Historical inaccuracies that are not minor

[Anne Neville]

Originally Posted by RickJay

No, they would mostly have worn pants. In battle the better equipped men, which would have included Wallace, would have worn chain mail and such; he certainly would not have gone charging into battle without wearing armor. He wasn't as insane as Mel Gibson.

The kilts worn in "Braveheart" are great kilts, more or less. When William Wallace was alive those were still about two hundred years into the future.

Even if they hadn't been, William Wallace wasn't a highland Scot, and lowland Scots didn't wear kilts. Edinburgh Castle has a statue of William Wallace, and in it he is wearing armor and chain mail, not a kilt. Lowland Scots have generally looked down on Highland Scots. They generally wouldn't have been wearing clothing associated with Highland Scots. Some Scots (at least, I assume they were) in Edinburgh do wear kilts now, but they're street performers wearing them for the tourists. When I visited Scotland a few years ago, I don't remember seeing anybody wearing a kilt who wasn't involved in something that was aimed at tourists.

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

And, of course, different rules/considerations always governed royal marriages. No need to wait for a prince to "get established" in life

Royalty operated by different rules than most people did. They didn't have to earn a living. They needed to produce a healthy heir, and generally didn't need to worry about having too many children to support. Under those conditions, starting your family as young as possible is advantageous.

Originally Posted by Lumpy

A big income and and even bigger debt are hardly incompatable

It happens to this day. Not everybody who has credit card debt now is poor. You can live above your means at almost any level of income. Henry VIII managed to do it on a royal income augmented by money from the dissolution of monasteries.

[Kobal2]

King Arthur set out to paint a historically accurate (at least they hyped it as such) portrait of Arthur and his knights as Sarmatian warlords turned auxiliae in the Roman Legion. Which is fine - that is indeed one road historians have pursued to look into the origins of the legendary character. Then you get to the part where the Romans defend Hadrian's Wall from the Picts. Err... okay then... not really the same geographical location at all but whatevs, I can roll with that.
Then the Picts bring fucking trebuchets to bear. In open battle, no less.

To put it in perspective, that's not entirely unlike making a film about the War of US Independence, touting its historical accuracy, then have the Red Coats actually be Spaniards. And they have M-16s. No, scratch that, M-16s really are close combat weapons: make that Spaniards with B-52s doing strafing runs.

(I'd totally watch that film by the way, someone has to make it happen. Couldn't be worse than The Patriot anyway.)

[Malthus]

Originally Posted by Anne Neville

Even if they hadn't been, William Wallace wasn't a highland Scot, and lowland Scots didn't wear kilts. Edinburgh Castle has a statue of William Wallace, and in it he is wearing armor and chain mail, not a kilt. Lowland Scots have generally looked down on Highland Scots. They generally wouldn't have been wearing clothing associated with Highland Scots. Some Scots (at least, I assume they were) in Edinburgh do wear kilts now, but they're street performers wearing them for the tourists. When I visited Scotland a few years ago, I don't remember seeing anybody wearing a kilt who wasn't involved in something that was aimed at tourists.

Wallace was a Norman-Scot by background - as in the statue, he would have looked more like a French Knight than a Highland Clansman. Let alone a woad-wearing Pict.

Though he *did* allegedly make a sword-belt out of the English Treasurer's flayed skin ...

Inaccurate though it is, I have always enjoyed the Horrible Histories version of Wallace:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g61xASD-24

[Lumpy]

Originally Posted by Kobal2

To put it in perspective, that's not entirely unlike making a film about the War of US Independence, touting its historical accuracy, then have the Red Coats actually be Spaniards. And they have M-16s. No, scratch that, M-16s really are close combat weapons: make that Spaniards with B-52s doing strafing runs.

(I'd totally watch that film by the way, someone has to make it happen. Couldn't be worse than The Patriot anyway.)

How will our era be misremembered 2000 years from now?

