Oh that kind of thing has always happened (MASH (written in the 1970s but portraying the 1950s) had slang and terminology from the 1970s turn up. It’s just easier for folks who lived through the 70s and 80s to notice when current programs get our lifetimes wrong.
The Adam Sandler film The Wedding Singer was aesthetically a mashup of early-eighties fads, styles and tropes, so it can’t really be pinned down to one year. Within the timeframe of the movie, Billy Idol is a star, the Rubik’s Cube is big, and J.R. gets shot on Dallas.
This is now one of my all time favorite Bad Films.
Forget about the mishmash of historical errors and National Enquirer-style Alien Stuff. The film makes no sense even taken on its own terms.
A few examples:
The Bad Guys kidnap some of the Caveman People as slaves. To bring them back, they have to go through the Swamps of the Giant Birds and the Desert with Giant Cats and take boats on the river. All this to get some slaves (and maybe get yourselves killed by the birds, the tigers, or the desert people)? They must be DAMNED good slaves!
And, oh, yeah, they also brought back mammoths to do their work. Over the River and through the bird-infested woods we go. How did they get the mammoths on the boats? Did they only steal baby mammoths?
Our Hero, following after the Bad Guy tribe, accidentally falls into a Saber Tooth Tiger Trap. This is a giant hole in the ground with pointed punji sticks in the bottom pointing upwards to transfix anything falling in. Our Hero evidently doesn’t see the Giant Hole in the Ground, even though at least two other animals have fallen into the trap before him. Slick trackin’ there.
One of the animals, a gazelle or something, fell onto the punji sticks, but Our Hero hasn’t. Nice trap you guys built there. Even more damning, the giant Saber Toothed Tiger that fell into the trap didn’t hit any punji sticks, either, and it was a lot bigger than the gazelle. Again, nice goin’ there, trap people! You built a trap that kills antelopes, but not twelve-foot-long tigers or human beings.
Our Hero, being a Sentimental Idiot, decides to pull an Androcles and the Lion and help the giant carnivorous tiger out of the trap, rather than leaving it there to die. In the Real World, behavior like this is insane. It fits the logic of the movie, so I’ll allow this bit of craziness. After all, after sniffing him, the tiger leaves him alone! What I can’t buy, though, is that, after getting a good whiff of his scent, the tiger doesn’t follow his trail back to his camp, where Our Hero’s chief is waiting with a hurt leg. Thanks for the snack!
And so on… The movie is filled with such silliness. For a perfect evening, pair this with Stargate to see more outrageous aliens ‘n’ Ancient Egypt. Although Stargate is a lot less dumb and inconsistent than 10,000 B.C.
It works as long as you never leave the mammoths alone with the foxes, or the mammoths alone with the corn. But you can leave the foxes alone with the corn.
Leave the fox. Why did you have a fox?
Not if they’re hungry. Foxes eat all sorts of things, corn included.
I really doubt a fox would take on a mammoth, though the mammoth might stomp on the fox.
thorny-the-overly-literal
I was watching a film set in 1940s WW2 but written in 2010 where one of the American GI’s calls the rations given to him “Grody”.
That can’t possibly be period accurate right?
The guy who fell into the vat was Grody.
Reminds me of the episode of that awful Dirty Dozen TV series in the '80s where they were fighting Fascist cavalry in the Balkans. One GI says to his buddy “Man, you were awesome up there on that horse!”
It was at that point I changed the channel.
Maybe so, but Dictionary.com dates grody meaning disgusting to the 1960s, and likely from grotesque.
It wasn’t so much what he said, it was how he said it. He sounded like he’d just come from hanging out at the mall.
My dad was a WWII vet. I can’t imagine him using “Awesome!” in any context.
I’ve always thought “grody” was a corruption of “grotty.” Does “grot” come from “grotesque” as well, or does it just date back to Reginald Perrin?
Illuminating, thank you! 
I’ve used "grotty’ many times, but “grody” never.
Possibly. I became old enough to use that word in the early 1970s, as a grade-schooler, and my generation can’t have made it up, although who knows, maybe they did.
Is it certain it was set in the 1940s? It feels pre-WWII to me.
The movie is set in 1940 or '41, based on stuff like when Ralphie’s decoder ring was produced. Pre-war for America, at least. It was based on stories written by Jean Shepherd about his childhood. Shepherd was Ralphie’s age in 1928.
It’s not as far off as you think. Apparently it comes from Old English but started taking off in Britain in the 1960’s. Here’s a Google ngram search graph.
Still 15 years too late and a continent too far to be realistic. But it’s worth knowing it didn’t start in 1980’s California.
“Mother’s Look magazine” was 1937. Maybe she just hadn’t finished it yet.*
It could be that the set decorators are confused, and the 1940 decoder is way cooler than the earlier decoders. I just accept Ralphie’s memory is conflating different years’ memories. Like he can’t tell a 1947 firetruck because he just can’t see the differences.
But they should have kept his name Jean. Otherwise why would dead Aunt Clara keep thinking he was a girl?
*I always find is amusing that Ralph puts the Boy’s Life on the page with the nude beach.
I was watching The Goldbergs a few months back and two characters gave each other fist bumps. That totally took me out of it, they should have high fived or slapped each other some skin.
Maybe they were big Wonder Twins fans?