Watch this realizing that Jean Shepherd is an unreliable narrator. The Wizard of Oz was a 1939 movie, so the parade with those characters had to be Christmas of that year, movies in those days were ephemera and didn’t hang around on television or DVDs. The decoder pin (not a ring) has the date 1940 on it. Scut Farkus’s coonskin cap is from the 1950s. I had one myself. Bill Dietrich wasn’t traded by the White Sox until 1946. Just remember the whole movie is filtered through Ralphie’s 40 year old memories and move on.
We’ve discussed the timing of A Christmas Story at length in the past. The era is deliberately ambiguous, with contradictory cues in different places
To cite Wikipedia on this:
The YouTube series “Reel History” wherr an actual History Professor reviews movies for historical accuracy has made the claim that Christmas Storry thematically takes place in 1940, due to the fact the sheer number of background extras wearing military uniforms but absolutely no mention of the war or rationing. The existence of extras in military uniform indicates the 1940 Peacetime Draft as people shopping in military uniforms really wasn’t a thing in American society until then.
Remember, the parade had characters from MGM’s Wizard of Oz in it. The movie came out in 1939, so it can’t be before that, and it would have taken time for it to be well known enough to add to the parade.
In The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Denis Green, Anthony Boucher, and Ken Greenwald, at one point there is an English robin’s egg which is bright blue. In Great Britain, robins lay white eggs speckled with brown.
If an anachronism is something that’s in the wrong time, what’s the corresponding word for something that’s in the wrong place?
Anatopism?
For me, it’s always lighting and their attitudes toward it: a room long pre-electricity with one person in it will have several lamps burning, and they’ll go outside without putting any of them out (or taking one with).
And everyone is always way too clean.
My dad was a car guy, and was notorious in the family for not only noticing the wrong car model year, but the reuse of cars for background: “There’s that Buick again…” he’d mutter, as a car drove behind the hero.
I mentioned this in the Mrs Maisel thread (a show that’s full of anachronisms), but having a character at a 1964 hospital mention a desire for coffee and wonder “if the machine takes a twenty” is ridiculous. Bill-accepting vending machines didn’t exist then, and even now it’s very rare to find one that takes a $5, let alone a $20. And someone in the 1960s would have had change anyway (people carried a lot more change then because a lot of things you’d want to buy would cost less than a dollar)
Not officially, no.
There was an unpublished novel (someone who read it described it to me as more a well-written fan-fic novella than an actual novel) during the Lucasfilm years, in which a sleeper-ship escaped the THX-1138 Earth to find a new home (in the Milky Way) and be free.
They hit a wormhole/space wedgie and got flung across the Universe to the Star Wars Galaxy, and popped out somewhere near what is now known as Coruscant, which was an uninhabited Earth-like world. They settled there, and were doing pretty well until a nasty alien race conquered and enslaved them, obliterating most of their history and culture.
Some centuries/millennia later, humans won their freedom, adopted the tech (including hyperdrives) of their former overlords, and everything else follows. One note related to me is that the anti-alien bias amongst many Core-world humans stems from that original alien conquest.
Word 'round the campfire is that Lucas was “soft” on definitively stating when/where Earth-humans entered the Star Wars galaxy (or, if they even were Earth-humans), even if he did like the tie-in to TXH-1138. But the story never got the “nod” from Lucasfilm, and then they sold the Star Wars rights to Disney, and who knows what’s what anymore.
I just watched a season 1 episode of Mad Men, which takes place in 1960.
One of the characters, in the context that she was tired or bored with something, announced, “I am so over _____!”
Did anyone use that phrasing in 1960?
I just did a search using Google Ngram. It appears that the phrase “I am so over” didn’t become popular until 2000 or so. Because Google Ngram is looking at written examples, not spoken ones, it’s possible that it became popular in speech a little earlier than that but didn’t appear in writing until then. Still, it certainly appears that no one in 1960 would have said that.
The room is always way too brightly lit for just candles or oil lamps. The only movies I can think of that portrayed this realistically are Barry Lyndon and Heaven’s Gate.
Thanks, that was my primary point, which I managed to omit!
Yeah, it’s always amusing when someone walks into a cave and lights a match that has the power of a 250-watt halogen spotlight.
I’m willing to forgive a lot of lighting issues. Otherise we’d all be going “what’s happening? I can’t see a thing!”
The other example of this is “back lit night scenes”. Why is there a blue glow behind you? Shouldn’t you go check that out?
Nighttime in the country with no moon is DARK. You can’t even see your feet.
Right, like in The Hateful 8. Minnie’s barn was beautifully backlit by 1860s technology!
It’s even more ridiculous when you stop and think that $20 in 1964 would be about $188.58 today! Nobody’s going to carry that amount around casually, looking for a cup of coffee.
Absolutely.