[Tamerlane]

Originally Posted by Marley23

Averages can be misleading, so you shouldn't say "you were lucky to live to 40 or 45." Life expectancies were very short historically because infant mortality was so high. If you survived to age 5 or so, you had a good chance of living much longer than that and you probably wouldn't be expecting to drop dead at 40 or 45.

As a truism that is largely correct. But there are exceptions. People often talk about life expectancies in ancient Egypt ( say the New Kingdom ) as being in the mid-thirties. But that may in fact be unrealistically high, as I suspect nobody has a great handle on infant mortality rates from that period. Instead that is based on the fact that the archaeological record shows that the average Egyptian peasant rarely lived much past 35. Life for those folks was truly miserable. Endemic disease, a life of usually back-breaking labor and apparently near universal chronic malnutrition. The agricultural revolution in the Nile allowed for the development of a surprisingly dense population, but simultaneously a horribly unhealthy and short-lived one. The high nobility of course being somewhat excepted.

[Siam Sam]

Let's not forget Pearl Harbor (if it wasn't mentioned earlier). Seems to have been many inaccuracies there. One I recall off the top of my head is no serviceman who was at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack participated in the Jimmy Dolittle raids.

[Little Nemo]

Originally Posted by Siam Sam

Let's not forget Pearl Harbor (if it wasn't mentioned earlier). Seems to have been many inaccuracies there. One I recall off the top of my head is no serviceman who was at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack participated in the Jimmy Dolittle raids.

Nor was there any American who served in the RAF during the Battle of Britain and then was at the Pearl Harbor attack and the Doolittle raid.

But I'm not going to give them too much grief over that. There were American pilots who did all of these things so it wasn't too much of a stretch to combine them all into a single pilot. That falls within the limits of fictional license.

Besides that movie had enough other much more serious problems.

[Little Nemo]

My two examples of WWII inaccuracies were the characters of "Oddball" in Kelly's Heroes and Carson in U-571. Both characters were wildly anachronistic for the nineteen-forties. Oddball was a hippie and Carson was John Shaft.

[Donnerwetter]

I remember an interview with a WW II German U-boat commander on American TV when the movie opened.

The elderly gentleman took part in the media hype but politely pointed out, that it was impossible to operate a WW II era German submarine with almost no crew, even by officers, NCOs and sailors who were actually trained and experienced with that type of ship.

[Sampiro]

A Man for all Seasons whitewashes Sir/St. Thomas More a bit. It's doubtful, for example, that the families of the Protestants he burned to death when he was in power under Henry VIII would be that moved by his persecution under the same king. (There's also some character merging (e.g. Thomas Howard, D. of Norfolk is a composite of the real Thomas Howard and other characters) and subtracting (e.g. More had more children than just Alice- in fact his most important early biography was written by his son), but that's to be expected when you're cramming so much into two hours.)

1776 is one of my favorite movies and, while it takes liberties with (but never declared independency of) history for dramatic purposes, it stays generally correct. However, it's actually one of the movies that, due to time constraints, had to remove historically accurate material that was in the original drafts: a Mohawk Indian who came to negotiate with Congress during this time and spoke in a perfect Oxford English accent, the junket to New Jersey during which Franklin and Adams and another delegate had to share a bed in a crowded tavern, and a couple of randy goings on outside of Congress with some of the members.
As far as historical changes, they were mostly to condense the constantly coming and going dozens of members of the Congress into a few who you could remember and keep track of, and a few characterizations were changed. Perhaps the most serious things changed biographically would be the role of James Wilson and the climactic moment when he switches his vote; we don't really know why he changed it, and he was really not in the shadow of Dickinson (who was his former law professor but they weren't chums; incidentally, Dickinson's considerable holdings were mostly in Delaware and in his political career he was usually the representative from DE, not PA, though he was representing PA in 1776). Also, Caesar Rodney, while he did leave due to health reasons related to his skin cancer, wasn't really at death's door like he was in the play/movie, he was just severely uncomfortable; he in fact lived for several more years. Also, Thomas Jefferson's wife never actually came to Pennsylvania and was in fact recovering from a stillbirth in 1776, but I don't think any fan of the show minds as we got a great number out of it and you get to see the Tom:Martha dynamic and compare-contrast it with John:Abby without both relationships being telepathic.

