I had the good fortune to have worked with the crew for the movie "Final Countdown" and managed to get a couple speaking parts and several visual scenes. One thing I can tell you is that the crew of the Nimitz edited a lot of dialog that would have been....un-realistic. Peter Douglas (producer) and Don Taylor (Director) were onboard for this and in fact encouraged our participation in the production of as authentic scenes as we could without taking away from the story line. THAT'S why the Final Countdown has become a favorite cult classic. We also enjoyed working with this crew. They treated us with respect and seemed to enjoy working with us as much as we enjoyed working with them. Peter Douglas was like a kid in a candy shop and his dad, Martin Sheen and Farentino were the same. It was a blast. I was in this show as well (right place right time......again) This show????? Not so much. The acting was weak and there was not a single big name in the cast that could hold the show together. The cast were all snotty wannabes who at no time seemed to genuinely enjoy what they were doing or working with us. The one guy that even talked with us was playing the part of an enlisted sailor whose job was similar to ours but even then I felt like it was mostly condescension rather than an interest in what we did. The premises of how the ships systems, crew and the Navy in general worked were ludicrous. I remember one scene in particular where the lead, sh!t hot, Ops Specialist had diagnosed a radar contact as being a Russian bomber and when the captain (who was in CIC despite the fact that the captain's job is on the bridge) asked "how do you know that". The dialog had the actor telling the captain something like "Do you hear that 'ping, doyng doot' sound that we're getting on the radar? That's the sound that this Russian bomber makes." First of all radar doesn't make sounds in the radar operators headset. Second only Electronic Warfare techs "listen" to RF emitters, not Op Specs. To add a humorous note to that episode: The consoles we worked from had intercom communications between them. We were all manned up making CIC look like we were on an underway footing and we all kept activating our intercom to this actor's console and telling him "ping doyng doot" over and over. We were driving him crazy and it was pretty much the only time we enjoyed doing this show. We hated this show and we hated being associated with it because it was stupid. And as was correctly pointed out in a previous comment/review the Navy did eventually pull their endorsement BUT it is important to understand that the ONLY episode that was actually filmed on the aircraft carrier was the pilot show. There were 8 episodes and none of the other 7 episodes were filmed onboard the ship. They were filmed in sets to emulate the ship. So just because the Navy pulled its endorsement there was no reason they couldn't continue to film the show. There are lots of military shows that have no military endorsement. But it was just an awful show and they knew it.
