Glaringly obvious anachronisms in tv and movies

That's not exactly an anachronism, unless the story was supposed to take place in Victorian times. I think the right word would be anatopism.

How exactly is that an anachronism, OP?

Alright wrong word then but obviously out of place for England.

Thanks R1 for the proper word but even in Victorian England that house would be out of place.

Well, in the film of Phantom of the Opera (musical), there is a nutcracker costume in the cellar scenes. First, it had not been written at the time of the film. Second, in France they would have done "The Fairy Doll", not the Nutcracker.

Speaking of dolls, they are almost always wrong. From The Paradise to Le Miz to Call the Midwife, they just can't be be bothered to get them right. Oddly, one time they got them right was a so-so British TV show titled Strange.

The costumes in the 1994 Little Women were not so much anachronistic as WTF. I mean why would girls in New England be wearing Pre-Raphaelite clothing???

Most women's clothing in films is somewhat anachronistic as the necklines are always changed. The doctor's costumes on Murdoch Mysteries are particularly bad in this way.

In "The Lion in Winter" opening scene, Peter O'Toole & his lady are having a picnic. There are pineapples on the blanket.

Pineapples were unknown in 12th century England.

I was so rich, I could afford to see [italic]Camille[/italic] three years before it was even made.

That's a really bad one R5.

How many other little boys had hair like Bonnie Franklin during the Teddy Roosevelt administration like I did?

R5, a lot of the anachronisms in Lion in Winter are intentional. They also wrap Christmas presents, which wasn't done in the 12th century.

In a BBC production of "Martin Chuzzlewit" there is a scene where they are drinking tea out of cups and saucers that weren't made until 50 years after that time.

That was the Peter Tobin case, OP. The wife narrated the story, but the reenactment of the storyline was obviously filmed in North America.

The wife was very "iffy" herself. She claimed she saw him abuse two prostitutes in the home. But he killed two young women in his home who weren't prostitutes. I think she saw those crimes and didn't do anything about them.

That's it R11. Thanks.

I liked Strange, R4 and wish they would release it on DVD. Mostly because I love Richard Coyle, but also Ian Richardson.

R13, I loved the male actors in strange. Less fond of the female lead, but I suppose she had to contrast to the men. I found the material so-so, partially because they never followed what the demon actually was. I do wish there had been more episodes. It was clearly going somewhere before it was cancelled.

I own this thread

I'd forgotten that R15. Yes, I did love Joanie's very un-50's-60's perm.

Trust me, those ID Discovery channels are made by the cheapest cunts on the planet. Non union, horrible rates for the actors, shoot three shows at once. Disgusting. The last thing they care about are details. Cheap cheap cheap -- or, rather, capitalism since they pocket a huge licensing fee but pay cast and crew nothing.

In general, most "period" musical films use modern day hairstyles, rather than those of the period in which the film takes place. See Funny Girl. No woman would be caught dead walking around with Streisand's bob back in the teens and 20's.

Everyone at Discovery Communications should be shot for letting Discovery and TLC go to shit like they did. Some of us remember when they actually had educational programming back in the 1990s.

Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, and Steve McQueen in THE CINCINNATI KID (1965). The film takes place in the Depression '30s, and yet...

Most of those ID reenactments are filmed in Canada & Australia

Most of the actors on deadly women are Aussie

Some of the most pathetic ones like "Swamp Murders" are shot in Atlanta. Another even cheaper one in Tennessee. SAG was invented for asshole production companies like the ones that do this shit.

R23 apparently, SAG-AFTRA doesn't care, since they let all these foreigners (Brits, Canadians, Irish, Scandinavian, Aussies, Kiwis) take American acting jobs. DOWNTON ABBEY has even won the Best Ensemble SAG three times, and they don't abide my SAG rules. This was a minor scandal when they first won in 2013, but nothing was said after they won in 2015 and 2016.

Wasn't the classic example some Biblical era epic like Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments where one of the Roman soldiers is wearing a wristwatch?

