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a new study bible! posted:Ken also has one of the most fun scenes in the whole show. And is essential to one of my favorite small scale fun scenes. "I've started cooking—actually made myself a—what is it, honey?" "A Pop-Tart, Ed." "It was very good."
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Oct 21, 2020 23:16
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Even Washington was something of a brand.
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Oct 28, 2020 14:46
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potee posted:I don't remember the whole plotline off the top of my head, but the issue does come back around when Pete tries to sign a defense contractor (I think?) that starts running background checks. North American Aviation. Everyone working on that one had to have clearance, because Pete was chasing literal nuclear weapons PR or something crazy Cold War like that. Almost no other client would even care that Don isn't who he says he is, if they found out. The DoD, thought is going to have Serious Problem with it, if North American had a guy that sounds like he was a character on the Americans show up.
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Nov 4, 2020 02:56
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I never think of Bert being evil. He simply is, like a hurricane. A hurricane that hates shoes.
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Nov 4, 2020 04:26
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Gaius Marius posted:I swear the season six finales episode description was just "don has a problem". Yes. I personally enjoyed "Joan goes to the beach."
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Nov 6, 2020 05:55
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Gaius Marius posted:Ehhhh I'd be careful with trying to extrapolate anything from that, we can read those themes into the work post facto because they're omnipresent in our current lives, but things take quite awhile to actually develop. Weiner wrote the pilot to Mad Men before he started writing on Soprano's for example. Using one of the examples, the Bourne Identity was a 1980 book. The script was written in 1999. The movie filmed in late 2000. It was supposed to be a September 2001 release. It isn't really an artifact of the Bush era or the post 9/11 world because it is literally the product of a different era. Plus there's a simple math problem: eight years of Obama simply had more time than four years of Trump. Especially considering one year was basically lost.
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Dec 12, 2020 21:02
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GoutPatrol posted:(don and sal chat) Possibly Don had some unspoken regret about it that made him think it was a mistake when he did that with Sal and that's one reason why he was the most opposed to Joan being used the same way.
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Jan 14, 2021 21:24
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I'm not sure what just triggered the thought, but aviation comes up so much in the show and in so many different ways. Not just "they fly around, because they are fancy Jet Age business men," but in every aspect it can. Mohawk, American, the Flight 1 crash, the Jet Set California people, General Dynamics, North American Aviation, Ted and Jim are/were pilots, Ted's Cessna and his various adventures, Don's wistful contrail watching at McCann, Pete ending up at Learjet. Almost like it is supposed to be a theme that I'm too dense to figure out.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:19
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JethroMcB posted:Subber's Note: Don mastered the Five Magicks before his showdown with David Ogilvy in the Lucky STIRKE 19:63 Love One An/OTHER OVA, which takes place between Seasons 2 and 3. It has yet to be released/translated stateside. Let me just say that this might be the best post I've seen in a very long time.
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Feb 10, 2021 15:24
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I knew Don was a piece of poo poo from the end of the first episode. A piece of poo poo that's really loving good at his job, but a piece of poo poo nonetheless. The show then proceeds to show us how every character is also a piece of poo poo for one reason or another and that Don is a scared sweaty nobody terrified that the world is one second away from finding out that he's a sweaty nobody. Because once the world finds out he's nothing, then he can't get away with being horrible in every regard. It isn't that complicated.
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Feb 22, 2021 00:00
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Jon Hamm was capable of desperate panic sweat better than any other actor that has ever lived and Don would be nothing without it.
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Feb 22, 2021 03:46
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Shageletic posted:Don Draper and women are pretty weird. He's the opposite of someone who uses women to burnish his image, like soft headed wannabe alpha men today. It's all way more complex, and hosed up then that. The first woman to show kindness to him he could remember hosed him, while being kind to him (not the act of course, which is statutory rape, but before at least). The dude was literally being fed soup and being bundled up after his stepmother cast him into the basement, before the caretaker jumped his bones. That episode where the prostitute rapes him is the point where Don moved from "total piece of poo poo" to "deserving of pity" for me. The guy is just so fundamentally broken from his junk upbringing that I'm not sure he could fix himself, even if the wanted to. Although he doesn't, because of how messed up he is.
