The Incredibles

oldgringo2001 When does the story happen? The years are as rubbery as the science, but I would place it mostly in 1964. Except for the Hudson Hornet there are no exact duplicates of real cars, but there are cars extremely close to the 1964 Thunderbird (the car driven by Thelma and Louise) and the 1965 Mustang, which came out in the spring of 1964 as an early 1965 model. For another thing, the definitive James Bond film, Goldfinger, is also from 1964, and the Incredibles is more like a James Bond picture than a superhero picture. And for a third, I was actually fourteen in 1964. I was not Tony Rydinger. Girls had abandoned the beehives and were wearing lots of Capri pants and smocks, probably because Mary Tyler Moore looked so good in that outfit in the the Dick Van Dyke show. Blue jeans were allowed in some schools, but every school had a dress code. Skirts cut to mid-thigh didn't appear until 1965, and not on many white American girls until 1966. Video recorders in the 1960s were expensive things using huge reels that not every TV station could afford. President Johnson's use of two of them in the White House so he could record the network newcasts he wasn't watching was counted as one of his major extravagances. The one in the movie is a complete anachronism put there only so Dash can be called to the principal's office. The class geek was always the only guy who could fix the 8mm or 16mm movie projector when the film jammed or broke. Another anachronism is the secretary at Insuracare coming up with the information on Bob's employment instantly. She would have had to get up to check the records in some file drawer, or send someone else to do it. This is may be an artifact of the Pixar culture. Present-day computer geeks can't really comprehend how primitive information technology was a couple of human generations ago. If you can remember newspaper want ads, there would be a whole page of jobs for keypunchers in any big-city newspaper, meaning people who did nothing but transcribe information onto cardboard computer punch cards, 80 characters per card. I wrote my first computer program on a six-inch-stack of punch cards and I was still doing some keypunching in the 1980's.