Yeah, I always thought that was strange too with "Abbey". Why reward a show that doesn't use a SAG contract? (WGA, my union, doesn't award scripts that aren't written by WGA members, of course)..

But SAG-AFTRA continues to show themselves as a union with no teeth and it is baffling, especially post merge which happened 30 years too late. But now almost every commercial is non-union, even in L.A., because producers figured out they didn't have to pay actors big bucks when so many non-union ones will gladly take the gig. And SAG-AFTRA let it happen.

My opinion? We writers have our own issues but we are cerebral by nature and, yeah, mostly intellectual. Actors are emotion based, great for their work -- but SAG has been a mess for years as far as leadership goes. Even their elections! WGA and DGA can and have stopped Hollywood in its tracks overnight with a strike but SAG just keeps losing more and more teeth.

We could probably start an entire thread on this issue alone.

(Plus SAG president Ken Howard just died. Maybe he heard us talking about him.)

R25/R26 what I found strange about the 19th SAGs (held in 2013) was that they shut out BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD of any nominations, because it was not made under the terms of SAG-AFTRA's Low Budget Feature Agreement, which mandates the use of professional actors. And yet that same night DOWNTON won its first Ensemble SAG.

The Ice Cold Murders show seems to be shot in Washington or Maine, with large, snowy coniferous forests. They reenacted a murder that happened about 30 miles from where I live. It's a depressed town that's become mostly minority. Nobody takes care of their lawns or houses, there are five or six cars per house -- in the driveway, in the street and in the front yard. Chain link fences. Pit bulls. "Run down" is the term that comes to mind if you have to drive through it. Everyone in their teens and twenties live with their parents and they all have children but never married. Sometimes, there are 5 siblings living with their parent, and each sibling has at least one kid.

Well, on the Ice Cold Murder show, the town was a beautiful, bright, sparkling village with large waterside homes. Think upper class Maine summer getaway. They also didn't mention the murdered woman had a child and, in fact, was referred to by the media here first as a "missing mom" and then as a "murdered mom." I guess they didn't want people to wonder why she wasn't home with her kid instead of bar hopping with friends at 4am, then getting into a truck with some strange guy she just met, even though she had a boyfriend who'd dropped her off at her parents' house about 10 minutes before the stranger texted her.

I was kind of surprised at home glamorised they made the story. Usually the actors aren't much better looking than the real life people., but in this case everyone was practically a movie star compared with IRL. The IRL sad little bars were spacious nightclubs. It looked like they actually put some money into the production. Or maybe it's just because the real case was so sordid. But Discovery can do "sordid" really well in their cheaper productions.

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Dynasty's view of Moldavia looked suspiciously like California.

The women's hairstyles in Doctor Zhivago.

The entire soundtrack of grease

Terms of Endearment was set in the seventies but looked like the 80's.

Palm trees in Denver in "Dynasty."

My friends have a house like that in the UK which was built in Victorian times. Why is that odd?

The house in the ID discovery series was huge and new -- at least within the last 20 years. It wasn't a real Victorian. It was on a very large piece of land.

R18, that's always been the case, but it's gotten more and more blatant - I recently watched a film called The Keeping Room, set during the Civil War, and the two female leads are repeatedly depicted wearing their long hair loose, in public - even to work in the fields and around the farm in the heat. It was ridiculous - this was an era when women braided their hair just to sleep!

Something I've noticed more and more is really anachronistic language being used in period films. I attribute it to the age (and cluelessness) of the screenwriters. I watched a horror movie partially set in the early '70s a few months ago, and it was a nonstop barrage of 'dude!' and 'bro!'. FFS.

R37, that is intentional. You will also notice American words in British films and TV shows. Producers feel that historically accurate word use is alienating. They have no interest in how the film/TV will hold up since the assumption is that it will just be remade in 20 years rather than re-released. You will also notice that many films and TV shows don't have period costumes, they have period inspired contemporary fashion. This is true of Ripper Street, Penny Dreadful, and the recent War and Peace. Again they feel that anything that is not in a 15-30 year-olds vocabulary or experience is a liability.

