TV Series and Movies Set in the Past That Get the Time Period WRONG

I knew "That '70s Show" had become the "That Any Decade Show" when Kelso started wearing alligator shirts without the puffed sleeve. And later, they were all, like, "Michael, I just left Donna's house, and she was like..." and so on.

When Calls the Heart

The hairstyles on M*A*S*H didn’t evoke the 50s to me.

I imagine I just wasn’t aware of how long it had been on but Laverne and Shirley seemed realistic to the 50s until they moved to CA and all of a sudden, they had a huge cardboard standup of The Beatles, ca 1964. I guess that’s not really a good answer to OP’s question, but that always threw me off.

R3 I remember that about Happy Days. The used the pomade on the guys hair and the girls were all very poodle skirty like in Grease and American Graffiti. The the guys hair was longer and Lori Beth had hair like Toni Tenille.

The hairstyles of the women in some 1960s movies set in previous eras are hilariously wrong. There are many examples, but two that spring immediately to mind are FUNNY GIRL and DR. ZHIVAGO.

Reposting from the other thread.

1998's The Last Days of Disco. Nothing about it looks "very early 80s." Kate Beckinsale has a modified Rachel haircut and wears baby tees. Everyone's in late-'90s all-black everything, and the men all wear late-'90s baggy suits (with mock turtlenecks, even) and haircuts (those curtain bangs).

It's one of my favorite movies because of the script and performances (especially Kate B's), and Whit Stillman found a wonderful tone and mood, but it has the worst historical production design I've ever seen.

In The Edge of Love, Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller look like they went shopping at Anthropologie

Every single one.

The most recent Marple series had atrocious hair and costuming.

There have been entire threads on Melinda Dillion's perm in "The Christmas Story."

I didn't find Kate Hudson very convincing as someone from the 70s in "Almost Famous"

Dirty Dancing

Granchester is not up to the UK usual standards

Aside from the mom's perm, I thought A Christmas Story did a good job

Babylon

Even as a kid, I thought Dana Delany's hairstyle on China Beach was too contemporary. It was a late '80s/early '90s cut. Every other mom, girl in high school, and Winona Ryder had that bob.

And circa 1990, when the layered dyke haircut became popular for women (e.g. Bridget Fonda in Single White Female), Delany got it too, and it was supposed to pass for 1969-70ish.

R13 The first time I watched Dirty Dancing I had no idea the movie was set in the early 60s.

Dirty Dancing gets the hairstyles all wrong

The soundtrack is very 80s too. I don’t think they were really trying to be period.

R18 the opening sentence of the movie is, "That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me Baby and it didn't occur to me to mind."

[quote]The hairstyles of the women in some 1960s movies set in previous eras are hilariously wrong. There are many examples, but two that spring immediately to mind are FUNNY GIRL and DR. ZHIVAGO.

Not so famous but just as glaring, Tuesday Weld and Ann-Margret in THE CINCINNATI KID (1965).

You would never guess that it takes place during the Depression '30s.

Walk on the Wild Side was another 60s film set during the depression that look way more 60s than 30s

Mostly the incongruity is intentional. Makeup artists and hairstylists with authentic period designs would get knocked back by producers who wanted their stars to look sexy and modern. It wasn’t like they didn’t know how to do authentic looks.

Something modern productions set in the 1940s and 50s never get right is how loose and floppy the women’s curly hairstyles are compared to how they really were.

The Flintstones live action film

When the 2007 HAIRPSRAY movie came out on DVD, we rented it and I remember my stepdad, who was in high school in the early '60s, pointed out that nobody wore backpacks back then like in the movie.

He said they weren't even a thing until his kids were in school in the '80s and by the '90s it had become an industry.

[quote]Laverne and Shirley seemed realistic to the 50s until they moved to CA and all of a sudden, they had a huge cardboard standup of The Beatles, ca 1964

R4: That season took place in 1966, so the Beatles were accurate, but by the final season, which took place in 1967, the costume and hair people just gave up. The kids in the opening titles are wearing fashions of the 70s/early 80s, and it looks like the casting person just borrowed some kids from the local elementary school wearing their street clothes.

