"The Spirit of the Future" DVD commentary
If "The Innocent's Progress" is a character-driven show-biz story, and "The Pretty Horsebreaker" is a hard-boiled detective story, then "The Spirit of the Future" is a fairy-tale romance, complete with chivalrous knight, evil baron, good witch and lady of the lake.
It starts out with a "boy" (this is the vague age business I talked about earlier) ( Read more... )
It starts out with a "boy" (this is the vague age business I talked about earlier) ( Read more... )
Not those of us who grew up watching sixties sit-coms during children's hour. :) My immediate point of reference was Bewitched, since that show also featured an advertiser. But really, it's hard to avoid advertisers in TV shows of that time period - they were like the urban cowboys of the early sixties. So I thought that aspect of the story was very authentic.
The nastier elements of the era didn't seem terribly anachronistic to me either. Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and probably lots of other shows of that era had subtle references to racism. It was a time when TV shows were pushing the envelope.
No, the anachronistic element I sensed had something to do with the style of the show. I read somewhere that they filmed it in a camera-style similar to sixties camera work, which is very cool, but even so, the manner in which the scenes were presented was very, very 00s. This is probably more obvious to me than to most viewers, because I've seen so much sixties television. Also, I stopped watching television back in the 90s, and stopped watching it heavily in the 80s. So every time I glimpse a current show, my reaction is, "Wow. Is that how they do things these days?"
(This is not to say that I could do better than the creators of Mad Men at recreating sixties styles. I'm currently trying to recreate sixties styles of speech for my atompunk series, which is a major headache.)
So the show just didn't feel retro enough to me. Despite the authentic costumes and social milieu, I kept getting pulled back to the 00s.
Overall, though, the series looked intriguing. Wish I could see more, but I don't have a television, and there doesn't seem to be any easy way to access the show on an iPod Touch (which is my primary computer these days).
"You are right about the 'chronological snobbery' the show sometimes can fall into "
Oh, I wasn't taking a stab at Mad Men when I quoted Lewis. I was just following up on your earlier, general remarks on this topic. Sorry that I wasn't clearer in my transition.
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