TBG’s right. In the final scene we saw Tommy’s father and grandfather. Tommy had imagined them as characters in his globe but they were also real people in his life. There’s no reason to assume the other characters in Tommy’s mind weren’t also based on real people.
It might not have been a big deal for a lot of people (and in San Francisco no less), but at the time it wasn’t implausible that the landlord might be an older person with conservative (pre-1960s) values.
Will mention the opposite problem: when films/stories depict a certain future year, and then that year comes up and we still haven’t seen over the air hoverboards (well not commercially) ala Back to the Future.
The other example I recall was my teacher sheepishly saying, “well the author thought that would happen” I think it was a Ursula Le Guin short story set in 1987 where folks were colonized on the moon.
The best example has to be Asimov’s story about Everest; sure, he did a bad job of predicting the future when he wrote it – but by the time it saw print, “I predicted that Mount Everest would never be climbed, five months after it was climbed.”
…and with all these shows being in that kid’s head, I think someone has shown that our own world i.e. the “Real” world…is also in that kid’s head. Mind=blown, amirite?
Hey Alfishius, just wondering if you think it’s all in that kid’s head. Please clarify.
mmm
Stumbled across an episode of Adam-12 a few years ago. The main pair of cops had pulled someone over for some offense or other, and the guy was being a jerk. One of the cops took the guy’s license, went to his car, spread peanut butter on it, and ate it in front of the guy (licenses were paper then). He then wrote a guy a ticket for driving without a license, stating “Go ahead and challenge it. Tell the judge I spread peanut butter on your license and ate it. He’ll think you’re nuts.”
Yup, because what we want is our officers fabricating tickets then committing perjury in court.
It’s a good thing black people didn’t exist on television back then or things coulda got violent.
IIRC the only reason she was the 1st human in space was because she was smaller & weighed less than the male astronauts. Also didn’t the President promote the male lead at the ender (after she married the couple) because naturally a husband had to outrank his wife (I guess POTUS is a widow or spinster)? :rolleyes:
Interesting to read such a long-lived thread.
For me it’s not attitudes, prop technology, or prices that date some entertainment so badly as to make me disconcerted (although some items, like Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast in Tiffany’s make it unwatchable) it’s more about passe techniques.
The big one for me is the psychedelic montage. I was reminded of it recently when Cracked made some jokes about the Nixon campaign ad “Convention”. The film adaptation of “Flowers for Algernon” (Charly) had a notable one. Obviously, 2001 had a famous one at the end.
I think Kubrick liked the psychedelic montage-- and was good at them-- and they don’t stand out so much in his work, and thus don’t date them. I suspect that the ones that I dislike (and I really didn’t like the one in Charly, a film I otherwise didn’t mind) are imitations of Kubrick.
That montage in Charly was just awful, but I have a particular dislike for the “running from yourself” dream sequence here, with distractingly bad double-exposure photography that must have seemed primitive even in 1968.
But of course Cliff Roberston got the Academy Award - he didn’t go full retard.
I’ve been watching The Monkees season 1 lately. Vox Super Beatle amps? A Gretsch bass guitar? Come on!
Beating out Peter O’ Toole for **A Lion in Winter **who should’ve gotten it.
I had no idea Robertson got an Oscar for that. Here’s a link to the montage scene, which shows off his performance. Sure, the double exposure sequence is also bad, but holy crap.
Speaking of the Monkees, I think I remember that their show had a lot of this sort of thing as well.
Anything done in the 1960s was hyper-optimistic where spaceflight is concerned. At the time people took the early space launches as the equivalent of Kitty Hawk, and presumed that spaceflight would advance as fast as technological development would allow. In fact they’d have been disbelieving if you told them that there’d be an interregnum where we’d putter about in low orbit for fifty years before even considering doing as much as returning to the moon.
Heh, reminds me of a comment by an aerospace engineer who’d been involved in Apollo along the lines of "If you’d told me in 1970 where we’d be in 1995, I’d’ve asked ‘was there a major war?’ "
Drunk driving was sometimes treated humorously in old shows. A car on a spewing fire hydrant was always good for a few laughs.
Back on topic, Hawaii Five-O is a gold mine for dated material. I always enjoyed the scene where one of McGarrett’s underlings was tailing a bad guy. When asked for an update he replied, in all seriousness: “He was last seen with three chicks. They were both very foxy.” There was no charming pimp-like inflection to his voice. It was stated as if this was legitimate technical law-enforcement terminology that would stand the test of time.
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Even way back then, it infuriated me the way whenever there was a pretty girl from the mainland in the plot, the guys would immediately switch to the Hawaiian language in front of her and start making personal comments about her.
My favorite line was when McGarrett asked Chin Ho how much a bunch of figures came to: “I don’t know. I don’t have my abacus with me.”
I don’t know what you watched, but it wasn’t Adam-12!
I’ve seen all the episodes recently, not only is that not there, it doesn’t even fit the tone of the show. Jack Webb would never show characters doing crap like that. Let alone, them carrying a jar of peanut butter around just for jerk-assed tricks like that.