^^^ Oops, forgot the linked :

R27 I didn’t realize the show spanned such a long time - thanks for the clarification.

R5- THE most egregious thing was Chachi’s hair.

On the show it was supposed to be 1960 and looked like an extra from Saturday Night Fever with his disco 🕺 hair.

Mary McDonnell had feathered bangs as Stands with a Fist in Dances with Wolves.

How about my short 'do in "The Battle of Britain" set in 1940?

R24, an early 1930s fashionista might have her fairs very slicked down and tight, but an ordinary woman of the era might well have had a looser style. Or an out of date style.

One of the things that a lot of productions get wrong, is that they make every thing too new! Say a film is set in a 1958 family home. Not everything in that home would be from 1958! The decor might be from 1948, dad's suit from 1952, mom's hairstyle from 1940, and Junior's jalopy might be a Model T from 1925.

It also felt like Fonzie's hair on Happy Days in the later years was sept back and pinned. It's as if Henry Winkler didn't want to go all in with a period haircut. Just sprayed it a lot.

The Hardy Boys on Hulu. I like the series, but that version of the 80s is nothing like the 80s I remember.

I usually blame budget for most of the historical mess ups in these shows. They just don't have the money to do the period properly. From not having the money to hire the proper consultants to buying the right props and wardrobe, so they cut corners.

Diane Keaton in The Godfather....wtf was up with her hair? It was in no way mid 40s or even early 50s.....It looked like a wig that had been mega blown out and teased, I'm not even sure what decade it even resembled. By the very end it's a little better but still pretty poor.

Drew Barrymore's hair in The Wedding Singer. Absolutely NO ONE wore their hair like that back then.

R37 yep, that's definitely circa 1998. 😂

[quote]Something modern productions set in the 1940s and 50s never get right is how loose and floppy the women’s curly hairstyles are compared to how they really were.

I love the hair and clothes of the late 40s, and I tried throughout my misspent youth to get hairdressers to set my hair like Rita Hayworth's in Gilda or, more conservatively, Lauren Bacall's in her earliest movies. I had plenty of hair, which they were at liberty to cut before setting, but none of them could even approximate it. I truly believe it's a skill that has died, along with most other skills that required proper apprenticeships to learn.

One of the reasons for the looseness is that they try to blow-dry or use hot rollers/curlers, whereas 40s and 50s women had wet hair set on dry rollers, then spent an hour or so under one of those old-fashioned dryers to make sure the set well and truly took hold. As the hair dried it pulled the rollers tighter. The last phase of those dryers was a cool-down to ensure the curl was totally set before the brush-out started. In the mid-60s they still set hair this way, and I remember from childhood they had to brush like crazy to get it to relax enough to stop women looking like Shirley Temple, with the shape of the rollers still evident. You can't achieve that with modern technology.

Also, films made in the 1960s will always default to pale 60s lipstick and fingernails, with lots of eyeliner. In any era, assuming the leading man is not short, women's heels will tend to be the height popular at the time of filming rather than the period in which the piece is set. Men's facial hair will also tend to conform more with the present day.

Every last one of them.

[quote]Men's facial hair will also tend to conform more with the present day.

Like in GONE WITH THE WIND, which takes place during the Civil War and Reconstruction (1860s and 1870s)

Beards were in vogue for men from the mid 19th century until the turn of the 20th century (late 1850s to early 1900s).

But in the movie all the men (with the exception of Clark Gable's trademark pencil mustache) were clean-shaven, because that was the popular style for men post-WWI through the 1960s.

Mad Men and Call The Midwife are two shows on a short list that got their respective time period RIGHT.

Most other shows get at least some of it wrong - either the set or the hairstyles/clothing. It's usually an interpretation of a certain era through contemporary eyes. I didn't watch the Goldbergs much but when I did I'd change the channel in, like, three minutes because something about the hair or costuming would just bug the shit out of me because of its inaccuracies.

The Woman King

That awful “A league of their own” TV series.

And don’t even get me started on “Bridgerton”.

The huge WWII epic “The Battle of the Bulge” is preposterously ahistorical and in fact is so bad that historians went on the news at the time to complain about it. In fact ex-president Eisenhower, who was supreme allied commander during the Ardennes Offensive, issued a statement, quite peeved!

