Quote Originally Posted by AndrewCrossett View Post
Most average people today would not understand most of what was said to them if they traveled back that far in time. Most people can barely make heads or tails of a Shakespeare play until they've gotten used to that language. Even if you could get the gist of what was being said it would be very distracting. It would be like listening to a word-for-word adaptation of the Clockwork Orange novel without having the glossary to refer to.
Shakespeare's plays aren't how actual people in there day to day lives talked. You can pull up a newpaper from the 1600s, it's pretty easy to understand what's being said. It's not quite 400 years ago, what with it being 1722, but go look at (or listen to) Benjamin Franklin's first Silence Dogood letter; it's not a hard thing to understand either.

It would only be like a Clockwork Orange if you ran into people that heavily used slang. But then slang can be like that no matter what time it is.

I was a kid in the 70's and 80's. Yes, there were a few 50's shows like I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver on TV in syndication. But most of what we saw of the 50's was stuff like Happy Days... not a very accurate portrayal, at least according to my parents. And even the real 50's shows didn't dwell very much on current events or pop culture of the time... mostly because they were written by middle-aged men who grew up in the 20's and 30's and had no idea what these damn beatnik kids today were doing. The idealized "Ozzie and Harriet" depiction of the Middle Class Suburban White Family of the 1950's was a fiction created by networks, not a reflection of reality.

I see the same thing today. That 70's Show was clearly written by people who didn't remember much about the 70's. Stranger Things is a good show, but its depiction of the 80's (I was 17 years old at that time) is not very similar to what I remember.
There were more than a few, I was a kid in the '80s and '90s and there were lots of shows from the 50s that were on. Most of the big one still aired in the '90s outside of the Sid Caesar shows. And the 50s was basically the beginning of tv.

I'm also not sure what your point is really even meant to be with the other thing. Happy Days (which is just the crappy tv version of American Graffiti anyways) not being an accurate portrayal of a time doesn't have anything to do with anything. The topic is about media from the time, not taking away a realistic view of an era by way of a tv show.

In the 70's and 80's and on into the 90's we had open syndication, when any local TV station could buy a syndicated package of some old sitcom and show it during the day. But that ended, and now we're stuck with god-awful infomercials and judge shows and crap like that... it's not even worth faking illness to stay home from school anymore. But in its place, today we have YouTube where you can see just about anything from past decades. Any 15-year-old today can instantly go and watch the same videos I watched on MTV in 1983. That's a resource we didn't have when I was a kid.
You don't build taste by having near limitless option of what to watch. You build taste by having less option. You turn on the tv as a kid, you flip it over to HBO, and there's Zardoz. Have you heard of it before this? Let's say no, but you watch it anyways because there's nothing else on. You like, you don't like it, doesn't really matter. What does matter is you've watched something you probably wouldn't have otherwise if you had the option of reaching into a hat and pulling out something you know. The thing you're talking about is only nice because we grew up in a time where we were exposed to things we normally wouldn't be, and our taste were allowed to grow. But imagine you're some kid who's really into Minecraft, and when you're not playing it you're watching Let's Plays of it. Now YouTube is a near limitless resource for Minecraft videos, so why would this kid ever journey outside their comfort zone? Not only are they not being forced outside that zone, they've got something that allows them to stay in it for however long they want.

You had a resource in 1983 that let you watch things from 1952, they were called television and VHS. They were only more curated.