Carabimero said:
Are you saying this has a run time of 27 hours for a '30 hour' miniseries?
I had the same thought, and I think the quoted 30 hours did refer to the total of the original time slots, including commercials. But watching them recently, episodes 8-12 did seem rushed in some ways. Maybe they did run out of time/budget near the end. I had read the book before the series aired on TV, and I don't remember the TV adaptation seeming chopped too much at the time. So I just re-read the last parts of the book, and I can understand some of the cuts. There are a lot of naval battle descriptions in the book that are long and would be hard to recreate on screen. The Battle of Midway was recreated at length in the TV series, but some of the others were not, particularly the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Instead, there was a brief reference and the newsreel coverage, as with other, mostly land battles. There are some other minor scenes from the book near the end that had no coverage or just brief references in the TV version. My guess is that this is rather minimal, maybe less than an hour or so in total? On the other hand, if everything in the book had been filmed in the same level of detail, W&R on TV might have been something like 100 hours long.
I don’t know where you got the 1620, but that is WITH commercials. The runtime without commercials is roughly 1367 or 22 hours 47 minutes. This comes from the runtimes printed on the MPI DVDs. I’m too lazy to stick in each DVD to verify the numbers.
So, if it was planned to be 30 hours, with commercials, then there are about 2.5 hours of runtime, without commercials, that were not included. Or maybe the 30 hours was an approximate estimate. I have not seen much on any of that other than that second hand reference to "several hours were cut" from the May 1989 episodes (Parts 8-12). For those of you who read the book, you know that there is more material than what was in the miniseries. A lot of what was not depicted in the miniseries were descriptions of the battles, which were generally shown as narrated wartime footage in black in white. I actually thought that was well done and a good choice. The book is over 1,000 pages long and some of the naval battles were a bit tedious to read, because they were written in such detail by Herman Wouk. He was a fantastic writer but I think that the level of detail for the naval battles would not have held audience interest too well. However, there are a few other scenes from the last few chapters, which correspond to parts 8-12, that were not depicted in the miniseries. For example, when Byron returns to Washington, D.C. to visit his father, the book describes his lunch with his mother (Rhoda), where Janice (Warren's widow) is also present (she was working "on the Hill" and preparing to attend law school, as I recall). That scene is not in the miniseries. Instead, all we see is Rhoda looking out the window of the house when Byron arrives, as Pug and Pamela drive away. That scene would have been just a few minutes long, but it kind of completes the story of Janice and Rhoda, based on the dialogue, and probably should have been in the miniseries.