It was the largest battle the US Army fought in WWII, and ended in an overwhelming victory, but the US suffered greater casualties than any other battle in its history, and Eisenhower was enraged that their sacrifice was portrayed so incorrectly.

Visually the Germans are portrayed as having nothing but Tiger tanks (they were in fact a small minority) and these were “played” by American M-47 tanks painted grey (although at this point in the war, the Germans painting their tanks an earthly mustard yellow, then applied dull green and brown patterns over it). US Shermans were played by Chaffee light tanks.

The battle is portrayed as won because the Americans rolled fuel drums filled with petrol down onto the Tiger tanks, blowing them up! Which is ludicrous.

It’s widely regarded as the least accurate big wwii picture ever made. However, Robert Shaw is absolutely terrific as a fuhrer fanatic panzer commander. Telly Savalas and Henry Fonda are great in the picture too.

A little off topic, but I was reading a novel recently where the author had characters watching a movie on a VCR and buying a pregnancy test ... in 1972.

How a tiger II would actually have looked in the Bulge fighting.

Of course there were not any available to be in the movie, but they could at least have painted the tanks correctly.

I think Bridgerton is supposed to be an alternate universe.

R47, VCRs were around in the early 70s but they were expensive, and you couldn’t get pre-recorded movies to watch. Of course you could record a movie and then watch it later. It was in the early 80s that Sony Betamax and then vhs tapes made it an affordable household product.

Home pregnancy tests wouldn’t be available in the USA until 1977 because Jesus, but in Canada they were available from 1971 on. (Don’t know about the UK, Australia, etc.) So depends on where the story was set.

Watching Jane Birkin (complete with her trademark bangs) play a WWII Yugoslav partisan fighting the nazis in an obscure movie called Nineteen Girls and a Sailor was a hoot:

Every goddamn movie that shows an adult 19th century woman out in public.. with her hair down!!!

FUCK that bugs me, it just wasn't done in those days, not once a girl had made her debut. And if she hadn't made her debut, she was at home with the nanny or governess, and NOT attending grownup parties.

Erin Walton had the feathered bangs hairdo in the latter season of The Waltons. So did Ben's wife, Cindy.

I feel like Stranger Things really gets it right look wise and even the dialogue.

The boys constantly say things like “Don’t act like a girl, sissy”. Thing little boys no longer say today.

“Am I speaking Chinese in this house?”

The Queen’s Gambit. Some characters looked like they were from the 70s while others looked like they were from the 50s. I think the show was supposed to take place in the 60s.

And don’t even get me started on the Party City wigs…

R33 That’s something else I appreciate about Mad Men is that even though the show was set in the 60s, not everything in the show was obviously 1960s.

Don and Betty dressed like it was still 1955 throughout the series. Their home looked very 50s. Some of the older characters still dressed like it was the 20s or 30s.

The show did a great job representing how some characters lived in the past and refused to change with the times.

Just brilliant.

And r56, it’s been said that, for mainstream America, the 50s lasted until well into the 60s.

[quote] [R27] I didn’t realize the show spanned such a long time - thanks for the clarification.

I just watched the whole series a couple months back and it mostly takes place in the 60s. They start out around '58 or '59. Then when they move to LA, they skip a year or two into the future (not sure why, but probably to get closer to the look of LA in the mid-late '60s, which they fail at miserably).

Past the first two seasons, the show rarely looked like it took place in the years it said it did. Its look was very, very firmly in the late '70s.

When is Happy Days set? I just watched the movie that inspired it, “American Graffiti,” last night, and that’s set in 1962. (“Where were you in ‘62?” was the tagline.)

Interestingly Cindy was in that, as Ron Howard’s mousy/cute girlfriend. She’s terrific in that.

The later seasons of The Waltons - the girls have feathered hair and look like they're wearing Sergio Valente jeans

Happy Days wasn’t inspired by American Graffitti, moron. It was spun from an episode of Love, American Style which appeared before the film was made.

