My Uncle is in his mid-fifties, lives in Massachusetts, and is one of those people who observe and comment freely on life. He says that 15-20 years ago it would not have been all that odd to see a CSA battle flag on a MA car or truck - just someone saying, “I’m a rebel.” A statement about one’s self, just as Spoke- said, nothing more. He said the same might be seen in any New England state.
Jois
I believe Jois and spoke- have hit the nail on the head.
Not that I’m particularly proud of it, but back in the early eighties, I had a rebel flag in my dorm room, and this was in Maine. I had picked it up years before as a young teen in the south, and Dukes of Hazard was making it a popular thingie-ma-bob for us impressionable (drugged out), TV watchin’ college students.
This shows the flag: the breakfast club smoking scene - YouTube
Contrary to what was said 13 years ago, that’s definitely the old Georgia state flag. The blue field with the Georgia state seal is very visible.
Also, just before that you can see another state flag, right when he begins do do a cartwheel. I can’t recall which one it is off-hand, but it would appear that the library is decorated with a number of state and US flags.
Zombie thread…off to CS.
Agreed. Here’s a (slightly blurry) screenshot. And here’s the then current Georgia state flag.
Since we’ve discussed “Animal House” in here, too, I feel it’s okay to wonder why Gotham City is in Indiana
That definitely looks like the Georgia flag, but not sure what the first flag in the scene, dark blue with a seal and stars might be. Lots of state flags have a seal on a blue field, but the stars don’t appear to match any flags. Indiana might be the closest, but the stars are white, not gold/yellow. Then there is a plain yellow flag that can be partially seen along with the 13 stars in a circle US flag, could be New Mexico or New Jersey. And that 13 star flag appears to be a odd non-standard design too.
All in all, weird ass scene. Watching the scene on youtube it has the feel of a rerun of an old TV show that had a proper rock song replaced with generic rock music because of a music rights issue.
Re: Animal House, Faber College was supposedly in Pennsylvania, at least in the book.
I remember, there was once a time when people could do as they pleased. If you wanted to put up a flag, you could put up, and you would not be surgically dissected to try to see what punishment is appropriate for putting it up.
Maybe that movie was made during those times.
Actually, there was never a time when “people could do as they pleased.” There have always been symbols that have been taboo, and punishments for the people who violated those taboos (some much more severe than the social condemnation used today).
There was, however, a time when it was O.K. to keep certain people as slaves, and later a time when it was O.K. to discriminate. In those times, symbols that we now consider to be offensive could be displayed. Those were not good times.
Having read the thread only up to Spoke’s post, I agree with him.
My high school team were the Rebels. Our class rings depicted a mounted Confederate soldier charging with his sabre drawn. The year after I graduated, they switched to a cartoon Confederate; apparently because it was thought to be less offensive than a more realistic depiction.
I was hoping for a screenshot from the HD release, but the version I found that said it was HD really doesn’t seem to have been.
If anyone has the Blu-ray, or is willing to get their hands on it (one way or another), we might be able to see those flags more clearly.
“The Breakfast Club” was one of John Hughes’ hit teen coming-of-age movies. That’s what his flicks were all about. Finding yourself, having fun, trying not to fit people’s expectations of you, and being individual. They often didn’t reflect the actual world. None of the events from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for example, would be everyday occurrences for most people. How many people have actually sung “Danke Schoen” in a parade or accidentally sent their father’s Ferrari backing over a cliff? People often saw them because it made them nostalgic for their teen years and they wished they had done the things the characters in the movies dared to do. They saw a little bit of themselves in Hughes’ characters.
May you point to where anyone was looking for “punishment” when the thread first started? It’s a perfectly valid question in the case of a film or stage play to ask if everything that appears on the set was placed there under deliberate director’s/writer’s/art designer’s instructions to make a point.
And anyway you don’t just put things up on the walls of the school library just for the sake of putting them up, without regard to context or educational value; not now, not in 2001, not in 1986, not in 1966.
People were speculating (kind of blindly in the 2001 absence of abundant online clips to check) on why would the CBF be displayed on the school library because back when the movie was made it already had become controversial to display it without a specific context in many places, and the OP and early commenters on the thread did not realize that the context was a prosaic “flags of the States” display and it was simply a then-current Georgia flag.
OTOH, I must say that seeing how the guy passes that flag twice in the scene, there was a second chance to notice it was NOT a plain CBF. This sort of reinforces the notion the states of the USA need some serious vexillological help, since hardly anyone recognizes their flags.
(Side point: Georgia of course was a particularly annoying case since the flag with the rebel saltire was adopted in 1956 as a nyah-nyah to the part of the country that was right about the issues of the time, when they already had a perfectly OK prior flag, and then in 2001 proceeded to first try to fix it with the Worst. State Flag. Ever. before correcting to the current one, based on the pre-1956 one and on the actual stars-and-bars.)
Nothing I said implied that the director made a specific point to seek out the flag and use it. Rather, he would have simply assembled a collection of the kinds of things that would ordinarily been a part of the scenery. For all I know, the film was just shot in an existing school room, with everything left in place. At a time when there was a great deal more tolerance than there is now, for that which may be considered politically sensitive. As for my"punishment" reference, any student who put up such a flag today would almost certainly be suspended or even expelled from the school.
A student putting up the Georgia state flag would be suspended or expelled? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
(Now crazy pills would get you suspended or expelled …)
To be fair, they have plenty of company. And I don’t think that’s all of the blue-bedsheet flags (see third paragraph.) Georgia made it worse with the added flags at the bottom, but it hardly stood out.
Just look through the U.S. state flag Wikipedia article to see all the seals-on-bedsheet flags. I counted over 20.
Actually, when the movie was made in 1985, stuff like this was ignored simply because everyone was so completely focused on the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union instead.
