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Popular History: Difference between revisions
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{{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]'''}}
[[Popular History]] is when a show or movie set in a previous decade focuses on certain elements of the era's pop culture to an implausible degree, often mixing and matching things from different points in the decade and acting as if they existed at the same time (as in ''[[The Wedding Singer]]'').
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.
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[[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]].
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== [[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]].)
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