The Lion in Winter implies that Eleanor is very rarely "trotted out to court", but in fact she spent months at a time at a time at various courts in France and far away from the castle in England where she was officially a prisoner. Admittedly, she was under guard when there and could not leave the castle without an "escort" whose number one job was to make sure she didn't escape, but, she did have a lot more freedom than Christmas and Easter away from her confinement (which, of course, was luxurious by the standards of the time; house arrest in the royal quarters beat freedom in a peasant's hovel). Not so much an error as not mentioned: Geoffrey was Count of Brittany by right of marriage, not through pre-inheritance from Eleanor and Henry as is implied. Also not in the play because it did not go far enough: when Henry II died [during a campaign against Richard... again] Richard released Eleanor asap from her confinement, and tossed Alice into her former quarters. (Eventually she was freed as part of a treaty, and she married and had a family and all and faded from history.)

[CalMeacham]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

A Man for all Seasons whitewashes Sir/St. Thomas More a bit. It's doubtful, for example, that the families of the Protestants he burned to death when he was in power under Henry VIII would be that moved by his persecution under the same king. (There's also some character merging (e.g. Thomas Howard, D. of Norfolk is a composite of the real Thomas Howard and other characters) and subtracting (e.g. More had more children than just Alice- in fact his most important early biography was written by his son), but that's to be expected when you're cramming so much into two hours.)

1776 is one of my favorite movies and, while it takes liberties with (but never declared independency of) history for dramatic purposes, it stays generally correct. However, it's actually one of the movies that, due to time constraints, had to remove historically accurate material that was in the original drafts: a Mohawk Indian who came to negotiate with Congress during this time and spoke in a perfect Oxford English accent, the junket to New Jersey during which Franklin and Adams and another delegate had to share a bed in a crowded tavern, and a couple of randy goings on outside of Congress with some of the members.
As far as historical changes, they were mostly to condense the constantly coming and going dozens of members of the Congress into a few who you could remember and keep track of, and a few characterizations were changed. Perhaps the most serious things changed biographically would be the role of James Wilson and the climactic moment when he switches his vote; we don't really know why he changed it, and he was really not in the shadow of Dickinson (who was his former law professor but they weren't chums; incidentally, Dickinson's considerable holdings were mostly in Delaware and in his political career he was usually the representative from DE, not PA, though he was representing PA in 1776). Also, Caesar Rodney, while he did leave due to health reasons related to his skin cancer, wasn't really at death's door like he was in the play/movie, he was just severely uncomfortable; he in fact lived for several more years. Also, Thomas Jefferson's wife never actually came to Pennsylvania and was in fact recovering from a stillbirth in 1776, but I don't think any fan of the show minds as we got a great number out of it and you get to see the Tom:Martha dynamic and compare-contrast it with John:Abby without both relationships being telepathic.

The Lion in Winter implies that Eleanor is very rarely "trotted out to court", but in fact she spent months at a time at a time at various courts in France and far away from the castle in England where she was officially a prisoner. Admittedly, she was under guard when there and could not leave the castle without an "escort" whose number one job was to make sure she didn't escape, but, she did have a lot more freedom than Christmas and Easter away from her confinement (which, of course, was luxurious by the standards of the time; house arrest in the royal quarters beat freedom in a peasant's hovel). Not so much an error as not mentioned: Geoffrey was Count of Brittany by right of marriage, not through pre-inheritance from Eleanor and Henry as is implied. Also not in the play because it did not go far enough: when Henry II died [during a campaign against Richard... again] Richard released Eleanor asap from her confinement, and tossed Alice into her former quarters. (Eventually she was freed as part of a treaty, and she married and had a family and all and faded from history.)