[quote]Mostly the incongruity is intentional. Makeup artists and hairstylists with authentic period designs would get knocked back by producers who wanted their stars to look sexy and modern. It wasn’t like they didn’t know how to do authentic looks.

I agree with you that it was often intentional, but that doesn't mean it was the right decision.

R21 I was getting popcorn and completely missed that.

[quote]The boys constantly say things like “Don’t act like a girl, sissy”. Thing little boys no longer say today.

Where do you live?

That's a good observation, r56. Betty's style never really changes even when Joan and Peggy are wearing some pretty crazy shit.

Little House On The Prairie

NOTHING like the books. Or time period. Read "The Long Winter". They almost became cannibals.

R65 I dont agree Betty's style never changes, you definitely see a change from 50's style to 60's....it's just a tad more subtle because Betty had good taste and wore somewhat more "conservative"/suburban clothing.

But I agree that Mad Men was good in reflecting how people ACTUALLY dressed as opposed to having an idealized view contemporary people would have, especially with Joan and Peggy. Peggy the later seasons would dress in very boxy,mannish unflatteringly suits and would have that awful helmet hair but it made sense because Peggy was completely fashion blind and she'd think thats what a boss should wear. I appreciated they didn't sacrice the character's authenticity just so EM/Peggy could look better.

One small thing Mad Men got wrong. In the opening episode of season 5. It is May 1966 and Don and Meghan throw a party. All the women (except Trudy Campbell) are wearing micro-mini skirts. While it's true that mini-skirts became popular around the spring of 1966, they were worn by girls in their teens and early 20s. It was still a radical fashion choice. Adult women might have worn their skirts a few inches above the knees but it would take another year or so for the mini-skirt to become universal.

Still, it's better than Happy Days where Joanie and her friends started wearing miniskirts on January 2nd, 1960.

We donned miniskirts two decades before y'all!

R65 Don is frozen in time throughout the entire series. While all the other men in the office are growing sideburns and mustaches, Don is the same. I think this was done intentionally to show how rooted in the past Don was.

R67 You are right Betty did change her style somewhat, but she never truly embraced the 1960s style the way other characters did. Again, I think this was an intentional choice to show the arrested development of her character.

Thing is I didnt see Joan or Peggy fully embrace the 60's either. Joan always dressed mostly in the same style, lots of pink, lots of rose patterns and kind of conservatively to make up for her curvy bosomy shape. Not 60's at all. And Peggy as I said before was usually in boxy suits and helmet hair and also dressed pretty conservatively. The 3, Betty, Joan and Peggy, had their own style, you could see the 60's in their outfits but also their past and their personalities.

Now if we're talking Megan she was the only one that embraced 60s fashions with gusto.

Nobody's mentioned "The Tudors" yet? Or is it just too obvious?

Paramount Pictures' "Harlow" is supposed to be a fictionalized biopic of 1930s star Jean Harlow, but Carroll Baker's hair & makeup is all-out Monroe-era glam.

Ryan Murphy’s “The Normal Heart” HBO film didn’t even make an attempt at the early ‘80s.

"Now if we're talking Megan she was the only one that embraced 60s fashions with gusto."

That's largely because of her age and profession. The outrageous fashions of the late 1960s were meant for young people, the miniskirts, paisleys, and colored tights were for the young and carefree, not for matrons or professional women. And while Megan wanted to project the image of being young and carefree, Joan, Betty, and Peggy were more mature, and wanted to look like respectable matrons or trustworthy professionals, respectively. Peggy probably deliberately eschewed youth fashions, even though she may have been young enough to wear them, because she damn well wanted to look like a top professional and be taken seriously.

No, in the late 1960s, women who weren't trying to look young and carefree dressed in awful polyesters, and looked dreadfully plastic and stodgy. So IMHO the costumers were right to put Betty, Joan, and Peggy in clothes that weren't outrageous and up to the minute, that would have been out of character for all of them.

Not period, but that series GLEE about show choirs supposedly set in a conservative Ohio town felt more like Los Angeles, culturally and politically, because it was actually shot there. It in no way resembled the Midwest. Too many ugly actors, for a start.

So, R76, you think people in the Midwest are generally better looking than people in L.A.?

