Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Photograph: Cine Text/AllstarChina Central Television News last week broadcast a training exercise by the People's Liberation Army Air Force with one plane firing a missile at another. But an observant viewer spotted that the resulting explosion matches a blast from the final fight scene in the Tom Cruise movie.
The frame-by-frame comparison of the images, by someone posting under the name Liu Yi,demonstrates the likeness, and the Wall Street journal has produced a video comparing the news clip with the movie scene.
The news broadcast was posted on the CCTV website but vanished after news of the gaffe began to spread.
A spokeswoman in the foreign affairs department at CCTV said she was not aware of the claims and would need to look into them. She was not available when the Guardian rang back.
While the clip is no doubt the work of a maverick employee, many internet users have enjoyed the broadcaster's embarrassment. The authorities censor television more strictly than publications and CCTV's news bulletins, in particular, are notorious for their unflinching dullness.
When fire consumed a building in the glossy new CCTV headquarters in 2009, many attacked the broadcaster for censoring the images in its own reports. The celebrity blogger Han Han described the blaze as an act of self-castration by "the world's number one eunuch media"
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