a Man for All Seasons wasn't meant to be straight historical drama -- Robert Bolt was trying to make his points, as well, and chose the story of Thomas More to do it. Nevertheless, Bolt is always much more historically accurate than Peter Schaffer. An awful lot of this play uses actual quotations or writings by the original people as lines. Whenever i say that this play is pretty close to reality, people inevitably say :"But it doesn't say anything about More doing X". Which is true, but completely beside the point -- bringing up X might be great for a historical completist, but wouldn't help Bolt make his dramatic points. And, moreover, he didn't deny it, anyway. So burning Protestants (did he do so? I hadn't heard), if he did, or the martyrdom of John Fisher, or whether More was really strictly legal in his silence or making an indirect statement about the legitimacy are pretty much beside the point.

I loved 1776 when I saw it on stage, and in the movies. I think I like the fact that they finally treated the Founders as real people, rather than demigods, made a huge difference. Peter Stone spent a lot of time researching this, in places like Rutgers University library, and the play, like AMfAS, includes many actual quotes. David MacCullough, however, seems to dislike the play. He's never mentioned iyt in his writings, although you'd think it merited a note in his John Adams. On the other hand, he dredges up the same quotes Stone used in the play, more often than chance would give them, I suspect, and gives the actual circumstances, to highlight when Stone has used the quote in a different circumstance, or put it in the mouth of the wrong person. Again, this strikes me as pretty damned irrelevant -- the quotes are the legitimate thoughts of folks from back then, and the errors introduxced by this are minor.

There are plenty of other quibbles you could more legitimately introduce. James Wilson wasn't the spineless nonentity the play suggests. Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, was a mch more interesting person, and so on. But the play makes up for it by introducing so much real history -- Franklin's illegitimate son, his gout, the petty bickering in Congress (the bit about Melchior Meng's mule really happened), and other tidbits I never heard of before this.


The Lion in Winter definitely isn't real history, and I never mistook it for that. It was obviously a witty and intelligent fantasy based on a real historical situation, and was worth it for the verbal fencing and maneuvering.

[Marley23]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

Well, what about the classic Old-World pistol-duel, where the gentlemen take 10 paces in opposite directions, turn and fire? That ever happen IRL? Is that how Burr killed Hamilton?

Re-reading the Burr-Hamilton duel entry, and... maybe it did look like that.

Hamilton performed a series of deliberately provocative actions to ensure a lethal outcome. As they were taking their places, he asked that the proceedings stop, adjusted his spectacles, and slowly, repeatedly, sighted along his pistol to test his aim.

"Taking their places" doesn't necessarily mean pacing away from each other, but I wasn't able to find an explanation of how that duel or duels like it were actually conducted.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Anne Neville

Even Lowland Scots have generally looked down on Highland Scots.

They must have to stand on their tiptoes. [rimshot]

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

1776 is one of my favorite movies and, while it takes liberties with (but never declared independency of) history for dramatic purposes, it stays generally correct. However, it's actually one of the movies that, due to time constraints, had to remove historically accurate material that was in the original drafts: a Mohawk Indian who came to negotiate with Congress during this time and spoke in a perfect Oxford English accent, the junket to New Jersey during which Franklin and Adams and another delegate had to share a bed in a crowded tavern, and a couple of randy goings on outside of Congress with some of the members.
As far as historical changes, they were mostly to condense the constantly coming and going dozens of members of the Congress into a few who you could remember and keep track of, and a few characterizations were changed. Perhaps the most serious things changed biographically would be the role of James Wilson and the climactic moment when he switches his vote; we don't really know why he changed it, and he was really not in the shadow of Dickinson (who was his former law professor but they weren't chums; incidentally, Dickinson's considerable holdings were mostly in Delaware and in his political career he was usually the representative from DE, not PA, though he was representing PA in 1776). Also, Caesar Rodney, while he did leave due to health reasons related to his skin cancer, wasn't really at death's door like he was in the play/movie, he was just severely uncomfortable; he in fact lived for several more years. Also, Thomas Jefferson's wife never actually came to Pennsylvania and was in fact recovering from a stillbirth in 1776, but I don't think any fan of the show minds as we got a great number out of it and you get to see the Tom:Martha dynamic and compare-contrast it with John:Abby without both relationships being telepathic.