One thing about Mad Men bugged me: the secretaries' desks. Every time you'd see a woman sitting there at a typewriter there would be only one single piece of paper in the typewriter. I'm old enough to remember secretarial work pre-computer and photocopiers. WHERE ARE THE CARBON COPIES? Back then every single thing you typed had multiple carbon copies: cc's, bcc's, file copies, chron file copies, tickler (follow-up) file copies, etc. And you had different kinds of letterhead and colored tissue paper for each. And you had a collection of multi-colored liquid paper for correcting all those carbon copies. No evidence of that on the Mad Men secretaries' desks.

Grease, set in 1958, when sweet Sandy transforms into a 1970s disco dolly with permed hair and tight spandex that no '50s woman in her right mind would dare leave the house in.

R79 Yes! And the 1978 Candies.

R77 perhaps I should have said California instead of LA.

Yes, I think the average Midwesterner is prettier than the average Californian.

A lot of the good-looking people in LA are transplants from other states, namely Middle America.

R78 I love your attention to detail. Your boundaries have been stated.

R71 Joan wore some groovy fashions toward the end of the series. Peggy had a 60s style but she would have been considered a “square”.

Megan was stereotypically 1960s, but there are many different types of 60s styles. I think people tend to forget that the 1960s had a lot of different styles going on, although people only seem remember the hippie and mod looks.

R75 is correct.

R81, lol if you think people in, say, Indiana are better-looking than people in California you need to get out more. Or maybe you're just a Republican who thinks obese people from the red states are hotties

[quote]Grease, set in 1958, when sweet Sandy transforms into a 1970s disco dolly with permed hair and tight spandex that no '50s woman in her right mind would dare leave the house in.

GREASE begins with a disco number -- the title song -- which was written expressly for the film, so in terms of period accuracy, all bets were off from that moment on.

Those historical dramas like Gladiator, The Last Legion, and Attila, set in the Late Roman Empire, where the cast are dressed as centurions and togati of old, as if fashions hadn't changed since Julius Caesar's period.

In reality, soldiers and citizens were dressed like this:

r86 Isn't there some movie depicting that period where one of the actors is wearing a wristwatch?

Hmm. Link didn't work (R86).

Here's an example of Late Roman wear.

"While all the other men in the office are growing sideburns and mustaches, Don is the same. I think this was done intentionally to show how rooted in the past Don was."

I don't think that Don was so much clinging to the past, as too uptight to embrace much of the late sixties zeitgeist. The zeitgeist was all about being open, free, shallowly loving, and uninhibited at the time, but IMHO Don could never truly open up, because there was nothing much inside him. He always struck me as kind of a "hollow man", someone who couldn't access his own feelings and who had no idea where his true self had gone. So, he stuck with his slick Rat Pack style and persona, because he just couldn't open up like everyone else.

And the finale was about him finally experiencing some honest emotions.

[quote]I don't think that Don was so much clinging to the past, as too uptight to embrace much of the late sixties zeitgeist.

As far as I can tell, those two things are EXACTLY the same, so I'm not sure why you bothered to post a rebuttal at all.

"Those historical dramas like Gladiator, The Last Legion, and Attila, set in the Late Roman Empire, where the cast are dressed as centurions and togati of old, as if fashions hadn't changed since Julius Caesar's period."

I swear to God, R86, when I first saw "Gladiator" on DVD 20 years ago, I sat there and grumbled because the leading lady had faceted stones in her jewelry, and I knew that the technology to carve jewels into faceted stones wouldn't exist until about a thousand years later!

Ancient Roman jewels were cut into cabochons, or were carved or incised. But never faceted.

"I don't think that Don was so much clinging to the past, as too uptight to embrace much of the late sixties zeitgeist.:"

"As far as I can tell, those two things are EXACTLY the same, so I'm not sure why you bothered to post a rebuttal at all.",

Sorry, I don't think that Don ever had any real attachment to the *past* as such, he didn't feel nostalgia any more than he felt anything else, and I don't think he'd ever looked back in his life because he wouldn't like what he'd see. Because IMHO there's a distinction between clinging to the past and not really jibing with the present, and if Don wasn't really getting into the zeitgeist of the late sixties, well, the seventies and eighties were just ahead!