The use of British words are not well received in the US, but US words are accepted in the UK.

The 2005 version of "Pride and Prejudice" is rife with this shit, it was made by people who didn't understand the 19th century and didn't want to. They made Mr. Bennett a dirt farmer who herded his own pigs, without having a clue that a man who had any contact with pigs would NEVER be attending parties with the Bingleys and the Darcys. Of his daughter would be lucky to be hired as a maid at Pemberly, she would never even dream of becoming the lady of the house. Or that ladies of the period shouldn't put their fucking elbows on the table.

But the worst was the moment where Lizzie and Darcy met by accident, and were both startled... and she turned around and sprinted away! I suppose the director wanted the moment to seem dramatic and to squeeze in a action-filled tracking shot, but that was quite literally the last thing a woman of that time and place would do. The upper classes of that day absolutely despised cowardice and valued composure and courage - a woman who literally ran away from an awkward social moment would be the laughingstock of the local society. Hell, she'd be the laughingstock of the London ton as well, of anywhere Darcy was known.

Why the hell anyone lets Joe Wright direct films at all, much less period films, I don't know.

This is an interesting piece on historical accuracy vs historicity in period TV & film. What's the right balance between historical accuracy and modern sensibility? The author is comparing the Showtime version of The Borgias with the Tom Fontana series made for European TV, but you don't need to have watched either to follow the article - they're just being used to illustrate the author's points.

Forget scripted shit. I know of a serial killer (not caught yet) in IT. He makes bank.

One that makes me laugh is the old John Wayne movie "The Comancheros". The story taking place between the final defeat of Santa Anna and U S statehood so it can't be later then 1845.

So naturally you see Wayne and all the other characters running around with post-Civil War Colt six-shooters and Henry and Winchester repeaters. And all with brass cartridge ammunition instead of the ball and cap paper cartridge ammunition of the era. Excluding a pair of dueling pistols and a blunderbuss shown once for comic relief, nary a muzzle loader or flintlock to be seen.

Not even to mention everybody was clean-shaven, showered, and wearing laundered and ironed clothing in the Texas desert.

There's a movie from the early 1950s called "Kansas Raiders", about the Civil War conflicts that took place in Kansas.

The movie appears to have been shot in the Sierra Nevada mountains, for reasons I do not understand. I mean, if they didn't have the budget to leave California, why not use the Central Valley? It's flat, open, and rural!. Anyway, look at this still, with the pine trees and hills behind the actors. The whole movie is like that, it's supposedly set in Kansas and they're chasing each other up steep slopes covered with pine trees and pale gray Sierra granite.

The Vivien Leigh version of Waterloo Bridge is typical of older movies not bothering to be too accurate. The story has a "frame" set during World War II but most of it is a flashback to World War I. In the WWI sequences we occasionally get a glimpse of a period motor vehicle, but the women's dresses (with skirts up to the knee) and hairstyles are vaguely late 1930s.

The show Vikings. Completely unwatchable because of its inauthenticity. Beards so trimmed and well groomed, you'd think they were all gay millennials. Clean, silky hair--even in battle. Teeth so perfect and white they practically glow. Fitted shirts rolled up to reveal bulging biceps (again---more like stylish, gay millennials). Obvious make up and blond highlights. 21st century jewelry. Waxed eyebrows.

Don't put so much stock into TV and movie entertainment. Just dont.

You know what happened to those throwaway kids who were ignored in lower class homes. They think anyone wealthy acts like Thurston and Lovey Howell the 9nth.

Rich people don't raise their voices or ever get inebriated. I know this from watching TV.

Of course, on the other hand I love the historical obsessives. NYC subway fans are either the best or the worst depending on your point of view. Read the trivia for Bridge of Spys. Apparently, the have everything wrong from the subway cars to the colors of the glass globes at the subway entrances.