At least they got all the song-and-dance numbers right. (Except that, historians are pretty sure Franklin was a baritone.)

[Barrett Bonden]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

the junket to New Jersey during which Franklin and Adams and another delegate had to share a bed in a crowded tavern, and a couple of randy goings on outside of Congress with some of the members.

Originally Posted by Adams

Wake up Franklin; we're going to New Brunswick!

Originally Posted by Franklin

Like hell I am, what for?

Originally Posted by Hopkins

The whoring and the drinking!

[digs]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

At least they got all the song-and-dance numbers right. (Except that, historians are pretty sure Franklin was a baritone.)

Don't make light of Ol' Ben's singing. When it came to show tunes, Franklin was worth 100 Washingtons.

[Cartooniverse]

I love it when we discuss currency events.

[Nava]

Originally Posted by Anne Neville

When I visited Scotland a few years ago, I don't remember seeing anybody wearing a kilt who wasn't involved in something that was aimed at tourists.

Next time go to downtown Glasgow on a day with a big sports match.

[CalMeacham]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

At least they got all the song-and-dance numbers right. (Except that, historians are pretty sure Franklin was a baritone.)

Actually, the most disappointing historical truth is that, although Franklin was a wit, really did write all that stuff in Poor Richard's Almanac, and did all that scientific work, he apparently wasn't at all as he was portrayed in 1776. His contemporaries complained that he didn't take a very active part in debates and in the Continental Congress. When he was later in France, according to McCuloch, he often seemed to not do anything positive to advance the status of the fledgling nation. (Nevertheless, Franklin was immensely popular over there. He must've had a good sense of what would work, eve n if that was "not much") All in all, I get the impression that Franklin mostly just sat there and operated more behind-the-scenes, rather than being an easy, epigram-spouting Central Figure

[CalMeacham]

Originally Posted by Barrett Bonden

Having grown up near New Brunswick, and seen the still-extant tavern at which they would have stayed, this scene always fascinated me. When the film played in nearby East Brunswick, this line brought down the house.


Peter Stone's original script for 1776 had a scene where Franklin and Adams shared a room in that tavern. Adams wrote down an account of it, which McCulloch mentions in his book on Adams, and which undoubtedly served as inspiration for the scene. Apparently te scene didn't go over well, and Stone excised it before the show hit Broadway. But I'd love to read it, someday.

[Cicero]

Originally Posted by dropzone

And the Brits seem to forget that the Enigma code was first cracked by the Poles. Earlier, simpler machine, but same principles.

Yes and no. What you say is true, but the addition of extra wheels made it a really far more difficult code to crack (Ultra). Alan Turing deserves a hell of a lot of credit. I'm not sure the principles were quite the same.

Originally Posted by Jackmannii

The movie U-571 would have been grossly inaccurate had the heroes been British. Nothing like that ever happened in WWII.

The U-boat capture was not a grand deception operation, but involved routine anti-sub warfare. The recovered Enigma and other secrets were due to a British boarding party going into the abandoned sub and hauling out stuff over a period of hours. It took bravery to go into a sub that might or might not hold a hidden German crewman determined to go down with the boat (which was damaged and could have sunk at any time (and those involved were decorated later), but as a movie plot, it stank. A true account would have had theatregoers dozing in their seats after the first 15 minutes.

