That’s because all Simpsons episodes take place in “present day” but all the characters have a fixed age.
The first time I saw the movie was at a pirate viewing club in Moscow. The guy I was with (a Russian) noticed this and asked me about it.
Edward Scissorhands has a 50s/60s/70s/80s vibe.
Actually, I think no one uses an iPhone on Severance.
“Lars and the Real Girl” is set in the year it was made, 2007, but the clothing styles were all from the 1980s.
The 1980s weekend-night series “Night Flight”, which showed a lot of things MTV didn’t, often screened an ultra low budget film school project called “I Was A Zombie For The FBI.” All of the hair and clothing styles were from 1982, when this B&W movie was made, but the cars were all from the 1950s.
2013’s “Nebraska” was shot in B&W and also best described as “the present day” regarding when it was set. (It’s worth watching just for the cemetery scene; IYKYK.)
“The Royal Tenenbaums” has a bunch of vintage-style elements in it, although presumably it takes place close to the present day (at the time).
Legion is set in a world where tech and society range somewhere between the 60s and early 2000s.
Ok, they use Android devices. I assumed they must be iPhones since it’s an Apple show, but I didn’t bother to check. But that’s irrelevant to my point; they have smartphones, which is an element from the present day.
The 1997 Leave it to Beaver movie takes place in some no-man’s-land between the 50s and the 90s. (As Roger Ebert observed, the cars are new, but they still use glass milk bottles.)
I could have sworn that if you zoom in on the front page during one of the newspaper headline montages, you can spot a date from the 1940s. Which would have been nonsense of course, due to just the computers and the Prince music, but it seems like it would be a production design easter egg.
The Wedding Singer was deliberately constructed as a pastiche of early-80s trends and styles. Everything from the Rubik’s Cube fad to J.R. getting shot on Dallas to A Flock of Seagulls to Billy Idol’s career all take place simultaneously.
Jean Shepherd himself was a WW2 vet, so the actual stories that the movie was based on were based on his experiences in the early-mid 1930s, even if they were about the fictional Ralph Parker.
But a lot of the details pointed to a setting a few years later- the military people in the streets before Xmas, the cars themselves (the Old Man drove a 1937 Oldsmobile, for example). But not too much later- there was no mention of the war, and the toy tanks in the window of the store would have looked laughably antiquated after the war.
I think it wasn’t important in the context of the movie whether it was 1935, 1937 or 1940- it was sometime in the immediate pre-war era, so nobody tried to pin it down too hard. The later movie kind of had to stick a pin in it, so that they could refer back to it without being too vague.
Which can be a bit strange to watch, when you started watching it when you were in high school, and Homer was a bit younger than your own parents, and now your own kids are Bart and Lisa’s age, and you’re older than they show Homer to be.
They keep retconning Homer and Marge’s youth- they’re not 70s teenagers anymore, but 90s teenagers.
To put it another way, when the series started I was in the 4th grade, which would make me the same age as Bart. Now I’m older than Homer.
Shepard was 6 years older than my father. He was on NYC radio for years. My father would listen to him nightly. The stories he put into his books came from what he talked about on the radio. It was certainly all from the Great Depression. My father completely related to the stories even though Shepard grew up in Indiana and my father was from Jersey City.
Yes, I agree, It was when Ralphie was a kid. When the adult Ralphie was remembering the high points- all jumbled up in his memory.
Needless to say, they were commenting on that in the show twenty-plus years ago. Homer would be recounting a story, and while setting the scene he’d shuffle the dates up by decades. “Who knows?”
A show I loved as a 50’s kid, but even then the temporal ambiguity nagged me: The Roy Rogers Show. 1951-57. Wild West cowboy adventures but with telephones and a jeep.
Nah, because the actors would have even bright white teeth, modern hairdos and cosmetics, shaven body hair, and contacts. Almost every production set in the past cheats that way.
A British comedy called Funny Woman started last year. It is specifically set in 1964, and started out with period music but by the fifth episode had the characters going to an LSD party with hippies attending and music from 1967. The Beatles didn’t even get their first dose of LSD until 1965.
Maybe each year of The Simpsons takes place in a different universe?
It takes place in our cultural image of The Sixties, with missile crises and moon landings occurring a few days apart
See here
Vicki Vale drives a Chevrolet Citation, which were produced between 1980-85.
The first one that comes to mind for me is Riverdale. Even though it’s in many ways set in modern time, a lot of the aesthetic (the cars, the fact that the kids all hang out at a diner, the clothing and hair styles) comes from the Fifties and Sixties.