I thought producers hired specialists just to make sure everything is historically accurate.

r47 but then along came Lucille Bluth

R49, They do... and then they ignore them. In some cases, the do try; but if the difference between historical accuracy and close-enough is a huge expense, they will go with the cheaper option.

Also, there is the issue of being permitted to use the correct item. In the Hateful 8, they got the loan of an actual period guitar. They knew it was going to be smashed, but a duplicate was supposed to be used. They smashed the antique guitar... and it may not have been an accident. Apparently the director intended to smash the original all along. Similarly, in the Redford Great Gatsby, the extras at the party scene all has real 1920 beaded dresses. The director decided at the last minute that the extras should jump in the pool. All of the dresses were ruined. What is interesting is that wardrobe did not even make an attempt to correct the situation. The dresses were returned to the owners wet and moldy.

The other issue is that there are now people who are hired to pick out elements that will alienate younger audience members. So you can have a class between one consultant that says a woman of the period would never wear that and a consultant who says that the garment is too strange for young people and it needs to be updated.

Lastly, films are very careful to NOT represent women in period films accurately. Women in films, regardless of the period, need to be modern, active, assertive grrrrls. Not only will the female audience members not respond well, but in many cases, actresses will not take the roles. The obvious example is all of the recent rewrites of classic fairy tales.

If they are going to do fairy tales for the millionth time each, why not make it relevant to a modern audience?

R52, if something has survived for over 150 years if not much longer, why does it need to be made "relevant" to a modern audience? The Cinderella story has flourished in ballet, opera, stage, TV, puppetry and literature forever. Clearly, it has inherently has a relevance. Suddenly, in the last ten to fifteen years, it is no longer relevant?

I'm sick of all the updating and modernizing of classics. Wicked? Blech. Write your own damned play/musical instead of co-opting someone else's work and calling it your own because you've bastardized it.

R54, I have nothing against updating or modernizing classics whether it is West Side Story or Clueless. The problem with Wicked and things such as that is that it does not stay faithful to the original source work, while trading off the good will of the original work. It is purely exploitive and really no better than the porn films that play off of the titles of popular films. If one is going to write a prequel to The Wizard of OZ, the events of The Wizard of OZ should flow naturally out of the prequel. If Wicked is "fact" then The Wizard of OZ could not take place.

R55 you've got it wrong. WICKED (the book) is faithful to the original source. Therefore, everything that happens in WICKED eventually affects what happens in THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ. It's not like MALEFICENT, which totally retconned SLEEPING BEAUTY in order to make Maleficent more likable. and heroic.

In 1960s Cleopatra, Liz Taylor had a handmaiden who was clearly meant to be Chinese. Impossible & unknown in BC Egypt.

That awful movie is full of ridiculous anachronisms, in fact.

R56, not wrong, but referencing the musical.

Well, R51, Game of Thrones is the most popular series on TV right now and most of its fans are young. They creators sure haven't worried about depicting women as empowered feminists. They don't worry about cleanliness, perfectly white teeth and 21st century clothes and hairstyles either.

R39 that was the worst version of P and P ever. You are right about turning Mr. Bennett into some pig-herder. He was a gentleman and at that time no gentleman would do manual labor, poor or not. The "poor" gentry always managed to have a staff though. Everyone was miscast and the Bennett girls were the homeliest set of sisters ever.

The 1940 version with Greer Garson was pretty bad too. She was way too old for LIzzie Bennett and the costumes were way off for a story line set in the Regency. Did they not have Regency costumes on hand?

I appreciated Deadwood for it's authenticity showing the dirt and conditions that really existed in the Old West.

If the movie is set in 1955, all the cars are mid 50's cars and they're all in perfect condition. No one drove a used car back then? If you look at real photos from 1955 at least half the cars are from the 40's and at least half would be completely undistinguished junkers like station wagons, not the parade of Corvettes, Thunderbirds, and Cadillacs you see in most movies.

I understand they beg borrow and steal from car collectors so their options are limited, but the result is that every street scene looks like a classic car show.

So true about the cars. They're all new model cars from whatever year the story takes place.