Those who were decorated were actually drowned when the sub went down weren't they? That to me seems pretty daunting and enough to keep audiences going to sleep.

And there was also the previous ruse to capture the code books from the German weather trawlers off Lofoten Islands.

There was a lot more to cracking Ultra than stealing a machine from a sub (as Dropzone correctly points out- there was also French input).

[rowrrbazzle]

The movie All the President’s Men exaggerated the role of the press.

http://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/...atergate-myth/

And on another occasion, Woodward declared more bluntly:

“To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

<snip>

So, too, is the subsidiary myth that Watergate reporting — and the cinema’s depiction of the Post’s coverage in All the President’s Men – made the field seem so alluring that enrollments in college journalism programs surged as a result.

The movie Good Night, and Good Luck greatly exaggerated Murrow's role in bringing down McCarthy.

http://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/...mccarthy-myth/

Far from being fearless, Murrow, it can be argued, waited till the risks had subsided before taking on McCarthy. By March 1954, McCarthy’s capacity to stir dread was in decided retreat.

<snip>

“In the days and weeks after the See It Now program,” I write, “Murrow said he recognized his accomplishments were modest, that at best he had reinforced what others had long said about McCarthy.

“Jay Nelson Tuck, the television critic for the New York Post, wrote that Murrow felt ‘almost a little shame faced at being saluted for his courage in the McCarthy matter. He said he had said nothing that … anyone might not have said without a raised eyebrow only a few years ago.’”

Murrow, moreover, told Newsweek magazine: “It’s a sad state of affairs when people think I was courageous” in confronting McCarthy.

[Toxgoddess]

In the show "The Tudors", I couldn't get past the fact that the actor playing Henry VIII, eye candy and theatrically accomplizhed as he was, was too young for Henry. He was portrayed as about the same age as Anne Boleyn and only a few years older by the time he marries Catherine Howard. Henry was almost twenty years older than Anne. By the time he married 17-year-old Catherine, he was in his fifties and grossly overweight. Catherine was accused of infidelity and historians think she was probably guilty. If he had actually looked like the actor in the series, perhaps she wouldn't have bothered.

[Orca Eyes]

I just love when they make up inaccuracies to sell movies to kids.

Anastasia was an okay film, but the inaccuracies were striking. Other than the whole "Anastasia lives" thing, there's plenty. It claims that Grand Duchess Anastasia was 8 at the time of the Russian Revolution, when she was in fact a teenager. And her grandmother, Marie, moved to Denmark, not Paris, after the Revolution (after all, Marie was a Danish princess by birth). And Anastasia was no beauty - IRL she was short and rather fat. The only thing that they got right about her appearance was her red hair (though IRL it was not as pronounced). At least the whole Rasputin being crazy was somewhat accurate, but only in the fact that he was crazy - he wasn't green and didn't have a bat sidekick.

One of the worst is in this Italian cartoon called Titanic: The Legend Goes On. It features a rapping dog aboard the Titanic in 1912. Rap didn't exist until many decades later. (There is another cartoon about the same subject, also from Italy, that contains its own fair share of inaccuracies - such as a giant octopus being tricked into sinking the Titanic. But that one's mistakes are so bad you'd laugh.)

See this if you don't believe me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxHNztg0X3s

On par with that movie is The Magic Voyage, an animated movie which is about Christopher Columbus. What disturbed me was that it perpetuated the myth that Columbus wanted to prove the world was round. In fact, he just wanted a quicker route to Asia. But what's worse is the addition of a talking woodworm (that looks nothing like a worm), a fairy princess, and a Mayan temple in what is supposed to be New York (I thought he landed in the Bahamas IRL), with stereotypical Native Americans.

[Kobal2]

Originally Posted by Cicero

Yes and no. What you say is true, but the addition of extra wheels made it a really far more difficult code to crack (Ultra). Alan Turing deserves a hell of a lot of credit. I'm not sure the principles were quite the same.

