China: Top Gun Footage Used in News Report by State-Run Media

Footage from the Jan. 23 CCTC report. (Credit: Wall Street Journal)Top Gun, the famed 1980s Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer film about jet fighter pilots, was the source of news footage used by Chinese state-run CCTV recently, according to reports this weekend.

A Wall Street Journal blog posted a video that compared scenes from the Tony Scott-directed film and CCTV footage from a news feature about a Chinese air force training exercise. The jet explosions in both pieces of footage look exactly the samedown to the smoke, fire, and debris flying out from the explosion. There are other striking similarities as well.

The Jan. 23 CCTV film faux pas was first spotted by a Chinese user named Liu Yi on the Ministry of Tofu blog.

The user pointed out that "the jet that the [Chinese] J-10 hit is an F-5, a U.S. fighter jet. In Top Gun, what the leading actor Tom Cruise pilots an F-14 to bring down is exactly an F-5.

The Journal reported that CCTV has since removed the clip from their website.

A person familiar with CCTV told the BBC that this hasnt been the first time that the state-run television broadcaster used movie footage in a news report.

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"There are other cases of the deliberate use of inappropriate footage," the source, who was not named, told the British news agency. He said that it was sometimes due to laziness or lack of footage.

He added that it occurs mostly in footage about science and the military.

In 2002, the Beijing Evening News newspaper translated and used a story created by satire news website and publication The Onion. The faux news story was about a U.S. Congressman threatening to leave unless Washington DC builds a new Capitol building with a retractable dome.In 2008, there was speculation that a highly-publicized space walk done by Chinese astronauts during the Shenzhou VII mission was ! actually filmed underwater, not in outer space.


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