Also, everybody is dressed in the style of whatever particular year the story takes place in as well. For example, if it's set in the late 1980s, every single person is in the fashion/hair of the late 80s, even older people. At that time, you would've seen many people who were still in the style of the 70s and even the 60s.

The problem with cars is that the vintage cars that exist are all lovingly restored cars owned by collectors. Nobody can afford to store wrecks for movie shoots.

What are you on about, R41?

I am sure very soon they will have to model vintage cars, and, then, maybe, when done with CGi, they will make it even more accurate.

Soon actors and actresses won't age. Post production will just retouch, a la SATC 2 and the latest Pee Wee Herman film, and keep performers eternally 28.

R64 Jeff Bridges was also de-aged in that 2010 TRON sequel.

They never emulate period hairstyles accurately, and like somebody else said, they do that on purpose because they think it will be too alienating to modern viewers. Drew Barrymore in The Wedding Singer has a smooth bob, not fried, permed hair with huge bangs that are stiff with hairspray as most young women had in the mid-'80s when it was set. Why? Because audiences would have laughed at her rather than rooted for her.

And it's true for men, too. Doesn't matter whether the film is set in the 1920s, the Old West, or whatever, the men will almost always have whatever hairstyles are in vogue when the movie comes out. When have you seen a man in a movie set in the teens or '20s who had oily hair parted in the middle? Virtually never and again, it's because audiences would laugh at the absurdity.

Most women's costumes are also changed to take out the more extreme elements of certain periods in order to make them seem more relatable. Flappers will be wearing dresses with defined bosoms and waists, for instance, when the style at the time was flat-as-a-pancake and straight up and down. Movies set in the '60s will tone down the absurdly elaborate beehive and bouffant hair and the shapeless polyester A-line dresses to something vaguely '60s-ish but relatable.

I'm not a fan of this style; I prefer seeing the absurd fashions and hairstyles in all their extremism, but then I know I'm not the typical audience member and not who filmmakers are trying to please.

Also, similar to the discussion of cars above, they portray everybody in a movie as always being up to the latest style (whichever year the movie is supposed to take place in). But most fortyish moms and dads in the '70s didn't wear their hair long and feathered, or denim elephant bells. They remained sort of stuck in the styles of their youth, just like middle-aged people tend to. There are trendy oldsters in every era but they're the exception, not the rule.

[quote]They never emulate period hairstyles accurately, and like somebody else said, they do that on purpose because they think it will be too alienating to modern viewers. Drew Barrymore in The Wedding Singer has a smooth bob, not fried, permed hair with huge bangs that are stiff with hairspray as most young women had in the mid-'80s when it was set. Why? Because audiences would have laughed at her rather than rooted for her.

CZJ's hair in CHICAGO is another instance where they modernized the bob. The 1920s bob was a very severe cut, especially the bangs, but CZJ's bob looks like it's been blowdried and the long bangs swept to the side.

This is what it should've looked like.

You have to have the right face shape to carry that severe bob off R68.

There was a bit more leeway on the 1920s bobs but the poster's point is valid.

R70 how do you mean?

[quote]Doesn't matter whether the film is set in the 1920s, the Old West, or whatever, the men will almost always have whatever hairstyles are in vogue when the movie comes out.

For some reason the 1950's and earlier Westerns always seem more authentic than the long hair in Westerns from the 60s and 70's, even though the long hair is probably closer to what the West was actually like. In some of the later Gunsmokes you half expect the bad guys to roll a joint while they sit around the campfire.

Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot - a 1920's every flapper? Hair, make up, costumes, even shoes were are late 50's glam. LOVE the movie, but the filmmakers sure didn't care about being authentic.

R73 I'll raise you a Faye Dunaway in BONNIE AND CLYDE. Never mind that she doesn't look like Bonnie Parker (save for the blond hair and beret), but 1930s woman had hairstyle or wardrobe like this?

The real Bonnie parker

Mountains in Kansas.

Palm Trees on New England beaches.

