I assumed that the idea of a town drunk letting himself in and out of the jail was always unrealistic. Did anything like that ever happen anywhere? I presumed that the idea was supposed to be funny because no sheriff ever treated someone that way.
The scene in Bowfinger where Steve Martin tries to look important by tearing the car phone out of a car, and talking on it like it’s a cell phone as he walks through a restaurant. Completely nonsensical today.
Brings to mind another story. Back in the day when car phones were corded handsets like nightshadea mentioned and maybe four people in the entire city could place a call simultaneously, a fellow had bought a couple dozen corded handsets (and nothing else) for pennies on the dollar. He carried a couple in his car for when the circumstances were right: He was in the right lane at a traffic light, there was a car on his right, with a passenger, and both windows were down.
When the stars aligned right he would pick up the handset and loudly say, “Hello? Why yes, he’s here – hang on a moment,” and hand the handset to the passenger with, “It’s for you,” timing it so the light was just turning green and he could drive off leaving the handset behind.
I don’t think people today would be OK with Hogan’s Heroes because it showed Nazis as not being really bad people.
It also seems to strain credulity that in a small country town in North Carolina, that nobody has a southern accent except for the sheriff and an occasional recurring character.
Sure, it was a joke about how out-of-it Mayberry was, but it wouldn’t work today even as a joke. (In fact, later in the run of the show they toned down Otis’s alcoholism as it became less and less socially acceptable.)
You had two “not so bad” Germans in Hogan- both WW1 vets whose big thing in life was avoiding being sent to the Russian front, and were both rather incompetent. And of course, in every war, on any side, you get those sort of guys. Neither one of them liked the nazis either.
The rest were quite nasty. Especially the Gestapo Major.
Of the cast of Hogan’s Heroes, Klemperer (Klink), Banner (Schultz), Askin (Burkhalter) and Caine (Hochstetter) were Jewish (and except for Caine all had fled Germany), and Clary (Le Beau) had been interned at a concentration camp:
Really the thing about Otis that wouldn’t work today is the idea of the town drunk as a lovable comedic character rather than someone who has a serious problem.
And they sobered him up completely for Return to Mayberry
Regarding alcoholism, Arthur(1981), with Dudley Moore as a spectacularly alcoholic millionaire, was an enormous hit. The remake in 2011 starring Russell Brand was an abysmal failure. Part of this was that Brand was no Dudley Moore, but I wonder if part of it wasn’t that alcoholism just isn’t that funny any more.
You also have the people who claim that “We’re not allowed to make fun of Nazis anymore” or “We’re not allowed to say Nazis are bad anymore”. Basically you can never do anything with Nazis, ever.
The problem is not that we’re not allowed to make fun of Nazis anymore or that we’re not allowed to say they’re bad. The movie Jojo Rabbit shows that we can do both. The problem with Hogan’s Heroes is that treats the Nazis as goofballs who can’t do anything right, so their prisoners can joke around and treat their prison guards as too dopey to do anything right. On the other hand, Jojo Rabbit shows that even right at the end of the war, the Nazis were willing to do terrible things to anyone who disagreed with them.
At least one of them. And other episode had a crime being solved by a nosy busy-body telephone operator listening in on calls.
No, they didn’t.
Klink was a buffoon, and Schultz was lazy, disloyal, and bribable. The other German characters weren’t.
Klink’s various superiors and various other Nazis who passed through the camp were competent, and actual threats to the heroes - or to Klink, whose buffoonery Hogan and the others relied upon.
Even the other, nameless, guards at the camp were generally treated as serious obstacles, even with Schultz as a weak link in their chain and hampered by answering to Klink.
Otis was also a domestic abuser. In one episode (Ellie for Council) he tried to hit his wife with a thrown leg of lamb and hit his mother-in-law in the mouth instead, making her need to go to the dentist. This was played for laughs.
Really, Kamino Neko, you don’t think the character in this clip is anything more than pompous and incompetent?:
Haha, I just found another example: The movie “8 Heads In A Duffel Bag” (a criminally underrated movie, IMHO… Truly a guilty pleasure of mine considering it has an abysmal 11% on Rotten Tomatoes, and just 35% from the audience), which I rewatched recently. The first third or so of the movie deals with his frat roommate buddies being interrogated as to the lead character’s whereabouts, when they only know he’s “gone on vacation to Mexico somewhere”… Nowadays, he’d have posted to Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram exactly where he was, who he was with, and what he was eating or drinking at least ten times already.
Oh, and him having no way of telling which of the 8 heads in the eponymous duffel bag were missing - because he couldn’t just take a picture of the remaining 7 and immediately send it to someone else.
It was a contemporary movie at the time (1997), and yet within 10 years most of the plot premises would become anachronistic!
I just remembered a cell phone related plot that wouldn’t work today. There was an episode of Seinfeld, probably from the final season, where Elaine called someone on her cell, I think to congratulate them on their new baby or something like that. The person she called was offended that she’d called on her cell rather than a land line. Jerry tells Elaine (paraphrasing) “The cell phone call from the street? That’s like telling the person you’re calling 'you’re not important enough to call from a real phone, so I’ll just get this call out of the way while I’m out running errands.” That plot only would have worked during the brief period when cell phones were common enough that someone like Elaine would have one, but hadn’t yet become reliable enough to replace land lines, so people would still consider the land line to be the “real” phone.
A sort of sideways example:
At the time the novel Good Omens was written (Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman), answering machines with little cassette tapes were common. This is a plot point when the demon Crowley transforms into an electron stream and leaps into a telephone line, pursued by the demon Hastur. When Crowley gets to the other end, he immediately switches on the answering machine, trapping his enemy in the answering machine.
This scene is repeated in the recent miniseries, but a throwaway line is put in to point out that Crowley’s answering machine is an antique. There are a fair number of folks who might be watching it, and would otherwise have no idea what the machine is or what it does…