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Of course this is anecdotal, but I don't know of ANYONE who called it KFC until they rebranded and that was in the '90s. I grew up with Kentucky Fried Chicken and that's what everyone called it ("Kentucky Fried Chicken, we do chicken right!" ). When I checked online after I heard "KFC" in the show, I found a zillion posts that said the same thing.
I'd heard it casually--it's like how people call Target "Tarzhay".
Biggest movie time-error peeve?
For me, it's the ubiquitous use of the countdown, which by most accounts was invented in 1929 by Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang.
Lang was working on a science fiction film called Woman in the Moon that featured a dramatic rocket launch, preceded by a countdown to heighten the dramatic effect of the final ten seconds before launch. Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was a fan of the movie, and brought the countdown to zero with him when he came to America.
So when a movie portrays a New Years Eve party with a countdown for time periods long before then I cringe.
Shakespeare is famously rife with such things. Cleopatra referring to billiards and Caesar to a striking clock (each over a thousand years before their invention), Aristotle being mentioned during the Trojan War (when he wouldn't yet be born for many centuries).
But these things really don't impact in any way the themes, motifs, or messages of the stories.
Most historical speech in films isn't realistic. The dialogue isn't quite correct, nor is the accent. Often, the language altogether is used. After all, who wants to watch The Lion in Winter in Anglo-Norman? More broadly, almost all fictional speech is highly stylized, regardless of the set time period. It's far more polished, with few (if any) uses of 'um' or countless other pause-fillers) and generally expository as its object is as much to convey information to the viewer (or reader) as it is to reflect reality.
And that's the way we want it. We want fantasy. We want our national heroes of centuries gone by to be great orators with deep and powerful voices, even if the historical records suggest they weren't and didn't. We want our gunfighters to be less grimy than they were, and to always have a three-day growth of facial hair. We want our salt-of-the-earth colonial forebears to be wearing bright whites without wrinkles, and colorful garb they likely wouldn't have afforded.
Most historical speech in films isn't realistic. The dialogue isn't quite correct, nor is the accent. Often, the language altogether is used. After all, who wants to watch The Lion in Winter in Anglo-Norman? More broadly, almost all fictional speech is highly stylized, regardless of the set time period. It's far more polished, with few (if any) uses of 'um' or countless other pause-fillers) and generally expository as its object is as much to convey information to the viewer (or reader) as it is to reflect reality.
I don't even think it has to be historical speech. I watch a lot of British/Aussie programming, and a lot of times there's an American character who doesn't speak quite in the way an American actually would. For a show created for a non-American audience it makes more sense for the character to use phrases and slang that make sense to that audience. Talking like a "real American" might be confusing and take viewers out of the story.
Shakespeare is famously rife with such things. Cleopatra referring to billiards and Caesar to a striking clock (each over a thousand years before their invention), Aristotle being mentioned during the Trojan War (when he wouldn't yet be born for many centuries).
But these things really don't impact in any way the themes, motifs, or messages of the stories.
Most historical speech in films isn't realistic. The dialogue isn't quite correct, nor is the accent. Often, the language altogether is used. After all, who wants to watch The Lion in Winter in Anglo-Norman? More broadly, almost all fictional speech is highly stylized, regardless of the set time period. It's far more polished, with few (if any) uses of 'um' or countless other pause-fillers) and generally expository as its object is as much to convey information to the viewer (or reader) as it is to reflect reality.
And that's the way we want it. We want fantasy. We want our national heroes of centuries gone by to be great orators with deep and powerful voices, even if the historical records suggest they weren't and didn't. We want our gunfighters to be less grimy than they were, and to always have a three-day growth of facial hair. We want our salt-of-the-earth colonial forebears to be wearing bright whites without wrinkles, and colorful garb they likely wouldn't have afforded.
All films are fantasy to some degree.
Are you saying that speakers of foreign languages don't speak in British-accented English when they are alone the way they do in movies?
I don't even think it has to be historical speech. I watch a lot of British/Aussie programming, and a lot of times there's an American character who doesn't speak quite in the way an American actually would. For a show created for a non-American audience it makes more sense for the character to use phrases and slang that make sense to that audience. Talking like a "real American" might be confusing and take viewers out of the story.
