What's new

When they just get it wrong historically. (2 Viewers)

Mark Y

Screenwriter
Joined
Mar 20, 2006
Messages
1,233
Honestly, both solid points of reference we got turned out to be wrong.

Potter's introduction was given as September '52, but there's no way the next 7 years happened in 10 months. Likewise, there's no way the entirety of the Blake, Burns, and Radar years happened in two months.

So, repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax, and forget the dates.

Didn't they have two different episodes that took place on the same New Year's holiday, one with Blake and one with Potter?
 

Jack P

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 15, 2006
Messages
5,593
Real Name
Jack
Didn't they have two different episodes that took place on the same New Year's holiday, one with Blake and one with Potter?

They had a post-Radar episode that put the ENTIRE year 1951 into the episode going from New Years Eve 1950 to New Years Eve 1951 just so they could have the entire 1951 NL pennant race as a running gag throughout the episode. So therefore in THIS MASH universe, Henry, Trapper, Frank and Radar were all gone between June 1950 and December 1950 and didn't even make it until the War *really* turned bad following the Chinese intervention etc.

And other character inconsistencies within the show are as bad as the many continuity errors in "The Odd Couple"!
 

LeoA

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Dec 31, 2008
Messages
3,552
Location
North Country
Real Name
Leo
The continuity errors that bug me the most are on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I'll spare the details since it doesn't have any direct relevance to the actual topic, but in the flashback episodes revolving around Laura and Rob having a baby, Rob & Laura flip flop between different homes and the office that Rob works in.

Millie even somehow manages to be expecting the birth of her son Freddie when Laura goes to the hospital, and evidently already has given birth and is home and all settled and back to normal when Rob brings Laura and their own baby home.

They're classic episodes though, even if they fail the continuity test.
 

Jack P

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 15, 2006
Messages
5,593
Real Name
Jack
I always thought that compared to other shows, the Van Dyke Show tended to be a lot better. We had the inconsistency in the name of Rob's Army buddy Sol/Sam Pomeroy/Pomerantz and yes they didn't always get the flashbacks on the offices right, and for that matter the issue of how many kids Millie and Jerry had seemed to vary. But compared to Odd Couple/MASH they did remarkably well.
 

Ron1973

Beverly Hillbilles nut extraordinaire
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Nov 26, 2012
Messages
2,559
Location
SE Missouri
Real Name
Ron Reagan (not that one!)
I was watching a documentary earlier on nuclear weapons. I didn't catch the title of the program as YouTube is set to autoplay and I was resting after mowing. They said that Albert Einstein talked to Theodore Roosevelt about the possibility of the nuclear bomb and then showed a picture of FDR! Obviously it was FDR that Einstein spoke to as we all know. I just giggled and continued to rest.
 

Ron1973

Beverly Hillbilles nut extraordinaire
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Nov 26, 2012
Messages
2,559
Location
SE Missouri
Real Name
Ron Reagan (not that one!)
I'm gonna bump my own thread again. I was watching a documentary about 70's tech last night. They got to the part of the Atari 2600. They showed some kid taking cartridges in and out without ever turning off the console. YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!!
 

The Obsolete Man

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2008
Messages
3,808
Location
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
Real Name
Robert
I'm gonna bump my own thread again. I was watching a documentary about 70's tech last night. They got to the part of the Atari 2600. They showed some kid taking cartridges in and out without ever turning off the console. YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!!

Well, you can take them in and out easily enough without turning it off. But you're not going to get a game to play unless you reset the power.

I think that knowledge has been lost since everything this century has been a disc drive. The power remains on, you just eject it and swap discs.
 

MishaLauenstein

Supporting Actor
Joined
Sep 4, 2002
Messages
774
Location
Vancouver, BC
Real Name
Misha Lauenstein
One recent show (might have been Mad Men) set in the 60s/early 70s had a character wanting to watch something at 6:00, so they were excused from the dinner table and they turned on the TV at 6:00. Magically, the picture came on.

In the real world you would get up at 5:58 to turn on the TV as it took 30 seconds to a minute for the picture tube to warm up. Then there's still time needed to fiddle with the horizontal and vertical hold depending on what channel you were watching.

One Mad Men thing that drove me nuts was an episode where the daughter was just sitting there on the phone making a long distance call. I know the family was rich, but I wasn't even allowed to use the phone without permission until I was in my teens let alone make a long distance call.