[quote] If they are going to do fairy tales for the millionth time each, why not make it relevant to a modern audience?

Because they usually end up being embarrassingly dated within 25 years. When was the last time you saw any of those Shelley Duvall attempts to "update" fairy tales or nursery rhymes?

At least nobody mentioned my hair yet.

The 1900's ragtime music score for "The Sting", which takes place in the early-1940s. It works, though, so maybe it was intentional.

Pretty much everything on "Happy Days" after Fonzie became the star.

R5, there actually WAS trade between China and the Roman world of Cleopatra's time. I know that the heavy silk brocades of China were transported by land and were fantastically expensive when they arrived, and that the upper classes of the Empire had then unwoven and then re-wove the silks into lighter, more sheer, still fantastically expensive fabrics that were appropriate for the Mediterranean climate.

Now it's my understanding that people didn't travel directly up and down the ancient "Silk Road" (yes, it's that ancient and that's where the name came from), but that goods were sold from trader to trader and each trader transported the silk across his territory before selling them to the next trader to the west. I have not heard that slaves were sold along from China to the Middle East to the Roman Empire, but I suppose someone might have given it a try. And transporting goods was so labor-intensive that nobody could have afforded such a slave but royalty.

R79 The Sting takes place during the early Depression, not the 1940s.

R79 THE STING takes place in 1936, but I agree with you. It's like using '80s or '90s pop music to score a movie set in modern-day. 2016.

[quote]The 1940 version with Greer Garson was pretty bad too. She was way too old for LIzzie Bennett and the costumes were way off for a story line set in the Regency. Did they not have Regency costumes on hand?

The movie was made after Gone with the Wind. Women wearing Civil War era hoop skirts were all the rage -- and there were plenty of them in stock in the costume department.

R81 the link to whatever story that is on the BBC, doesn't work.

One of my favorite pastimes watching TV is to spot the palm trees in unexpected locations -- like Scranton, PA.

Vinyl, HBO's new show set in the early 70s is full of anachronisms. The clothes are off. People talk about things unknown (like lyme disease) and use expressions nobody used (like "and boom!" to indicate something suddenly happened). Also the prevalence of cocaine is a bit overplayed, as it really got to that level a few years later.

Sorry, my comments at R81 were addressed to R57, not R5. My 7 key sticks some times.

Anyway, regarding the awful 1941 "Pride and Prejudice", which I hate almost as much as the 2005 version, the studio intended to place it in the 1840s, because it thought the costumes would be more flattering to Greer Garson than those of the 1800s. Shame on anyone here who can't tell the difference between an 1840 gown and one from the 1860s, even if it had been through the untrustworthy hands of the MGM costume department.

Everything in Grease

R87 was there some particular reason they thought Regency would not be flattering on Garson? Did they she have some figure flaw to hide?

[quote]Did they she have some figure flaw to hide?

Yes. Her penis.

Regency-era dresses tend to make women look larger than they are, with the empire waists just below the bust and the skirt falling straight down from there.

R91 Regency clothing (for women) was certainly more comfortable than what came before and definitely after. I mean, later in the 19th century there followed hoopskirts, cumbersome skirts and petticoats and bustles. The hemlines were also dragging on the ground until about 1910, when they raised to the ankles, then the shins around 1915, and finally the knees in the 1920s. But in the early 1800s, the dresses were very flowy and comfortable and the hemlines weren't that long. What happened that made women's dresses more restrictive in the latter decades?

Also, though women did wear some type of corset in the Regency era, they weren't the torture devices that they became in the latter century.

What about the frizzy perm in A Christmas Story? It was the fifth member of the Parker family.

How about Leo's NY accent in the "The Man in the Iron Mask?"

Other irritants - upspeake, sloppy diction, glottal stops (I'm British - or, as those who are unable to pronounce the letter 't' might say - Bri'ish), using 'OK' in period dramas, men hugging instead of shaking hands as a greeting, constantly putting hands into pockets... the list goes on...

