How many anachronisms can you name in period TV shows/movies?

I'll start:
Krispy Kreme doughnuts had not yet reached the midwest in the 70s--they were still a regional company in the South.

Showed them attending a HS basketball game, and the gymnasium had a 3-point line. I believe this series was supposedly set before the 3-point shot was introduced into basketball (at least at the HS level).

you can go to:

http://www.imdb.com

and find out about all sorts of movie/TV "goofs", including anachronisms.

...it's supposed to be sometime in 1959. Patsy Cline and her husband are in a parking lot, dancing to a song on the car radio called "Stranger On The Shore", by Mr Acker Bilk. That song was not released until the Summer of 1963, a few months after Patsy Cline was killed in a plane crash.

Just curious.

eom

I haven't really watched it too much recently.

...in my original post. I'd just been reading another thread about That 70s Show and naturally assumed you all (excuse me, I mean y'all) knew what I was thinking!

For starters, many of the episodes of "American Dreams" take place in 1965, 1966, and 1967, and show Dick Clark broadcasting "American Bandstand" from Philadelphia on weekdays after school. But Dick Clark moved "Bandstand" to LA in 1963, and went to a Saturday-only schedule.

My roomie won't watch WW2 movies with me anymore, and anything circa 1812. Rev war would still get past me though. I'm much better with Mideval pieces.

Cars, phonographs, household appliances - the list goes on.

Anti-semitism hadn't been invented yet.

Phoenicians were all anti-semitic, as were the Eqyptians and Persians for that matter.
It has a much longer history than just Christianity.

emerge until the late 19th century.

that was my point.

was used or not. I don't think so but I could be wrong.

(the origional movie with Kirk Douglas), there`s a scene with a Roman soldier in tennis shoes and wearing a wrist watch--

Afros, muscle shirts, shag haircuts, bell bottoms. The show was pretty authentic at the start, but by the end of its run it was as if they weren't even trying to do a period show anymore.

character has the "Elvis In Concert" LP in his record collection. That record came out in 1977, recorded during Elvis' last tour in June of 1977. Just saw that film the other night for the first time and enjoyed it, all the same.



Also just saw In America -- great film, but all over the place chronologically. Supposedly set in the early 80s, but there are so many '90s things (the ones that first jumped out at me were the camcorder, the inline skates, and some cars) that the time period is more properly labled 'indeterminate.'

Then there's the most famous of all, possibly: the Zulu warrior in 1964's Zulu who's wearing a wristwatch.

If you really want to have fun, this site is the mother lode of goofs chronological and otherwise -- good for endless hours of fun:

http://www.nitpickers.com

Hawkeye (Alan Alda) wears a pair of brightly colored 80's running shoes. :-)

I used to be exposed to it when visiting my mother, whose highest word of praise is "that's a cute show."

The one that sent me into a rant was the episode in which the black family remembered waiting for Santa Claus during their days of slavery. Ahem! Christmas for a slave family meant a ham and a jug of corn liquor, period. And Santa Claus was not known nationwide until the 1880s.

During that same period, there was a Civil War drama called The Blue and the Gray. It accurately depicted people going out to watch the earliest Civil War battles for entertainment, but in this program, the battle got out of hand, and a newspaper reporter had to rescue a young woman who was trapped. So their eyes meet, etc. etc.

So far so good. But then he decides to seek her out. He goes to her house in D.C., marches up to the front door, and tells the butler who answers it, "I want to talk to Kathy."

Whoa there! In the 1860s. even the butler would have felt justified in kicking him down the front steps for that kind of boldness. In order to even pay a social call on a young woman from a wealthy family, even more so to pursue a romantic relationship, a man would first have to get her father's permission. If her father said no for any reason, that was the end of it. Furthermore, he would never call a new acquaintance "Kathy," especially when speaking to a family servant. He would address her as "Miss Lastname" and refer to her as "Miss Katherine" when speaking to a servant. Only after they were engaged (with Papa's permission, of course) would he be allowed to call her by a nickname.

This same drama had another anachronism when it referred to "the German ambassador." Germany was not a united country until 1870. If there was an ambassador from that part of the world in Washington during the Civil War, it was probably the Prussian ambassador.

Prussia established a Consul-General, also acting as Minister Resident in 1817. It is possible that other German countries had representatives as well, but certainly no ambassador.

The first German Representative with full Ambassador status took office in 1893 - prior to that no representative of any of the German countries held that title.

Recently I was watching "Born and Bred," a British television show about an English village in the 1950s. One of the characters referred to being "downsized," in the sense of having his job eliminated. That verb didn't come into common usage until the 1990s.

American TV is full of examples of shows using the wrong slang for the period. "I'll Fly Away" had a character say, "Life's a bitch." Again, the expression was off by a couple of decades

I have fond memories of my old housemate watching the Robin Hood series on PBS and finding anachonistic dialogue (i.e., the use of the term "hysterical"). Oh, and a recent Masterpiece Theatre series on Boadicea had characters referring to the problem of terrorism.

You know what I mean. A film is supposed to take place in 1957, but on somebody's radio, or perhaps on a jukebox, you'll hear a song that wasn't even recorded until 1962. Granted, most folks wouldn't catch those mistakes, but I catch them all the time, and they annoy the fuck out of me!

is supposed to take place in the early to mid 70s, correct? In one scene a Ford truck from the late 70s or early 80s is seen on the street in the background.

A housemate of mine swore that one of the books a character was reading -- maybe it was "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse, or a similar title -- was an edition that didn't come out until the 1980s or 1990s.

I also noticed that Connie's TV had a remote. Weren't hand-held remotes common a bit later than 1976, when the series begins?