"I'm Dying Up Here" has anachronistic dialogue in almost every episode, but from a costuming standpoint, one of the characters wearing black underwear to work in the early 1970s seems extremely unlikely.
 

Ron1973

Beverly Hillbilles nut extraordinaire
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Nov 26, 2012
Messages
2,559
Location
SE Missouri
Real Name
Ron Reagan (not that one!)
One recent show (might have been Mad Men) set in the 60s/early 70s had a character wanting to watch something at 6:00, so they were excused from the dinner table and they turned on the TV at 6:00. Magically, the picture came on.

In the real world you would get up at 5:58 to turn on the TV as it took 30 seconds to a minute for the picture tube to warm up. Then there's still time needed to fiddle with the horizontal and vertical hold depending on what channel you were watching.

One Mad Men thing that drove me nuts was an episode where the daughter was just sitting there on the phone making a long distance call. I know the family was rich, but I wasn't even allowed to use the phone without permission until I was in my teens let alone make a long distance call.

"I'm Dying Up Here" has anachronistic dialogue in almost every episode, but from a costuming standpoint, one of the characters wearing black underwear to work in the early 1970s seems extremely unlikely.
I don't know how it was anywhere else, but out here, we were still on a party line until around 1980. I can remember my dad having to call the operator to make a long distance call in 1979. Now the reason I remember this is because, like me, my dad is named Ronald Reagan. He was calling someplace in Georgia and the operator wanted to know if he was calling Jimmy Carter! <_< Life might not be easy for a boy named Sue, but growing up Ronald Reagan in the 80's ran it a close second! "What are you going to do about taxes?" "How was the summit meeting with Gorbachev?" Grrr!!! <_< Then when Reagan got shot, somebody called the house looking for dad. He was (and still is) an insurance agent, so my mother assumed it was a business call. He come in, picked up the phone, and was greeted with the following: "I hear they shot ya, you S.O.B. Too bad they didn't kill you!"
 

jcroy

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2011
Messages
7,916
Real Name
jr
One thing which I find more and more annoying as i get older, is noticing that there is an inherent "reset switch" in tv shows featuring time travel or parallel dimensions. It just makes it too easy to "reboot" a show in a very lazy manner.

This inherent "reset switch" was lazily hit on shows starting with certain seasons like: season 4 of Fringe, season 3 of Continuum, etc ...
 

jcroy

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2011
Messages
7,916
Real Name
jr
(More thoughts on lazy rebooting via slamming down on the "reset button").

If I was a much bigger hardcore Star Wars fan, I think I would have been really pissed about Disney hitting the "reset button" in 2014 and downgrading the entire "expanded universe" (from novels, comics, etc ....) into non-canon status. At the time, I haven't read enough 1990s/2000s era Star Wars novels (yet) to have much devotion to the previous expanded universe canon.

https://movieweb.com/star-wars-canon-legends-expanded-universe-why-dropped/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/201...-chainsaw-to-the-star-wars-expanded-universe/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/lucasfilm-unveils-new-plans-star-698973


In the case of other scifi properties with a huge/moderate series of novels (or comics), some officially considered the novels + comics to be entirely non-canon from the start (with the odd few exceptions). For example, this appeared to be the case for Star Trek and Babylon 5. For this primary reason of "non-canonicity" from the start , I never really got into the Star Trek "novelverse".

For other scifi properties which didn't crank out too many novels (or the novels were too difficult to find), there wasn't enough content for a coherent "expanded universe" to emerge. So issues of canonicity were largely moot. For example, such as Battlestar Galactica (both original and reboot), Sliders, Fringe, X-Files, etc ...
 

jcroy

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2011
Messages
7,916
Real Name
jr
At this point, I don't waste anymore time on stuff which is officially non-canon in a particular show (or franchise).

I have too much other stuff to watch on my "unwatched list", instead of wasting too much time reading non-canon Star Wars novels (for example).

Regardless of the writing/production quality of such non-canon works, in practice it isn't much different than reading unofficial/unsanctioned "fan fiction".
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Latest Articles

Forum statistics

Threads
356,814
Messages
5,123,701
Members
144,184
Latest member
H-508
Recent bookmarks
0
Top