088 - Television Curmudgeon

In the search for light, family-friendly, half-hour television for the Summer, we have finally come to a sitcom called The Goldbergs. Despite it featuring the voiceover work of my beloved Patton Oswalt and being set in the 1980's, I have been unable to watch more than one or two episodes up till now because it drives me NUTS.

The stories are fine. The jokes are occasionally great. But the attention to 1980's accuracy? NOPE.

EXAMPLE: Last night we watched an episode where the kid was frightened because he had just seen the movie Poltergeist at a Dollar Theater instead of The Great Mouse Detective. Meanwhile, in Storyline B, his older brother was working to earn a pair of Reebok Pump high-top sneakers.

REEBOK PUMPS came out in 1989.
POLTERGEIST came out in 1982.
THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE came out in 1986.

And between it all, he was playing games on a NINTENDO, which didn't come to North America till 1985,and wearing a Voltron shirt that was very clearly sourced from a 2009 Hot Topic store with it's fake-distressed logo.

I know there has to be a word for this, I call it "Lump Historical Revision", and they touched on it in Futurama when they went to a theme park version of The Twentieth Century and saw things like Civil War soldiers battling armored knights in a breakdancing competition. Mark Twain and Muhammed Ali could totally have been best friends solving murders together, they were both prominent figures of the 20th century right?

While I generally enjoy this type of lump revisionism, for some reason on this show it just *bugs me*. Probably because I was there, and I have to scream out "THAT NEVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED" during any given episode.

But I'm trying to get over it :)