abrams but there was a tank in Iraq that was mobility-killed and pounded for several hours straight with even RPG-29s and only the driver got wounded. Modern armor is very resilient against the more common shoulder launched "grenades" and rockets but the big boy missiles are still effective. However, like I mentioned above infantry can still pose a danger to tanks even with the cheaper AT weapons, although you can't easily get through the armor you can easily damage its sighting, tracks, etc and at least make the tank unable to fight properly. Hence why a tank can be considered "killed" without having to fully penetrate the hull.
Brandon Being a man of a certain age I can say that I was 19 when the original Red Dawn came out in theaters and as a gun nut, I fucking loved it !!! I have not seen the 2012 version yet and I would love to hear what you have to say about it BEFOREI watch it. Keep up the good work. Thanks, John
And now I gotta go watch it again. I watched it first with my dad at theaters in 84 and I have no idea how many times I've seen it since, but it just never gets old
@State of Wyoming homeschoolers kept schooling to stay on track with graduation at age 16 so they can complete college at 22. They be like that. Not me though.
@@thomassteele1728 I homeschooled after Jr. High, but while I was in Jr. High we had classrooms that looked just like that...I wanted to see parachutes come in... My dad actually took me to see Red Dawn in the theater when I was a kid...he had a thing for movie sound tracks and he had a mix tape with a bunch on it. Man, this brings back memories
this movie is amazing. i've watched it a few hundred times. thanx for the amaizing vid!! AN no i didnt leave when you nerded out. i nerded out right along with you
You didn't mention the General's speech.. Towards the middle of the movie, the Russians bring an expert to take over the hunt for the Wolverines. The actor they used also played Conan the Barbarian's father (the one who taught him the Riddle of Steel). He has a degree in Russian Literature, and taught Russian to at least one government agency. He also wrote the speech he gave about hunting them.
Uploaded 2hours ago Brandon: Red dawn is on Netflix at the time of upload. Netflix: Hmmm how about Olympus has fallen, Bushwick, Doomsday preppers. Ect
Bushwick, for all of its flaws, was very well filmed in my opinion. I liked the angles and everything and they took risks with the main characters that I genuinely respected.
actually it was made for a Spielberg film however that movie ended up being rated R as it contained some other questionable material. so TECHNICALLY wrong but correct as THIS was [to my knowledge] the 1st released PG-13 film.
Dude I love how instead of putting a stock photo up on screen, he just goes and gets an actual RPK machine gun that's lying around his livingroom...! This guy has ALL the cool stuff.
I remember watching this at my dad's house in jersey who had cable (moms house in the boonies of PA the TV only had like 3 channels since we didnt have cable) ill never forget the feeling I had watching this at 10 yrs old for the first time.
I think you need to revisit this in light of the Ukrainian invasion. We all thought this movie was silly fun in the 80s. But history has the last laugh here. They nailed it.
The last time I was this early, my dad was still here! He left 3 years ago to buy a kalashnikov. Come home dad... I miss you... and I want the kalashnikov...
Most of my stuff gets transferred through one dealer the balloon goes up I'm breaking in and torching their filing cabinets. The funny thing now would be when the soldier got to the store and realized that each form was at least 1 firearm he would shit himself call Col Bella explain it to him and they would just walk out and surrender
I was preaching and ranting about that 4473 scene and showing it to people (from a VHS copy none the less) before I could even buy a gun, I knew how dangerous those forms actual were to our freedoms and safety as you teenager. #akgnotificationsquad
they ought to have tossed an AK and a bag of mags over the fence. me and my brother said that we'd of done that for our old man when we watched it in the Pine Cone Theatre back in the 80's.
I preferred how that was handled in the new movie. A man telling his kids to save their country, rather than the original selfish risk your lives because I was wronged.
6:14 Fun fact, in Sweden during the cold war only local law enforcement where allowed to keep records on who where registered gun owners and if war broke out they had standing orders to burn those records at once.
Proud to live in the same state this movie takes place in. My family lives in one of the towns that most resembles the town in Red Dawn in our part of Colorado.
Do the a full length Red Dawn video, if I can sit through a full length Paul Harrell video I can absolutely watch 3 hours of red dawn AK's. Also do the 2012 cause rants get views
Just makes me think of the old 60-70s ww2 movies and shows where the Germans use clearly American vehicles just with iron crosses painted on them. Given I know Ramel had a couple battalions or captured tanks, but damn not that many.
Old westerns from the 50s & 60s, set in the Civil War, but using Trapdoor Springfield, or Winchester 73 rifles and SAA Colt revolvers. Movie is set in 1863, but they're using guns from 1873!
