Did China steal Top Gun clip?

China's military have been embarrassed by claims they used a scene from Top Gun instead of genuine footage of their latest fighter plane.



Footage supposedly showcasing the J-10 fighter, which showed an air-to-air missile destroying another jet, was broadcast by state-sponsored China Central Television.

Bloggers on internet message boards quickly picked up the similarities and the footage was removed from the CCTV website but not before the clip had been copied.

The Wall Street Journal then published a video which compared the two film sequences, with uncanny similarities.

The explosion is so similar that the fireball appears to form the same shapes and near-identical chunks of debris spray from the detonation and travel across the screen in what looks like the same way.

No one from the state broadcaster has admitted to the fraud but, if true, such a famous film would seem a poor choice from which to cull such material.

Top Gun was released in 1986 and was a massive hit, making a global star of Tom Cruise.

If the footage is a genuine fake, it would not be the first time that subterfuge has been used by China to try to improve its image.

Some of the more spectacular footage of the Beijing Olympic Games' opening ceremony, featuring fireworks creating "footsteps" across the city, were later shown to have been created digitally.

In 2007, Xinhua, another Chinese state broadcaster, was accused of using an X-ray image of Homer Simpson to depict a genetic link to multiple sclerosis.

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