Barring stuff like Blazing Saddles where all the anachronisms are a joke, or something that was unavoidably left in by mistake like seeing airplane contrails in a work set in the Middle Ages, or something where that was part of the style/setting like people with modern clothing showing up in the 1950’s, what are some of the most anachronistic things you’ve seen that were included in a movie due to either laziness or ignorance on behalf of the filmmakers?
I’m probably already breaking my own rule with this one but it’s the best example I can think of, Robin Hood (2010) with Russel Crowe. Sure you can claim it’s “stylistic” but I don’t think so, I legitimately think the people who made the movie thought every single beach invasion scene even in the middle ages looked like D-Day. Complete with landing craft that opened from the front which is anachronistic by about 850 years.
I don’t know if it’s an anachronism, but Patton and Battle of the Bulge both used post-war American M47 and M48 tanks to portray both American M4 Sherman tanks and German tanks. They don’t even remotely look like the proper tanks; they could have done better with bulldozers and plywood.
Using a German Shepherd for The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. GSD’s didn’t exist in post-Civil War America.
There are a lot of movies like Bridge of Spies that are full of little anachronisms. They don’t affect the story, mostly they’re things like the wrong year car or wrong year typewriter, that sort of thing, but they bug me because they are so easy to fix. There are a lot of people that can tell the filmmakers at a glance that the prop is wrong. For a movie like BoS that pays the money for cgi to fix things, why can’t they spend a little time and get the right year car?
The twentieth-century spray bottles seen in several episodes of Star Trek (TOS).
I completely understand why those were used. Trigger-style sprayers were fairly new in the mid-1960s and looked modern, and it wasn’t worth the effort and expense to build a prop that looked more futuristic but was still recognizable as a spray bottle. Still, it’s amusing to see them now.
Blink and you’ll miss it, but in the 2005 movie The Squid and the Whale, there’s a poster featuring WWE wrestler The Hurricane. That gimmick debuted in 2001, but the film took place in 1986. Hulk Hogan would have been more appropriate.
I’m surprised BoS had any anachronistic typewriters, since Tom Hanks is a known collector and semi-expert in typewriters. I haven’t seen the movie, so many he wasn’t in any relevant scenes.
In The Rifleman, Lucas McCain (Chuck Connors) wears jeans, which is fine. But in one episode a view from behind shows “W” stitching on his back pocket. The scene was in 1880, but Wrangler didn’t sell jeans with the W stitching until 1940.
This is the movie that made all the street fighting in the crusades very reminiscent of modern day urban combat, complete with bow and arrow room clearing and a ‘machine gun’ overlooking a street? I think they were just going with ‘recognizable and cool’.
No, that one was Robin Hood (2018), with Taron Egerton, the other recentish big budget gritty re-imagining of the Robin Hood legend. That one also had a casino with roulette wheels and craps tables, cops in riot armor with riot shields fighting protestors throwing Molotov cocktails, armored vehicles, and so on. It was very definitely highly stylized, with very deliberate parallels to the modern day. It obviously wasn’t even trying for historical accuracy.
Robin Hood (2010) with Russel Crowe, by contrast, was trying to be “realistic”.
Mad Med was filled with anachronisms, but the one that sticks out is Don Draper coming up with the slogan for Lucky Strike Cigarettes, “It’s toasted!” Lucky Strike had been using that slogan continuously since WWI – before the Don Draper character was born.
Famously, when the Kingdom of the North celebrates their victory over the Night King, there’s a Starbucks cup in front of Danaerys, despite the fact that Starbucks didn’t open their first Winterfell franchise until 6 years later.
One of my favorite Star Trek stories has to do with salt shakers.
The prop crew acquired several futuristic-looking salt shakers to use in the Enterprise cafeteria. Problem was, they didn’t look at all like salt shakers and would not be recognizable as such to the audience. So they went down to the studio commissary and grabbed some 1960s diner style salt shakers and used those.
The exotic shakers they had bought? They became some of Dr. McCoy’s medical instruments.
Y’all are overlooking the most obvious anachronisms of all - nice teeth. Sure, restoration dentistry has been around for a long time, but for most of history it was expensive, time-consuming and painful, and it was a lot more likely that your average person in ye olde times had missing, crooked, broken, and yellow teeth.