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Feb 23, 2021 05:09
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Shageletic posted:It's such an interesting question. I do think Don felt something there, and Don was more open about his mistakes (while not being specific about them, lol) to his call with Peggy than he ever has. It is important to me and my understanding that Peggy, the person that likely understands Don more than any other living person, is distressed and has the impression that something is seriously wrong with Don. She didn't realize, and Don probably didn't either, that he was on the cusp of actual change.
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Feb 24, 2021 21:17
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I think the best phone conversation is when Lane gets the call from London, firing him for firing everyone. He's just so  during it.
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Feb 26, 2021 20:28
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JethroMcB posted:New York's famous Pete Luger Steakhouse has placed wax figures of celebrities throughout the restaurant to make it feel more "normal" despite the reduced capacity due to COVID protocols - including the most famous New Yorker you would expect to see at such a storied Manhattan institution: He looks like he's one second away from puking all over someone's funeral, again.
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Feb 27, 2021 01:03
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Xealot posted:
The guy devolves to the point that he watches a cockroach walking through a living room populated by lawn furniture, while freezing because he can't get off his rear end to fix a broken door. It is a disaster entirely made by his own hand, that he was completely capable of preventing or rectifying, but he's a mess of a person. I don't see that as "oh poor Don  " but "loving hell, you blew your life up, you butt, for no good reason." Freddie's "fix your bayonet" scene is such a kick in the butt of a line for anyone, but it barely hits Don. I just wanted to mention it because I like that scene.
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Mar 6, 2021 02:22
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GoutPatrol posted:after don calls Freddy to meet the mets, he picks him up and takes him home, gives him a coffee that is "as black and strong as jack johnson" and gives him the pep talk to get back there and do the work because you'll never make it back in this state. It is that one
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Mar 6, 2021 03:41
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I'll admit that I may have misremembered the sequence of events!
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Mar 6, 2021 04:57
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Bobby should have been an unseen character like Maris Crane
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Mar 11, 2021 21:28
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Solkanar512 posted:I don't know if it's just "how management worked" back then or if they're particularly callous, but I just can't believe how incredibly lovely the London office bosses were. People shouldn't be surprised by a visit out of the middle of nowhere and certainly not during a national holiday. Outside of being incredibly lovely, you aren't going to get a full view of things - many folks are going to be out, clients are going to be out and so on. Given how long they've clearly been planning (given Guy's preparation), it was all likely done on purpose to gently caress with everyone and inject chaos into the situation rather than do a legitimate evaluation. I just took it as the British being incredibly British about business
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Mar 19, 2021 21:29
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When I first learned about the whole school tie thing, I was blown away that anyone could give a crap about that.
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Mar 20, 2021 02:11
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I've sort of assumed that if "Don Draper" was so injured as to be sent back to the US and promptly discharged, then so was "Dick Whitman."
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Apr 16, 2021 04:43
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GoutPatrol posted:I'd like a "where are they now" to look like a promotional graveyard tour, like you're visiting Arlington. I want Roger to be, inexplicably, still trucking at 105+.
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Apr 21, 2021 05:03
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Yoshi Wins posted:Apparently the Main Line region of Philadelphia is where its country club set live(d). The Main Line is still way up there. Lower Merion is like the fifth highest per capita income location in the country. Virtually every township in the corridor has a household income two to four times the Pennsylvania average.
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May 3, 2021 23:15
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Before about 1985, that was just the general background smell of society. Everything reeked of cigarette smoke. Literally everything.
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May 7, 2021 21:02
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Somehow I feel like Pan Am would have done better anywhere but ABC for reasons I can't exactly put my finger on.
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May 26, 2021 23:29
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I'm glad to see that Drew Carey lived
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May 29, 2021 03:34
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I assume the circumstances of entry were a factor too. None of us (the Americans I mean) have any concept of being attacked by an aggressor nation-state, especially one that was fully capable of winning. Yeah, we have 9/11, but...I wouldn't be surprised if the whole of al Qaeda in 2001 didn't have the manpower that just the Kido Butai had, let alone the full power of Japan.
