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| - Every time the heroes in an action movie or TV show have to go somewhere by helicopter, chances are they'll be doing it in a member of the Bell Huey family. This is justified in Vietnam War movies: the UH-1D Iroquois is a symbol of US involvement in Vietnam, with over 7,000 of them seeing service. As a dedicated troop transport helicopter, it's a natural choice for The Squad - it's hard to roll out after a Lock and Load Montage in an MD-500 which only fits two actors. Their looks also help convey a tough, militaristic feel and suggest a military movie in the way a less easily-recognizable helicopter might not. In a gunship situation, expect two heavily-armed attack choppers flown by nameless pilots in formation with a Huey carrying a named character.
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| abstract
| - Every time the heroes in an action movie or TV show have to go somewhere by helicopter, chances are they'll be doing it in a member of the Bell Huey family. This is justified in Vietnam War movies: the UH-1D Iroquois is a symbol of US involvement in Vietnam, with over 7,000 of them seeing service. As a dedicated troop transport helicopter, it's a natural choice for The Squad - it's hard to roll out after a Lock and Load Montage in an MD-500 which only fits two actors. Their looks also help convey a tough, militaristic feel and suggest a military movie in the way a less easily-recognizable helicopter might not. In a gunship situation, expect two heavily-armed attack choppers flown by nameless pilots in formation with a Huey carrying a named character. It's not only military action movies that favor the Huey. Their versatility and ready availability as surplus has them showing up pretty much every other time a helicopter's needed as well. Hence Bell 204/205/212 helicopters, all civilian Hueys, see very heavy usage, though certainly not to the extent that militarized Hueys do due to not having the same stranglehold on the market - or the public's imagination. Though in Real Life the US military started replacing Hueys with Black Hawks as long ago as 1979 and many other armed forces never used them at all, in the movies they still show up everywhere even now - even places they have no right to be. As a general rule:
* Hueys have a 50-50 chance of showing up in a fully civilian movie, where Bell JetRangers and other models appear just as often;
* A somewhat-military movie, or a movie featuring the military that Did Not Do the Research, will almost invariably have Hueys and follow this trope;
* A well-researched military movie will only feature Hueys as appropriate - for instance, when dealing with the Vietnam era, or for Marine Twin Hueys. Characters in action films are particularly prone to stumbling across them fuelled up, ready to fly and very often fully-armed. This is pretty unlikely now never mind Twenty Minutes Into the Future, but even there everyone will be flying Hueys. In action movies it's likely one of the cast will also know how to pilot one, however unlikely it is they'd have had any chance to learn how. In the few cases that the characters are not travelling in a Huey it's possible it'll still sound like they are, which is rather like suggesting every prop plane sounds like a Cessna. Perhaps because the UH-1 is so ubiquitous that it's just how helicopters are expected to sound. When the Huey shows up appropriately - for example in period movies and situations where they'd likely be seen - it's just a sign the filmmakers did the research. Its appearance can also be justified as a deliberate stylistic choice where the moviemakers are trying to draw parallels between the events in the movie and The Vietnam War: the rest of the time this trope applies. Less likely outside of live-action media, where the cost and availability of aircraft isn't an issue. This trope is becoming less common as time goes on. More recent films tend to rely more on the Aérospatiale AS350 Squirrel (or its two-engine counterpart, the AS355 Twin Squirrel) as their go-to helicopter of choice. Its sleek look, especially when depicted in black, seems to lend itself to the slicker attitude of more modern action films. Examples include Live Free or Die Hard (which does feature some Hueys but primarily uses Squirrels), three out of the four live-action Resident Evil movies (Apocalypse, Extinction and Afterlife) and Shooter. Compare Just Plane Wrong. Examples of Every Helicopter Is a Huey include: No aversions, please, otherwise this is going to turn into a list of helicopters in movies. Remember: this trope is about Hueys showing up as a generic helicopter in place of others.
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