The math and algorithmic principles were the exact same, the problem simply turned into a question of computing power. The Polish "bomb" could theoretically crack even Ultra, but it would e.g. have taken a month to crack one daily cypher. At which point every message written on that day would be open to decyphering, but... yes.

Turing's machines (and the factory-like organization of the work at Bletchley Park; along with other methods to extract information for coded messages, such as analysis of recurrent expressions, formatting syntax etc...) streamlined the process tremendously and performed far more computations per minute, to the point that they could more or less have the day's code cracked before nightfall.

So to say that "the Poles had cracked it first" is indeed misleading, in that they did, but it didn't matter because they didn't have the resources to crack it quite hard 'nuff.

Originally Posted by CalMaecham

(Nevertheless, Franklin was immensely popular over there. He must've had a good sense of what would work, even if that was "not much")

He did a lot of fucking. That'll make you popular in France

[Baron Greenback]

Originally Posted by Nava

Next time go to downtown Glasgow on a day with a big sports match.

Well this is downtown Paris, but same idea. The football supporters have made a whole new national dress out of kilts.

[Baker]

In the movie The Wind and the Lion Candice Bergen played a widow kidnapped in Morocco in 1904, along with her two children, by a Barbary chieftain, played in the movie by Sean Connery.

While there was a kidnapping, it was of a man, Ion Perdicaris, along with the son of his wife Ellen. She'd divorced her husband to marry Perdicaris, a man who was of Greek extraction and, although claiming US citizenship, had renounced it for Greek.

Teddy Roosevelt sent warships and troops to rescue Perdicaris, although he may have already known the man would have been released anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Perdicaris

[Dan Norder]

Originally Posted by Orca Eyes

One of the worst is in this Italian cartoon called Titanic: The Legend Goes On. It features a rapping dog aboard the Titanic in 1912. Rap didn't exist until many decades later.

I think that once you accept the notion that dogs can talk you give up the right to complain that what they are saying is unrealistic.

Of course it's unrealistic. It's a talking dog.

[Sampiro]

Originally Posted by Toxgoddess

In the show "The Tudors", I couldn't get past the fact that the actor playing Henry VIII, eye candy and theatrically accomplizhed as he was, was too young for Henry. He was portrayed as about the same age as Anne Boleyn and only a few years older by the time he marries Catherine Howard. Henry was almost twenty years older than Anne. By the time he married 17-year-old Catherine, he was in his fifties and grossly overweight. Catherine was accused of infidelity and historians think she was probably guilty. If he had actually looked like the actor in the series, perhaps she wouldn't have bothered.

Possibly a winner. Jonathan Rhys Meyers actually had washboard abs in his first scene with Catherine Howard. The real Henry was well over 300 pounds by that time and had all manner of physical infirmities (many of them probably related to diabetes but assigned to other causes).
The complete budget 1970s BBC miniseries with Keith Michell, adjusted for inflation, probably wouldn't have equaled Jonathan Rhys Meyer's salary for 6 episodes of this show, but with said low budget and few outside shots and nothing remotely like today's prosthetic makeup they managed to take Michell from an able bodied slim teenager to somebody believable as morbidly obese, barely able to walk, and suffering from erectile dysfunction on his wedding night. (Scene from the movie with Michell- also low budget, but the takeaway being Michell was in reality in his early 40s and of average weight; it would have been very possible to make Meyers look the historical part without bankrupting ShowTime.)

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by CalMeacham

Actually, the most disappointing historical truth is that, although Franklin was a wit, really did write all that stuff in Poor Richard's Almanac, and did all that scientific work, he apparently wasn't at all as he was portrayed in 1776. His contemporaries complained that he didn't take a very active part in debates and in the Continental Congress. When he was later in France, according to McCuloch, he often seemed to not do anything positive to advance the status of the fledgling nation. (Nevertheless, Franklin was immensely popular over there. He must've had a good sense of what would work, eve n if that was "not much") All in all, I get the impression that Franklin mostly just sat there and operated more behind-the-scenes, rather than being an easy, epigram-spouting Central Figure

Well, he was pretty old by then, wasn't he? (And older still at the Constitutional Convention.)

