Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Details 1

We've just started watching Mad Men season 3 (on disk). The show has a reputation - generally deserved - for scrupulous accuracy about the world of the distant past...1 year before I was born.

One small mistake - in one episode they have a close-up on an elevator control panel and there are raised-text numbers next to the buttons. Those didn't exist in '63 but only came in with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

11 comments:

Substance McGravitas said...

I remember the touch-sensitive buttons in my grandma's old folks home. It was 16 stories and some of the residents couldn't see so good, so anything their hands went near lit up.

Those were long rides.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Good eye! A few years back, the movie Riding in Cars with Boys was filmed in Tuckahoe (a village named after an edible fungus), and the village was transformed-old parking meters, they even changed the style of certain curbs. Since it was along one of my favorite bike routes, I would often stop by just to check out the mise en scene- if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Never did bother to see the movie.

Smut Clyde said...

(a village named after an edible fungus)

The nearby township of Stinkhorn really should think of changing its name.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

wanna know what gets me?

When Keanu Reeves or Bruce Willis or some other bullet headed action movie star places a lighter near a single sprinkler head AND SETS OFF EVERY HEAD ON THE FLOOR!!! GAHHHHH!

Also, free falling elevators. Can't happen. even with a murderous AI building computer.

N__B said...

Also, free falling elevators.

The cable that breaks a little (a few strands snapping) then breaks a little more, then breaks a little more, until you gave one strand holding the load that was enough to make the whole cable start to fail.

DIEDIEDIEDIE

Smut Clyde said...

AND SETS OFF EVERY HEAD ON THE FLOOR!!! GAHHHHH!

Well you have just spoiled my appreciation of Jasper Fforde's novel "The Fourth Bear", in which Detective-Inspector Jack Spratt uses exactly that trick to defeat The Quangle-Qangle's evil baked product golem, Gingerbreadman. No longer can I suspend my disbelief.* I hope you're satisfied.

Some people if they wanted to launch a crusade about design- & architecture-themed bloopers in movies, would devote their own blogs to the purpose, but evidently not ZRM.

* When I die, I have arranged for all my money to go into a special foundation with the worthy cause of funding bungee jumps for atheists.

It will be called "The Willing Suspension of Disbelief".

N__B said...

It will be called "The Willing Suspension of Disbelief".

It depends what impossibility I'm expected to accept. Red matter causes time travel? Sure. There's no red matter, so it can do whatever the writer wants. A bus heads off an unfinished highway ramp at 80mph and ends on a higher ramp? Bullshit.

The producers of fiction owe us plausible impossibilities for us to pretend to believe.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

A bus heads off an unfinished highway ramp at 80mph and ends on a higher ramp? Bullshit.


Mythbusters pretty effectively debunked that one.

Smut, my blog is already totally dedicated to inertia, and THAT takes all my time. Now you want me to start ANOTHER one? You're mad!

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

wait, I have a blog?

N__B said...

Mythbusters pretty effectively debunked that one.

Anyone who remembers freshman physics can debunk it for themselves.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

my freshman physics teacher didn't look AT ALL like Kari Byron, so elements of the class have had less - heh- staying power.