Any time there’s an establishing shot of a city skyline in a movie/show that’s supposed to be a period piece, I make a point of seeing if I can spot any buildings that didn’t exist at the time the movie is set. Two that come to mind; Anchorman, set in 1970s San Diego, has One America Plaza (erected 1991) and Petco Park (erected 2004, the same year the movie was made) in its skyline, and Jeeves and Wooster, which was set at an imprecise point in between the World Wars, used several establishing shots of New York City with the old World Trade Center towers visible.
Perfect example is there’s a 2016 film starring Nicolas Cage called “USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage” which is based on the true story of the sinking of the USS INDIANAPOLIS in 1945.
At one point in the movie a sailor in his bunk is reading a National Geographic magazine and is looking at an article about sharks (talk about foreshadowing!) However the National Geographic he’s reading is clearly from the late 1970s at earliest because it has full color underwater pictures of sharks that are WAY too high quality to be taken in the 1940s. Also the front of the National Geographic has an image and they didn’t put images on the cover until the 1960s iirc.
It’s very clearly super anachronistic in a “serious” historical movie and they had no reason for that scene, but they just didn’t care.
That’s a good one.
Which is sad, because the lowly USS Alabama museum, which doesn’t have the budget of a Major Motion Picture, is chockablock full of period correct props. The ship store is full of proper candy bars, CrackerJack, combs, cigs, shaving cream, etc. If they can do it, why not a movie?
If you see my entry in the photo manipulation thread, it’s trivially easy to make Nat Geo covers that look correct.
It’s confusingly phrased. I believe the correct parsing is: a thing that (wasn’t intentional) or (an accident).
Which is basically the same thing.
The OP is looking for accidental or unintentional anachronisms, excluding things deliberately done for stylistic or humorous purposes.
Sometimes they try too hard. A couple of years ago there was a Christmas episode of “Call the Midwife” set in the early 1960s which was atrocious on a variety of grounds, but one of the things that irritated me was a subplot based on the Guinness Book of Records. The prop they used was a thick hardback book with a cloth cover. I suspect that they went out and bought an actual Guinness Book of Records from 1962 or whenever. But whatever they did, the prop actually looked about 60 years old, the cover was worn and looked like it had faded a lot. Moreover, it clearly didn’t occur to them that a new Guinness Book of Records would have come with a glossy, colourful, illustrated paper jacket, as is easily discovered with 30 seconds of googling. They could easily have mocked up a jacket that looked new. So this anachronism was caused by a combination of earnestness and naivety.
It’s not the only time I’ve see a period drama use authentic props that actually looked far too old for the period in question. I saw a new edition of some novel from the 1950s. The picture on the front cover had a bathroom shelf with some contemporary products on it, it looked at first glance that it might have been taken at the time. But then if you looked closely, you could see spots of rust poking through the paint on the tins, since the tins were in fact 50 or 60 years old.
Going back to “Call the Midwife”, they kept referring to the “Guinness Book of World Records”, which is not what it was called at the time. I suspect they did a deal with Guinness publishing, and were told they had to use the modern name, which is just annoyingly stupid.
I don’t think that’s quite it - the OP doesn’t want anachronisms that were clearly mistakes. The Roman legionnaire wearing a wrist watch in a serious period piece isn’t covered, because if someone on set had noticed it, they’d have had the actor take the watch off. Nor would a scene in a comedy where a legionnaire checks his watch before declaring he has to be somewhere, because the anachronism is deliberate. But having a scene where a Roman legionnaire talks wistfully about going home to grow tomatoes would count, because the scene was intentionally included in the movie, was not written for comedic purposes, but is totally ahistorical, because tomatoes are a new world crop, and the Romans didn’t have them.
Marilyn Monroe et al. pass around a box of Ritz crackers during the “Pullman Pajama Party” scene in Some Like It Hot.
The movie is set in 1929 and was filmed in 1959. Ritz crackers didn’t come out until 1934.
I recently watched an episode of the 1958 Western “The Rifleman” set in the 1880’s in Old West New Mexico, and at one point a bounty hunter walks into town with a wanted poster, and the wanted poster has a actual black and white photo of the bounty that looks like it’s the actors publicity shot but wearing a cowboy hat. It literally looked like a perfect photocopy the image quality was so good on it. I can guarantee there were no wanted posters with actual black and white photos on them in the Old West at least in quality that looked just like a photograph.
The opening shot of “Escape From Alcatraz” features the Golden Gate Bridge and the caption “San Francisco 1960.”
Prominently visible in the shot is the Sutro Tower - built in 1972.
For what it’s worth here is site about Guinness Record Book collecting which has pictures of every edition since the first one in 1955: Guinness Record Book Collecting
I have noticed this kind of anachronism a lot lately. Period dramas from the 1980’s and earlier are sprinkled with expressions that sound like Millennial Facebook-isms (to my ears).
I’m willing to bet that it would take you all day to find a Sherlock Holmes movie where all the dialog is faithful to Victorian England. (Excepting versions set in the present, of course.)
I think you notice things like this more when you’re older, because you can remember a time when people didn’t use those phrases.
For example, hearing the word “issues” used for “problems” always seems anachronistic to me in period films. But to someone in their 20s, this is simply how people have always talked; for them, it’s neutral and not period-specific.
I’m sure there are also plenty of anachronistic dialog in stuff that was made when we were in our 20s that we’ll never notice, either, but people older than us spot right away. If something is tailored for you, it just seems “normal”.
I understand how this error is made, but that doesn’t make it any less wrong. It’s not a very good writer who writes a 1960’s period piece in the same register they use in Snapchat with their buddies.
I can sort of tolerate it if the tone is consistent, but it drives me nuts when it’s not.
That kind of inconsistency was particularly jarring in the Amazon film The Vast of Night, a Twilight Zone homage set in 1958. The opening scenes are full of Fifties-esque phrases, like “What’s the tale, nightingale?” and “double-dealing devil dog.” Once the plot gets underway, though, all that stuff is dropped and the characters talk like present-day people. Barely a half hour into the film, a telephone operator reports having “issues” with the switchboard.
There’s the original Bizarro, a creation of an imperfect duplication ray accidentally aimed at Superboy.
The Army tries to destroy him but can’t. Eventually Superboy drops an atomic bomb on him, but Bizarro catches it and hurls it to the Moon, where it explodes! The problem is that Superboy is set before the A-bomb was used! Furthermore, an observer at a guided-missile base sees it and says, “We were ready to fire our lunar missile! Who hit the Moon ahead of us?” (scroll down) Bronze Age Babies: Enter Bizarro - Dueling Pencils (and Plotlines)
Both errors were corrected in collections and reprints. IIRC “Super TNT bomb” replaced “A-bomb” and the observer at a generic Army base only says something like “Smoke on the Moon?? What happened??”
It would probably take even longer than that to find a Sherlock Holmes version set in the present where all the dialog is faithful to Victorian England.
In “Pearl Harbor”, the pilots are training on a Navy base on Long Island. Except that when they’re flying, you can clearly see the dry Southern California landscape.
This one is just weird.
In the made-for-TV movie Columbo: Any Port in a Storm, the muderer is a wealthy vintner/oenophile named Carsini. He’s so rich that he has California vanity plates on his luxury automobile that read CARSINI.
Thing is, California re-tooled the dies on their car-tag stamps in 1975 to accommodate seven characters. The movie came out in 1973.
Anachronistic?