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Dan Norder

I think that once you accept the notion that dogs can talk you give up the right to complain that what they are saying is unrealistic.

Of course it's unrealistic. It's a talking dog.

So what is Goofy?

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Possibly a winner. Jonathan Rhys Meyers actually had washboard abs in his first scene with Catherine Howard. The real Henry was well over 300 pounds by that time and had all manner of physical infirmities (many of them probably related to diabetes but assigned to other causes).

The way I heard it, Henry VIII suffered a bad jousting injury, gave up on physical exercise because of the pain it caused him after that, and that's why he bloated up.

[BrainGlutton]

And then there's Benjamin Frankin and the Gout.

FRANKLIN. Eh! Oh! eh! What have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?

GOUT. Many things; you have ate and drank too freely, and too much indulged those legs of yours in their indolence.

FRANKLIN. Who is it that accuses me?

GOUT. It is I, even I, the Gout.

FRANKLIN. What! my enemy in person?

GOUT. No, not your enemy.

FRANKLIN. I repeat it, my enemy; for you would not only torment my body to death, but ruin my good name; you reproach me as a glutton and a tippler; now all the world, that knows me, will allow that I am neither the one nor the other.

GOUT. The world may think as it pleases; it is always very complaisant to itself, and sometimes to its friends; but I very well know that the quantity of meat and drink proper for a man, who takes a reasonable degree of exercise, would be too much for another, who never takes any.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Kobal2

He did a lot of fucking. That'll make you popular in France

The Master Speaks:

He was an absolute stud. I know you meant this figuratively, but let's face it, the one thing everyone thinks they know about Ben is that he was a rake. Was he? Probably not. A legendary self-publicist, Franklin liked to give the impression he was a great womanizer, but he was in his 70s and troubled by gout while serving as an envoy to France, alleged scene of his most celebrated conquests. While he was charming and popular with the ladies, and it's not beyond belief that he got physical with a few of them (if women find Jack Nicholson sexy, anything's possible), there's little evidence of any Casanova-like proclivities. As a youth he patronized brothels and sired an illegitimate son (who became royal governor of New Jersey — proof of how far being a bastard can get you in this world, or anyway in New Jersey). For what it's worth, he never formally married his partner of 44 years, Deborah Read, with whom he had two more kids. Still, most scholars think stories about Ben's romantic exploits and legion of little Franklins are exaggerated.

[Sampiro]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

The way I heard it, Henry VIII suffered a bad jousting injury, gave up on physical exercise because of the pain it caused him after that, and that's why he bloated up.

He was 44 when he had the accident and already had more than middle aged spread going, though he was sleek compared to his later years. The lack of exercise and comfort eating after the accident (and living in a time when people literally drank beer like it was water [for good reason]) and his increasingly gargantuan appetite turned him into a morbidly obese prematurely old man by the time he was 50. Medical historians estimate his weight at above 380 pounds by the end of his life, and copious accounts of his health maladies (including constant and increasing thirst, violent irritability, infections that would not heal) are consistent with diabetes (as is massive weight gain for that matter). Accounts in recent years suggest his death was more likely attributable to diabetic kidney failure and other natural causes than the syphilis which was the previous diagnosis. (Google Henry VIII diabetes will bring up references to the articles.)

[aruvqan]

Originally Posted by CalMeacham

Having grown up near New Brunswick, and seen the still-extant tavern at which they would have stayed, this scene always fascinated me. When the film played in nearby East Brunswick, this line brought down the house.
.

But I have an aunt in New Brunswick ...
Tell her to keep up the good work!