Someone who genuinely clung to the past would have kept looking back and never really changed over the long term, but I can definitely see Don getting into EST and the other shallow self-help of the seventies after the finale, and then deciding it's all a load of crap and going for "Greed is Good" in the eighties. But he just couldn't do the fake-hippie thing that was fashionable for a short minute in the late sixties.

R90 My thoughts exactly.

R92, either your post is over my head or it's just overthinking on your part. But anyway, Don not changing isn't an example of him "clinging to the past," because it wasn't the past for him. It was his present, and he just wasn't willing or able to "embrace much of the late sixties zeitgeist."

I think Don clings to his glory days of the 1950s when he changed his identity and became successful at Sterling Cooper. It was the first time in his life he was happy IMO, although it was short lived.

By the 1960s, his persona wasn’t really vibing with the changing times. Other characters in the show made comments about his old fashioned ways.

He didn’t embrace change until the finale, but who knows how long that would’ve lasted.

[quote]Aside from the mom's perm, I thought A Christmas Story did a good job

One of the many charms of "A Christmas Story" is the way it captures everyday life in the years immediately before World War II. The period details are generally excellent. But, yeah, except for the mom's hair.

Inaccuracies aren't limited to TV shows and movies set in the past, of course. The look of the original "Star Trek" series is hilariously 1960s, especially when it comes to the female characters, with their beehives, mini-dresses and go-go boots.

R92 learn how to use the quote function. TIA

R78 - I remember visiting my aunt, a corporate secretary in the very early '80s, and she had carbons and those different color Liquid Papers.

She was also my babysitter and would teach me to type on my parents' typewriter. Carbons were a fundamental part of the instruction. You had to preserve your typing for history!

And then it was 1983 and my parents bought a computer.

Many kids seem to have the ‘Nicholas Bradford tv hair’ long bowl cut no matter what era it’s set in.

So many shows where men walk around in public with scruffy five days growth on their face... before the 1990s

Michael Landon's hair on Little House

Pretty much everyone's hair in anything taking place in the 19th century! Freshly styled and blow dried.

^ Heather Graham in From Hell was the worst example of this. She's supposed to be a street whore but looks like a model who just had her hair done at a high end salon.

R104, one of the sex workers involved in the Ripper case was known for wearing her hair down, I forget which one.

So in that one case I might be willing to forgive the sight of a 19th century grown woman whose hair isn't put up in a film, but I am NOT willing to forgive that it was dyed and styled into long helmet hair! The woman was teetering on the edge of homelessness, her hair might have been a nice color, but it'd have been grubby and straggly.

Watch When Calls The Heart in Hallmark Channel. All of the actors have 2023 hairstyles and hipster beards. Not very Victorian Era.

[quote]Watch When Calls The Heart in Hallmark Channel.

Not even if you paid me.

^^Do it or you’re fired

I've never actually watched When Call the Heart, but I see the commercials constantly when watching my nightly Golden Girls reruns. That Pascale Hutton's chunky bloned highlights are off the charts and another woman has a perm.

They should make more of an effort for those shows. Some people, like me, would tune in just for the period details.

When Calls the Heart, set circa 1915....

R108 - it’s late, my eyes are tired ad I’m reading on my phone. I also have no familiarity with Hallmark Channel shows — so I read the title as “When Call Girls Had Heart”.

When I got to “Victorian era” I immediately pictured a sappy hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold show with Frau-friendly stories but abysmal costume and hair inaccuracies.

Adding some call girls to the show might actually make it watchable

I've only watched it a few times, but what about "Murdoch Mysteries"?

Then there’s the opposite (although it might be deliberate) - in Bottoms the clothes looked very 1990s to me, and the cellphones also looked a bit like relics, yet the movie seemingly takes place in or near present day.

Kate Capshaw's perm in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

The many extras in Logan’s Run have hilariously stereotypical 70’s hair (and Texas summer tans!) even though it’s supposed to be the 23rd century where they live in sealed dome cities.

R111 I see that When Calls The Heart's version of the Victorian Era includes a Dyson Airwrap.

I think that Blazing Saddles was spot on.