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Jun 17, 2021 16:04
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:american military history is full of similar rhetoric of glorious self-sacrifice - "the tree of liberty watered with the blood of patriots", the alamo, bellau wood, dying heroically being the surest way to get a medal of honor (posthumous). the militaristic japanese government of the early 20th c really took this thinking to an entire level beyond though, and it is terrifying to be on the other end of a suicide charge (though, to be honest, most of the dudes doing the suicide attacks were motivated by avoiding the shame of being the one guy in the group who's a big coward not willing to die for the emperor). this fed into uniquely racist attitudes towards the japanese, beyond just the dehumanization of enemies in war. to the allies, the japanese seemed to even behave inhumanly, i guess because dying heroically is much more understandable if one or two guys do it for an audience instead of having entire groups of dudes throwing themselves boldly into the teeth of the enemy I do take a little exception to this, knowing a few guys missing parts because they survived their self-sacrifice. The attitude behind it, as well as the scale and scope, was different. Self-sacrifice in the Western tradition is more often tied to saving allies than damaging enemies. There's very, very few Medal of Honor and Silver Star citations that are "and then he made a pointless suicide charge" and plenty that are "he agreed to stay behind with the machine gun to cover their retreat." But even those are very small in number. The heroic last stands were because they couldn't retreat and they were going to be executed anyway, so just keep shooting. It wasn't the plan. It was a failure. The Japanese government made it the plan, and that's vastly different in my book.
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Jun 18, 2021 02:42
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Cutler had my favorite war-related line in the show. Over Dresden? I wanted to live!
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Jun 20, 2021 18:06
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I also like to think that Roger is all "OK whatever let's go" is because it isn't the first time he drunk hired someone. Don was just lucky that his BS aligned with Roger's BS.
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Jun 28, 2021 19:48
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Paper Lion posted:Boxing was a much bigger deal culturally back then, though not quite in the way you'd think of like baseball or anything. I'd go that far. It was easily bigger than pro football, at the time. The Super Bowl wasn't even a thing yet.
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Jul 6, 2021 21:23
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Shageletic posted:It affected the children of returning vets to, since alot of these people didn't create connections with their children, or had trouble doing so. My dad's dad was Marine infantry, fought at Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, and Tinian. He was a classic raging Irish drunk, who was apparently taking to random deeply philosophical musings (my dad recalls him often quoting the Koran and the kids having no idea what the hell the Koran was). He wasn't an abusive man, but was distant and hard on his kids. My dad always resented him and says he learned how to be a father from him, by the principle of doing the opposite of what he'd do. When he passed away, one of the items that passed to my dad was the journal he kept during the war. After reading the absolute horrors that it described, my dad's opinion of his father changed completely. He was a completely broken man that saw and did things that he'd never get over and was struggling with it while it was still going on around him. Turns out his philosophical streak was him trying to rectify his Catholic beliefs with the things he'd seen, studying various religions for insight, and how he couldn't get a grip on it. It was an eye-opening experience for my dad to read what had made his father the way he was. I wouldn't say he forgave him, but he was at least sympathetic to a troubled man. He passed away when I was fairly young and we weren't really involved with that side of my family, entirely because of his relationship with my dad. His alcoholism and smoking caught up to him well before his time. Part of me wishes I could have known him, because he'd had quite a life with a ton of adventures: coached amateur basketball in post-war China! Played one game for the Chicago White Sox! Caught Ty Cobb out in an exhibition game! Survived a train derailment! But, the injuries he sustained mentally during the war robbed one generation of a father and a second of a grandfather.
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Jul 7, 2021 03:09
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Shageletic posted:It does seem that whenever Don gets back home to Betty he hurries upstairs first. Presumably for a shower? Oddly enough, this wouldn't strike a lot of people as suspicious, especially given that it was a common habit where he spent some of his time as a youth (Pennsylvania coal country). Nor would Betty, who would likely have been aware of it being something people did, even from her upper class background. You came home from work, took a shower, then joined the family for dinner. It could easily be chalked up as just a habit. Look up what a Pittsburgh toilet is. Despite the name, they were all over coal and steel country from Central PA to Chicago.
