Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is a museum dedicated to the aviation history of the United States of America.

Fiction

Revenge of the Fallen film

When Wheelie told Sam Witwicky, Mikaela Banes, Seymour Simmons, and Leo Spitz about the Seekers, he told them where to find the ancient Transformers. The closest one was in Washington, D.C., in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The trip brought back memories for Simmons (he always wanted to be an astronaut). As part of their plan to do their search uninterrupted, Leo distracted the guards by claiming that the restrooms were out of toilet paper, then tazing one who followed him...also tazing himself. Simmons managed to down another four guards, and the human quartet went to work. They managed to find that the SR-71 Blackbird in the museum was the Seeker in question. Reactivating him with the AllSpark shard Sam had, it turned out to be Jetfire, who had not aged very well and damaged a good portion of the museum while trying to get his bearings. Revenge of the Fallen

Notes

• Revenge of the Fallen does some rather serious failures in geography with regards to the Smithsonian. What was actually displayed in the movie was the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which is administered by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and holds many of the aircraft seen in the film, but is a separate building located at Dulles International Airport, miles outside of D.C. itself. The novelization makes the distinction about the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy center being a separate facility administered by the Smithsonian, but the film itself does not. Additionally, when Jetfire wanders outside, what is actually shown is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group in Tucson, Arizona, implying that Washington, D.C. is actually an open desert.
• The Smithsonian seems to be proud of its role in Revenge of the Fallen, as one of the exhibit cases at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center closest to the SR-71 Blackbird now contains several Transformers toys, prototypes, and props used during filming at the facility, as well as a short clip depicting the development stages of Jetfire's CGI transformation sequence. The toys on display were all permanently donated by Rik Alvarez.^[1]
• Unsurprisingly, the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Annex is a cornucopia of popular Transformer alternate modes. In addition to the SR-71 Blackbird used to portray Jetfire in Revenge of the Fallen, other aircraft on display include a Concorde, a variety of jet fighters including the F-14 Tomcat and F-4 Phantom II; a large number of propeller fighters including the F4U Corsair, P-38 Lightning, and the Albatros D.V biplane (immediate predecessor of the Albatros D.III); and of course the space shuttle orbiter Discovery, moved to the museum after its final flight in 2011 to replace the Enterprise.

References

External links

• National Air and Space Museum on Wikipedia
• Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center on Wikipedia