The "Torment a Historian" movie playlist thread

[Orius]

Well, Wild Wild West gets a bit of a pass for not being serious history at all.

I saw that sequel I was a kid or maybe in my early teens. I don't really remember, but I was old enough to understand just how little it made sense. I do vaguely remember a scene where they encounter some German soldiers and the German guys are acting like "WTF is this black guy doing here?!" Reaaaaly awkward. It was like the movie knew it was dumb, tried to hang a lampshade on it, but the drunk guy at the party went home with it on his head instead.

 

[Dioltach]

Balde Runner. Clearly the future presented in this movie is not historically correct.

"Balde Runner: Ye Olde Mo Farrah Storie"?

 

[Dioltach]

I enjoyed the first series of The Medici, with Dustin Hoffman and Richard Madden. Some liberties taken with historical fact, but still enjoyable. Then came the second series and they Millennialed it all up.

Another one that's particularly bad is Reign.

 

[Ryujin]

I had the same reaction to the (admittedly ahistorical) Wild Wild West with Will Smith. While there were indeed black secret service agents at the time, they were not going to be selected for the kinds of missions the show (& movie) depicted.

But at least Jon Peters got his giant spider, that he didn't get to have in "Superman Lives"

 

[MattW]

To be fair... almost all movies about "The Old West" are historically inaccurate. They've always been more like mythology, rather than any attempt at realism.

 

[Lanefan]

Asking for historical accuracy from an obvious send-up like A Knight's Tale is pointless, and defeats the purpose. Ditto with something like Xena: Warrior Princess; a glorious mash-up of different timelines utterly lacking in anything resembling historical accuracy yet providing excellent inspoiration for D&D game settings.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Asking for historical accuracy from an obvious send-up like A Knight's Tale is pointless, and defeats the purpose. Ditto with something like Xena: Warrior Princess; a glorious mash-up of different timelines utterly lacking in anything resembling historical accuracy yet providing excellent inspoiration for D&D game settings.

The thing that annoyed me most about the Hercules/Xena setting was how many hundreds of years were covered by it.

 

[Orius]

To be fair... almost all movies about "The Old West" are historically inaccurate. They've always been more like mythology, rather than any attempt at realism.

Yeah, there's a lot of wild and inaccurate stories going from dime novel influences, through stuff from Hollywood's Golden Age which had a lot of romanticized nonsense and so on. But some of them make good stories.

The thing that annoyed me most about the Hercules/Xena setting was how many hundreds of years were covered by it.

More like thousands.

Generally the shows put them about 15-20 years after whenever the Trojan War occured. Whatever historical events inspired that would be about roughly 1200 BC. The Dahak storyline had Hercules going to Babylon and hanging out with Gilgamesh. Both of course are mythological figures (though possibly based on historical figures) but Gilgamesh's story is much older than Hercules. Then Xena visits something that looks like it was supposed to be late Warring States China, and she's got Julius Caesar as an arch enemy, and he mostly lived in 1st century BC. Hercules though was a less serious show, where Xena had me rolling my eyes more, and I eventually gave up on the latter.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I didn’t watch either enough to catch all of the jumbles, but I recall a Xena episode that tied into the story of Abraham‘s near sacrifice of Isaac (estimated around 2100 BCE) and her having Caesar as an enemy, That drove me nuts.

 

[Khelon Testudo]

I thought it was funny. Clearly the writers are saying "we don't care" about actual history, they're just writing what they thought was fun. Until it started getting heavy and angsty.