"using 'OK' in period dramas"

Depends on the period in question. It's an older phrase then you'd think. A newspaperman coined the term in 1839.

There was a fashion then for playful abbreviations like i.s.b.d (it shall be done), r.t.b.s (remains to be seen), and s.p. (small potatoes). They were the early ancestors of OMG, LOL, and tl;dr. A twist on the trend was to base the abbreviations on alternate spellings or misspellings, so "no go" was k.g. (know go) and "all right" was o.w. (oll write). So it wasn't so surprising for someone come up with o.k. for oll korrect.

Galsworthy or Trollope characters could very reasonably have used the expresson. The Emperor Claudius, not so much.

R93, corsets really weren't that bad until the late 19th century. For the most part, they were no worse that a modern boned evening gown. Tight lacing, in spite of what you saw in Gone with the Wind, was not the prevalent. Most references to tight lacing a from propaganda pieces claiming that Europe (or a specific European country) was destroying the morals of the US. It was also used by the North to claim moral superiority to the South. Also, keep in mind that as late as the 1860s, the majority of Americans still did not were a left and right shoe. Only the very wealthy had shoes made specifically for the left and right feet. By contrast, the technology for corsetry at the time was rocket science.

By the 1880s, corsets really were torture devises as the silhouette was basically a smooth line that made the wearer look as if she was turned on a lathe. However, keep in mind that most photos have women from the late 19th with impossibly small waists have been touched up.

R93 but why did women's wardrobe and undergarments become so restrictive in the latter 19th century? Look at Regency-era dresses and such, and the women could move about freely and easily and were not weighed down by cumbersome skirts and petticoats and corsets.

"New York City" looks an awful lot like Toronto, and "Los Angeles" looks an awful lot like Vancouver. In many movies and tv shows, you get the impression that they can't even be bothered to hide it.

R99, from what I understand the Regency period was heavily influenced by the ancient Greeks and Romans fashions, at least for women. There was a fascination at that time for antiquities from those ancient cultures. The "Egyptian" influence was seen in the interior decor of the homes of the trendy rich at the time. The equivalent of "Chinese modern" to the 50's.

The Victorian era was basically the squelching of any hint of sexuality so the women were heavily covered and even table legs couldn't be seen so the tablecloth became popular. Those horny men might get turned on by a table leg.....

R100 I've been watching the old TV show SOUL FOOD (2000-2004), which takes place in Chicago but was filmed in Toronto. I'm not familiar with Chicago or Toronto geography/landmarks, but I noticed a few outdoor scenes with a maple leaf flag flowing in the background/distance.

They used to say that when Toronto doubled for New York they'd have to add garbage to the streetscape. Now they'd have to clean the streets in Toronto.

R99, there were numerous reasons as this is a 100 year period that you are talking about. One might just as easily ask why the clothing of the 1950s is so restrictive given the freedom of the 1920s.

One reason was that the 1830s was a period of "free love". Consequently there was a syphilis epidemic that spread across Europe. Unlike outbreaks in the past, this hit the middle class. It wasn't just Royalty, soldiers, and sailors. This created the moralistic backlash of the 1840s.

Also, the industrial revolution created a new, larger middle class. Clothing that was so restrictive, fragile, or decorated that one could not possible work in it was a sign that you had made it. Being able to dress you wife in this way was how a man proved his success. Also, similar to the 1950s the clothing was intended to keep women out of the new economy. Prior to industrial revolution, many women were virtually running factories. The men provided the raw materials, but the women oversaw transforming those raw materials into soap, candles, fabric, clothing, preserved foods, wine and beer, etc. Once these items could be purchased, women had less to do and fewer responsibilities. As the century wore on, even the basic domestic responsibilities of a woman were delegated to a housekeeper. The more idle your wife was, the more successful you were.

Also, the creation of the sewing machine allowed for more decoration and larger, more elaborate, skirts than were possible when sewing had to be done by hand. It also sped up the changes in fashion. The silhouette changes faster, and one way to change the silhouette was through corsetry. ( I might add that advancements in printing and travel aided in this acceleration.)

