Incredibles, Too

Once Again, Gentle Reader, Peruse That Carefully
For I am unsure whether or not "The Incredibles 2" is legitimately available yet, and of course I do not condone those who <coughcough>rrent films illegally, because that is bad.
     Quite besides which, this Intro is about the earlier film, "The Incredibles", which I threatened you with earlier today and then had to back out of.
     But I'm back!  With pictures and witty pithy amusing comments, all centred around TI's somewhat anachronistic images, because nobody can parse an anachronism like Your Humble Scribe.*  All these many hundreds of words are all aiming towards one thing: determining Exactly When TI is set.  Art!

     These two shots (do you see what I did there?!) come from the film's very beginning, where you see an archetypal Fifties police car, all chrome and fins, and a sub-machine gun which might very well be the M3 'Grease Gun'.  Art?

     We can contrast this with the Incredibile, the chosen method of travel for Bob Parr a.k.a. Mister Incredible, and a bad pun in it's own right.  Art?

Or - is it "Incredi-Bile" as in vomit?

     There really isn't any timeline datum you can assume or assess from this shot, since the Incredibile is a pretty unique vehicle and thus a statistical anomaly.
     Next in Conrad's incredibly nerdy analysis is a camera, which is part of the haul taken by a thief.  He empties his bag of swag onto a rooftop in order to - oooh, I dunno, either gloat or assess for market value given depreciation?  Art!

     My extensive notes inform that this approximates to a "Spartus Full Vue" reflex camera, made from 1948 to 1960.  So, aha!  We are getting an idea of dates here.  And, yes, people, this is what old-timey cameras looked like.
     Next we look at a newspaper headline.  Art?

     This is as large as I can make the shot. As you can see, it is blurred and grainy, and the publication date is missing entirely as far as I can see; though given how murky this particular shot is, that's hard to judge, which seems to be deliberate policy on behalf of Pixar, so they can fudge around with dates and times. 
     Here an aside.  I always thought it would be a good idea for Mr. Incredible to drag the plaintiff back to the top of the tower he threw himself off, then offer to hurl him over the edge again in order to permit the suicide to go ahead.  Given that Conrad's mind and imagination are dark and twisted at the best of times, it is unlikely that Pixar ever storyboarded such an outcome.**
     Art!  Put down that plate of coal and the Mara Corday calendar and post another picture -

     Like it says on the tin.  Here we see plain old Bob Parr working away like <adopts South Canadian vernacular> a common schlub, ensconced in his office cubicle and WITH A COMPUTER.  A monstrously early computer with what John Cleese notably described as "a plate of spaghetti" hanging out the back, and which looks more akin to one from the Eighties than the Sixties.  Also -

     That display looks suspiciously monochromatic, as with all the cathode ray tube screens from the Eighties to the Nineties.
     One last item in this list of nerdy analyses - 

Helen Parr.***  

     Here Helen hails hubby, whilst washing Baby Parr in the sink.  Note the type of phone she is using, as my extensive notes class it as a "Bell Princess Phone", manufactured from 1959 onward, again helping delineate a definitive timeline.  Art?

A BPP

     I think it's now time for the motley to test our theory if being naked yet coated in goose-grease protects one when dropped into the middle of an acre of poison ivy.

Wow.  Another long Intro.  Don't whine, the Atomic Tazer I use on Art has a verrrry long range.  Okay, next!

"Chernobyl"
Ah, yes, back to the Sinister era again, and their consistently shoddy engineering, cavalier attitude to health and safety, paranoid secrecy and default resort to lies about everything.  
     For Your Information, this is a television series presented as a dramatic reconstruction of what happened at Chernobyl after the explosion, which is subtly represented as a distant flash on the near horizon, followed by another flash.  The explosive shock-wave that hits the nearby town of Pripyat is a literal wake-up call.

Today - nice and safe.  Well - safe.

     One reason why people find this program frightening is the nature of short-wavelength radiation.  You cannot see it, hear it, taste it, or smell it and yet it can kill you in as little as thirty minutes - although a lethal dose that high is actually felt, as a burning sensation on the skin.  Also, that drifting ash?  Radioactive.  The big lumps of graphite in the ruins?  Radioactive.  That huge plume of smoke heading into the skies?  Radioactive.
     As one who was around at the time this happened, Conrad remembers the Sinisters only owned up to what had happened because it was simply too huge for them to either deny or cover up.

These chaps almost predicted it.

     Train-wreck television: grim yet compelling.  I look forward to the next installment.

     Wow, from light and frothy to dark Slavic horror.  I think we need to get the pendulum to swing the other way a tad.

Well - Not Quite!
Instead, cementing my position as Nastiest Man On The Planet, I see that the final matches in the British Ballfoot Pry My Lager (sp?) have finished, and that one team have won.  This is kind of what you'd expect, after all, but of course there are now over 1,700 Comments on this end result as supporters of the winners gloat and supporters of those who didn't win - technically these are called "losers" and sorry for the technical jargon there - complain, and third parties hurl abuse from the sidelines -

Curling crews - close enough

     Oh my, how I will miss this!  A good wallow in schadenfreude is like taking a refreshing bathe in a river of poisons, and it also gets rid of athlete's foot.

     Okay, time for some of that food stuff.  Edna?  Do you want to escort me - ah.  She's in the kitchen already.

Later!


*  Possibly excepting The Doctor, who is currently unavailable for comment.
**  But - I can dream, can't I?
***  You would not believe some of the incredibly NSFW artwork there is of Helen.