>and the murderers will carry the burden of the secret of their crime for the rest of their lives … <

A similar sub-generational stratigraphic marker is civil defense drills in the public schools, the subject of nightmares for many War Babies and early-mid Baby Boomers but becoming passé by the time the late Boomers got into school.

Folk/protest singers have long been among the people with the wit to be scared of this stuff. There's a whole website about it:
http://atomicplatters.com/

Also valuable and in somewhat the same vein: its approximate contemporary Mediaspeak: How Television Makes Up Your Mind, by Donna Woolfolk Cross.

The Sopranos opening sequence may be the best example there's ever been — possibly the best there can ever be — of explaining what the show is about simply through atmosphere. No voiceovers or Chiron graphics or dialogue or thematic lyrics or other explication, but between the visual storytelling and the music, you…

I can't say that any one character ever *ruined* an otherwise good show for me, but one of the nostalgia channels recently took it from the top with "Newhart" and reminded me of how jarring and incongruous Kirk Devane (Steven Kampmann) was in those first couple of years. The character seemed to go beyond the show's…

Very Zeitgeisty, if memory serves. Consider 1976: just a few years after the establishment of the EPA (1970), the banning of DDT (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973). Smog controls for cars were in and leaded gasoline was on its way out. For better or worse — things could get a bit preachy and didactic at…

>You can't really sit down for a two-hour film on Christmas {etc.}

The Wikipedias say that the interiors were shot on soundstage (in Toronto), and the exteriors at a house in Cleveland. When the movie finally achieved its time-delay popularity via cable TV,* a fan bought the house in Cleveland, re-created the interior and exterior as seen in the movie, and opened a museum in the…

The extremely northern suburbs of LA, anyway. :)

Well, yes, just as the present-day USS Damn Near Anything could have her way with a tramp steamer mounting a few smallbore defensive weapons, I'd expect that the Enterprise could take the Millennium Falcon rather handily.

> I'm a huge Star Trek fan, but it is pretty soft stuff compared to a lot of science fiction.

> It's just a couple of lines here and there.

For your consideration:

Boba Fett aces the "would Bogart have played this character" test. He isn't even discernibly afraid of Darth Vader, for crying' out loud.

Either Stallone or Schwarzenegger attempting any of the various Brit accents would be… interesting.

Thanks for the link. An interesting quote:

George C. Marshall in three acts: spinning up a pathetically understrength and ill-equipped Army for what was plainly going to be a shooting war that would involve the US; pushing for reversal of the initial, punitive US policy toward the defeated Axis powers in Europe; and concluding that Chiang Kai-Shek was not a…

> LeMay was known to fly into SAC bases, get out of the plane > & say they were all dead. Because their security sucked.

Not the least successful thing about that movie was the framing device of Jimmy Stewart having to choose between SAC and the St. Louis Cardinals. Though athletic in a way that was plausible for a ballplayer, Stewart (b. 1908) was in his mid-forties and looked it. Former player turned manager, maybe…