Popular History: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''The temptation is to have the characters keep reminding the audience what year it is. But characters in historical fiction don't know they're living in the past. They think they're living in the present. And they can't see into the future. So they shouldn't talk as if they're cribbing from history books about their own time. Dialog shouldn't contain many temporal signifiers. Which is to say you don't want to have characters who happen to be living in the 1970s saying things like: "Did you watch the Watergate hearings today? Can you believe Nixon taped all those conversations!" Or: "I bought the new Zepplin album today. Man, that Jimmy Page is a genius!" Or: "They're called Earth Shoes. They're supposed to be much better for your feet than regular shoes."''|'''[http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2008/06/swinging-with-1.html Lance Mannion]'''}}

 

 

For instance, everyone in 1968 will be wearing tie-dye shirts, smoking pot and going to see the Stones or The Doors while protesting [[The Vietnam War]]. Everyone in 1977 will either be wearing platform shoes, a polyester leisure suit, an afro, and will be going to the disco, or wearing torn jeans, Doc Martens or converse, ripped shirt, leather Jacket and going to pogo to the Clash or the Pistols. Everyone in 1985 will sport ''[[Miami Vice]]''-type pastel clothes and mullet hairstyles if they are men, [[Eighties Hair|big hair]], lots of make-up and power suits if they are women, and early Madonna/Debbie Gibson-type outfits if they are teenage girls. Also applies to cars in the street; they will ''all'' be models from the year portrayed, as if nobody has kept a car they bought in a previous decade. Also compare the amount of smoking in movies from the '50s and before with that in modern movies set then.

This is especially painful when you consider that the writers generally lived through the era being depicted (meaning [[Did Not Do the Research]] doesn't - or shouldn't - apply).

 

 

None of this is to imply that ''nobody'' in a past era was conscious of the time they were living in or historically self-aware; indeed, cultural critics and pundits have often made a living in the field of [[The Great Politics Mess-Up|attempting to be prescient]] (and sometimes they have succeeded!). This trope is for instances when an "average person" who can't possibly predict future nostalgia is depicted having an outlandish amount of [[Genre Savvy|Genre Savviness]].

 

 

[[Nothing but Hits]] is a subset of this trope. See also: [[Politically-Correct History]]; [[Nostalgia Filter]]; [["Mister Sandman" Sequence]]. Compare: [[Anachronism Stew]]; [[Frozen in Time]]. For this trope in reverse, see [[Present Day Past]]. When a work actually made during the relevant time period appears to fit this trope, it's an [[Unintentional Period Piece]].

 

== [[Film]] ==

* Played with in ''[[Back to The Future]] Part II'' in which a cafe from the year 2015 is dedicated to the Popular History of the then-contemporary [[The Eighties|1980s]]. (Of course, the irony nowadays is that the rest of the 2015 version of Hill Valley [[Zeerust|looks just as '80s as the cafe]].)

** Amazingly, the trilogy as a whole averted this with their own respective versions of 1955 and 1885, like using cars from the late 1940s in 1955, and lampshading the '50s idea of cowboy garb that Marty is given prior to coming to 1885. (It's decorated with ''tiny atoms''. Good luck explaining those to folks who wash their underwear in the river.)

*** The cowboy one goes so far as to have him make a [[Clint Eastwood]] crack, which confuses everyone. There's a poster on the wall of this scene advertising ''[[Revenge of the Creature]]'', Eastwood's first film (it's a bit part as a lab assistant).

** It gets even more ridiculous when you realize that the woman, who is about in her late twenties in the present day (1994), would have been ''a teenager'' when the disco era ended, but in the flashback is as... er... "buoyant" as ever.

* ''Rumor Has It...'' gets pretty annoying with it, but the worst example is probably prominently showing during a party scene three men with no bearing at all on the plot discussing how there's this thing called [[Google]] that's gonna be a huge hit.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Hollywood History]]