Anachronisms in "Mad Men"

As one who is old enough to remember the era being portrayed, I'm really enjoying the second season, which I'm watching on DVD right now and which takes place in the year I was in eighth grade. They have the "look" and many of the social attitudes just right, and I was delighted to find that Sal and Kitty have the same cookie jar on their refrigerator that we had on our kitchen counter when I was growing up.

However, I have found some anachronisms that struck me as false.

One from the first series bothered me. It shows the Draper children playing with a plastic dry cleaning bag and Betty scolding them not because they might suffocate but for making noise. Hey, I was a kid then, and my mom was warning us against playing with plastic bags in the 1950s, and I remember a silly playground jingle from around 1962, sung to the tune of "Alouette": "Suffocation, restful suffocation/Suffocation, the game we like to play./First you take a plastic bag/Then you put it over your head/Go to bed. Wake up dead/Ohhhh...." What can I say? It's sixth grader humor.

The second is from the second series when comedian Jimmy Barrett calls Betty Draper to tell her that Don is having an affair with his wife. As the phone call ends, she says, "Have a nice day." Oops. That expression wasn't popularized until the 1970s--in conjunction with smiley faces.

The third really struck me as wrong. It's the scene in which the Draper family goes on a picnic and then leaves all their litter behind. While this occasionally happened in the early 1960s, anti-littering campaigns started in the 1950s, and by 1963, leaving your picnic trash in the park was considered a REALLY low-class thing to do. In other words, an upper middle class family would not have done it.

On the whole, though, I really like this series.

I haven't seen that one, what station is it on?

Since you gave us your kid song, here's one of mine from the same period:

"My bonnie has tew-bur-kew-lo-sis
My bonnie has one rotten lung.
All day she spits blood and corruption
And rolls it around on her tongue!"

Sixth grade bards were the best!

after reading the rave critical reviews and then rented the second season from Netflix. (I'm about 3/4 of the way through it.)

Since the storyline is linear and the characters change over time and with the times (the first season takes place in 1960 and the second in 1963), I urge you to start with the first season. I suspect that the flashbacks in the second season wouldn't make sense to anyone who hadn't seen the first season.

Excellent kid song, by the way. I also have fond memories of "Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts."

somebody sneezed....etc

We've been watching Mad Men at my house. We watched seasons 1 and 2 on DVD and are now caught up to the new episodes.

My wife and I, both around 30, were horrified when the Drapers left their trash in the park!

Maybe the location matters more than the time frame but as a child of the sixties I remember littering still being fairly common place. We lived in the country where people threw all kinds of trash along the road.

I remember anti-litter campaigns in school but most of the adults from that time were too set in their ways to care.

My dad, for whom fishing was a drinking game, continued to "sink" his beer bottles and cans in the lake until he became too old to drink or fish.

From my point of view, that scene was accurate.

i remember parks when we traveled would have one lonely garbage can, and there was garbage everywhere, and that was about this time. people still threw stuff out of their cars....

back in my Ohio hometown. People think nothing of it. Out of sight, out of mind.

When we visit our local CA beaches to watch a sunset the beaches are always littered with plastic water bottles and other trash that people just can't be bothered to pick up for themselves.

And, sorry, but every smoker who discards their butt on the ground or out of the window of their car is littering. What's wrong with extinguishing your cig in the car's ash tray and later emptying the full tray in a garbage can?

BTW - the problem may lie with the moniker "litter bug." It sounds sort of cute, like, ladybug. Perhaps if that particular moniker had started out as "fucking asshole" it would have had a greater impact curbing bad behavior.

One of the girls was putting soft contact lenses in. It was supposed to be 1974.

I distinctly remember the first anti-littering campaign I saw. It was Iron Eyes Cody standing by the side of the road, while people drove by and threw trash at his feet. It totally devastated me as a child to think we were making the Native Americans cry by trashing their country. I think it was about 1973 or 1974. I have never littered since. :-)

I got my first set of Bausch & Lomb Softlenses in September 1973. You had ot boil them at night to disinfect them.

more that are accurate than not. the way betty draper dresses was like my mother, my father worked in a department store in long beach, ca, and she had access to the best clothes. seat belts were in newer cars but not mandatory. i used to sleep in the back window of our 58 olds on the way home from my grandparents, about 60 miles. the women's underwear then was horrible. girdles for all, even trim women like my mother. and brassieres like armor. i watch mad men on various links from sidereal. i hope that young people watch and see how it was for women then. men too, just as stuck in their ruts. gays, well, thank goodness it isn't quite as bad now. in the clothing industry there was more 'don't ask don't tell' than other businesses i think. that is what my dad said.

I also remember "Suzy Spotless" ads in the sixties. Sweet little girl in a white dress picking up trash and properly disposing in in a bin.

Before meeting with their Lucky Strike cigarette client, everybody in the agency is talking about "that article in Reader's Digest."

That famous article ("Cancer By The Carton") was published in 1952. Season One of the show was set in 1960, so the article wouldn't exactly be big news eight years later.

That was one of their crusades, along with anti-Communism.

I'm going to fire up a non-filter Lucky Strike. And listen to the Red Army Choir sing The Internationale.

:evilgrin:

going beyond hollywoody, it's second to "True Blood".