Listen, I'm from New Jersey. How many times haven't I had to sit there and wince while a character supposedly from New Jersey speaks without saying their Rs (we DO) and otherwise sounds like someone out of 1950s Brooklyn? Think of Renee Zellweger in Cinderella Man. Great movie, but her accent was cringeworthy.
But what you say is true. Some words and phrases we as Americans use might not make sense to an Aussie.
I once watched somebody (some British rocker, I forget who it was) telling a story about how he showed up at some party wearing suspenders, and looking out at the audience waiting for them to laugh, and they didn't, and that was because suspenders to HIM meant a garter belt, but to the American audience, it meant what he would call "braces".
Adjustments do have to made to audiences for language clarity, but that is different from using terms and phrases that would not have been used in a certain time period, particularly in the memories of those of us who lived through them.
Sometimes it might be inappropriate. I had an aunt, my mother's youngest sister, who had cerebral palsy and was mentally retarded. She had about the intelligence level of a five-year-old. She was mentally retarded all her life, dying at the age of 61 from kidney disease in the mid-1990s. She did not live long enough to be reclassified as "developmentally disabled" because that was not a term used for most of her life.
But if you did a story now on such a person set in, say, the 1940s, and used "retarded", it probably wouldn't go over well.
Words go in and out of acceptable usage. Remember that John Langdon Down's paper describing the syndrome that bears his name was entitled, "Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots". It would be best nowadays not to call a person with Down Syndrome an idiot, even if our story was set in the late nineteenth century.
I just saw on social media a trailer for the new adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, in which Anne refers to Captain Wentworth as her "ex". The comments are all from former English majors clutching their pearls: "No! Absolutely not."
Bridge of spies had a couple of significant "out of time" plot elements. As I recall, Tom Hanks' character makes a direct dial long distance call, which was not possible in the early 1960s. Also, In that movie, the Berlin Wall was being erected in the middle of winter. It actually went up in July or august of 1961. But it was still a good movie IMO.
the one that sticks out to me is the song "Point of No Return" in Phantom of the Opera. That phrase was first used by fliers during WW2, not in the late 19th century when the movie was set.
Listen, I'm from New Jersey. How many times haven't I had to sit there and wince while a character supposedly from New Jersey speaks without saying their Rs (we DO) and otherwise sounds like someone out of 1950s Brooklyn? Think of Renee Zellweger in Cinderella Man. Great movie, but her accent was cringeworthy.
But what you say is true. Some words and phrases we as Americans use might not make sense to an Aussie.
I once watched somebody (some British rocker, I forget who it was) telling a story about how he showed up at some party wearing suspenders, and looking out at the audience waiting for them to laugh, and they didn't, and that was because suspenders to HIM meant a garter belt, but to the American audience, it meant what he would call "braces".
Adjustments do have to made to audiences for language clarity, but that is different from using terms and phrases that would not have been used in a certain time period, particularly in the memories of those of us who lived through them.
Sometimes it might be inappropriate. I had an aunt, my mother's youngest sister, who had cerebral palsy and was mentally retarded. She had about the intelligence level of a five-year-old. She was mentally retarded all her life, dying at the age of 61 from kidney disease in the mid-1990s. She did not live long enough to be reclassified as "developmentally disabled" because that was not a term used for most of her life.
But if you did a story now on such a person set in, say, the 1940s, and used "retarded", it probably wouldn't go over well.
Words go in and out of acceptable usage. Remember that John Langdon Down's paper describing the syndrome that bears his name was entitled, "Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots". It would be best nowadays not to call a person with Down Syndrome an idiot, even if our story was set in the late nineteenth century.
In doing ancestry research, I've looked at British census forms from the late 19th & early 20th centuries.
Among the features of those forms were columns where the census-taker would make a check-mark
if anyone in the household was "blind," "deaf-and-dumb," "imbecile / idiot," or "lunatic."
Monty Python could've built a great skit around that!
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). When I checked online after I heard "KFC" in the show, I found a zillion posts that said the same thing.