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Jul 8, 2021 00:35
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pentyne posted:During the 1960s at the height of the red scare? The Red Scare was way over by this point. North American still had some large Air Force projects on the books, but they were quickly becoming a space company. Having been cleared for similar reasons, he isn't even being cleared for technical purposes. It is almost a formality because he needs to see pre-release imagery and so on. Despite how fancy it sounds, he's clearing a low bar and the real espionage threats have already had access years beforehand. If he fails the checks, you just wash your hands. There are bigger fish to fry.
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Aug 4, 2021 18:27
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Yoshi Wins posted:Man, this background check discussion is fascinating. I always assumed Don was right and that he'd be thrown in prison if it had continued. The possibility that he would have been fine if he'd just stayed calm and gotten more info about how in-depth the check was really has an impact on the story. The important thing is this: Boxman posted:Of course, the fact that he was sent flailing at the idea that the government might find out indicates he really shouldn't have been granted that clearance anyway. One of the things that hasn't changed between the 1960s and the 2020s is that they're not really hunting what you've done in a criminal sense (of course, having a criminal history is a Bad Thing too). They're looking for how you can be compromised. Even in the back then days, Don's drinking and affairs would have at least raised an eyebrow. Those are potential blackmail points. That's also why they fixate on finances. Debt is a big driver behind a lot of guys working for the other team. Don freaking out like he did means that the whole stolen identity thing, likely combined with his general fear of 'getting caught' in any of his other dealings, means that he was very sensitive to being exposed. He's almost a perfect target to coerce. The only reason that he resisted Pete's blackmail is because he had tools to resist it in his professional leverage over Pete combined with Bert being an odd dude. That sort of defense vanishes when the blackmailer is a foreign agent. Like Boxman said, that's not the kind of guy you want to clear. Despite the talk of the nukes and ICBMs and generals around the time of the California trip and their various DoD dealings, North American Aviation's most important and visual contract at the time was far more interesting. I don't know if the writers knew it or just selected a random defense contractor. But, at the time, North American was developing the Apollo Command and Service Module. Had SCDP continued the work for North American, they'd have been doing the early promotional work for the Space Shuttle in just three year's time.
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Aug 5, 2021 00:18
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Jerusalem posted:The girl told not to read a book because it interfered with her pleasing image as a woman whose only required "value" was that she was very pretty. I always took that very differently. Reading a book is an engrossing activity that is harder to disengage from and gives approaching people pause when trying to interrupt the reader. A magazine is trivial and interruptible. It is also, conveniently, full of ads, which sort of makes it look related to the place of business. That's also how I've always had it play out in the real world. I've had quiet or slow periods at work where no one would bat an eye at someone reading the news or wikipedia or something, but busting out a book would be roundly discouraged.
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Aug 29, 2021 01:50
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:Betty went to Bryn Mawr, which is an elite women-only school. Not just elite in the fancy way, like actual elite in the academic way. It may have been the top school for women in the country at the time.
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Sep 18, 2021 04:30
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I really enjoy it. Making any comparison to Mad Men is useless. It is a comedy, first and foremost, and that's going to make it a completely different animal. It also really depends on if you could tolerate the "Lorelai/Rory are divine beings whose perfection everyone else basks in" Gilmore Girls energy. Maisel is the same with the lead. That said, it brings along a million supporting characters played by fantastic comedy actors. Alex Borstein and Tony Shaloub are hilarious.
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Sep 18, 2021 13:28
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Jerusalem posted:Old enough to have served in World War 2 There's a few bits and pieces that make his age really odd to work out and one of them is his WWII service. For his WWII stories to make sense, he'd have to be in his mid-30s before 1945. His stories imply that he was in command of a cruiser. He doesn't specify what type of cruiser, but he does say "cruiser" in one story. A couple of his stories have phrases that would have required him to be in command, because he mentions taking the ship off course to do something. But, even that young is pretty young to command even a light cruiser. A destroyer or destroyer escort skipper was routinely in his early to mid 30s. It is also possible that his command was not the cruiser he referred to and that he served on a cruiser before getting a command of a lighter ship, which comes up in his story about shooting down a recon plane. That story has enough details that require it happening no earlier than November 1944.
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Nov 2, 2021 01:42
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