R99, the lose Empire dresses of the Regency period were kind of an aberration. Well-off women had been wearing massive dresses supported by multiple petticoats, skirt frames, panniers, corsetry or boning, scaffolding, whatever, for centuries - since the time of Elizabeth I at least. The loose flowing Empire dresses came in around 1800, and the picture below shows the fashions from 1780 and1790, just ten years before Austen started writing about ladies in high-waisted Regency gowns. In the preceding decades the fashion changes from huge skirts with elaborate underpinning to less elaborate, and then boom! Suddenly all the ladies were wearing loose Empire shifts, and all the straight men were goggling because they could see the outline of their thighs, ladies; thighs had been buried under a foot or two of clothing for centuries!

It was a fashion revolution on the par with short skirts and loose waists appearing in the 1920s, and it didn't last. Just don't get me started on the French revolution and its influence on fashion, because that would really be a thread hijack.

I think some of the points here hardly qualify as "glaring anachronisms".

99% of viewers would never know, much less notice, the difference in womens hemlines or dress styles, between 1900 & the 1920.

I call, MARY !!

"Glaring" would be Sandys final slutty outfit in Grease. Thats 1980s, not 1950s, trollop attire.

R106 GREASE was filmed in 1977 and came out a year later.

I just watched a LAVERNE & SHIRLEY episode that takes place in 1959 but filmed in 1977. Laverne gets hurt by a toy store robot and tries to sue. The ambulance chaser representing her had a jewfro and facial hair. It annoyed me the entire episode!

Seberg was set in 1968 and a child was heard to exclaim that something was "cool", not referring to the temperature or jazz.

Vox Lux is set in the 2000s but someone makes a Natalie Wood drowning joke.

In the 1957 movie [italic]Peyton Place,[/italic] part of which was set in the early 1940s, people were drinking Coca-Cola out of the large 12-ounce bottles, which weren't produced until the mid-1950s. The only Coke you could buy in the '40s came in the tiny 7-ounce bottles.

[R99], everything [R104] said and then some...

Two interesting details -

The Empire style were not just form-fitting, they were sometimes well-nigh transparent. A cartoon of the day shows a severe elderly lady "In her gown of Bombazine" (a heavy silk-based fabric, usually black) contrasted with a saucy socialite displaying every possible curve "in her gown of Bum-Be-Seen!" Underthings as we would understand them were not often worn under the Empire dresses (or men's clothing either) and the political cartoonists of the time had a field day with the fact.

The hoop skirts worn by women after the 1830s were also a form of social distancing. They required that men - and men of lower social orders in particular - remain at least at arm's length. This established decorum in the drawing room but was also useful to a lady in making one's way down the crowded public street - no nasty little hands were possible when one's rear was six feet from any possible access point.

This is not so much an anachronism as a blooper, but it really shocked me, because in the 22 years it ran I never caught a glaring mistake: In a Midsomer Murders episode, Barnaby and Jones had a balls out fight with a bad guy in the great hall of a mansion, using swords and shields that were handy. In one quick shot as they moved toward the entrance of another room, you can see a man in a suit and tie, leaning forward in a chair like he's reading a menu or the paper. Don't know if it was a crew member, or they just got sloppy filming the scene in an operating 'stately home' with a restaurant. Shocking! ;-)

I know this is an old thread but there is considerable discussion above about why Greer Garson's Pride and Prejudice is set in the late 1830s/early 1840s instead of the Regency period. Contrary to the speculation above, it was done because costume designer Adrian had always wanted to design for that period and had never had the opportunity (among other things, he had an odd fascination with those huge leg o' mutton sleeves). He approached the producers and director Robert Z. Leonard for permission and it was fine with them, so that's what he did. It had nothing to do with making Garson more attractive or any of the other reason suggested above. It It was just a whim of Adrian.

R5, R9 The Lion in Winter was as silly as something by Bertolt Brecht.

Kate —with her voice like a crow— pretending to be French and producing a motley assortment of children.