Historical Inaccuracy

Just as an example of how historical accuracy is more important in today’s TV (especially if it’s Mad Men) than it used to be, here’s a screencap from an episode of Happy Days, back when the show was still set in the mid-’50s. The poster is for Roman Holiday, which is indeed a ’50s movie, but it says at the top that Audrey Hepburn is the star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which didn’t come out until the early ’60s. The set decorators obviously grabbed a poster for a ’60s reissue of Roman Holiday, and nobody corrected it because it was assumed, rightly, that normal people wouldn’t notice. But you can bet that you will never see Mad Men display a movie poster mentioning a movie that didn’t exist yet, because TV today is much more nitpicky about details.