What year was this set in?
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andrewwjohnson — 14 years ago(February 29, 2012 01:06 PM)
During the late thirties threw much of the forties some jukeboxes were made with rear projection systems that played "soundies" : short films of singers or bands of the era. World War Two material restriction ended the the production of the machines and the last soundie was released in 1946. It would be highly unlikely to find such a machine in a late fifties bar and totally incredible for it to be playing rock music.
Color TV sets were more likely. They were first produced in the mid fifties and there high cost made them more suitable for public places like bars. However they didn't have large screens so that is definitely an anachronism at least for the fifties.
You don't need a flux capacitor handy to realize the music is for more eighties rock then anything Haley and the Comets or Elvis ever did in the fifties.
TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone. -
skizzie72-1 — 18 years ago(July 27, 2007 10:19 AM)
set in 1984 but as hill's films all are, its an alternate reality which makes him able to incorporate things from different decades. i just watched it last night again and the video jukebox and the neons gave it away as being set in the current year but almost like certain things didnt happen in time so it stayed as it was in the late 40' or early 50's. almost as if there was no world war II and things more or less stayed the same, I.E. the abound racism when the cops call the sorells "spades", all the metal cars driving around so there was no metal shortage for the war. if it could only still be that simple today
IM RUNNIN THIS MONKEY FARM NOW,FRANKENSTEIN! AND I WANNA KNO WHAT THE F&$K YOU'RE DOIN WITH MY TIME -
chicago85 — 16 years ago(June 08, 2009 05:55 AM)
Its a comic book. It reminds me of Dark City with Keifer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Rufus Sewell and William Hurt. The telephones, clothes etc looked like 1940's.
I don't want to spoil things but Rufus Sewell discovers he isn't having hallucinations. Its worse than that. -
scotbpens — 16 years ago(June 28, 2009 06:49 PM)
It's made clear from the beginning that
Streets of Fire
is set in a dystopian alternate reality where styles, fashions, and the state of technology are chronologically all over the map, much like Terry Gilliam's
Brazil
. Only if I had to choose between living in the
Brazil
universe and the
Streets of Fire
universe, I'd pick
Streets of Fire
for sure. That world may be dangerous, but at least it looks like fun!
All the universe . . . or nothingness. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be? -
ozymandias312 — 16 years ago(September 24, 2009 08:05 PM)
I'm pretty sure it's supposed to take place in some kind of alternate reality, probably with an alternate timeline and history, sort of like in some Alan Moore graphic novels, or like in that Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder." Maybe World War II never happened there, or, if it did, it was fought by different countries for different reasons, or somebody else won. Maybe there have been several other wars in the meantime that never happened in our reality. There might have even been a limited nuclear war at some point.
Ozy
And I stood where I did be; for there was no more use to run; And again I lookt with my hope gone. -
Apollyon_Crash — 16 years ago(October 16, 2009 01:52 PM)
I always pictured the film as being set more or less in the 1980s, but in an alternate universe where the Cold War actually escalated into full-on combat (around 1959 or 1960), and after 20 years or so of war with Russia (perhaps the war has just ended or is just ending), society is crumbling. Crime is rampant, no new cars have been built for over 2 decades (presumably the assembly lines are/were converted for the war effort), and the world is very sharply divided between the "haves" and the "have nots."
In this sense, I think, the film actually seems downright believable. -
flern — 15 years ago(August 05, 2010 04:33 AM)
color tv is the dead give away
Not really. Why did everyone drive 50's style cars if the movie took place in the era of color television? I suggest that you read the rest of the thread, and then ponder why at the beginning of the movie, it was explicitly slated as "Another time, Another place".
And even if the movie was supposed to be set in some "real" time period, how do you know that the video jukebox (or whatever it was that was seen in the movie) was supposedly based on color television technology? Technology existed in the "real world" as far back as the 1920's to create such a box capable of displaying color motion pictures of musical performances on a screen. -
PinkPancreas — 11 years ago(March 04, 2015 02:48 PM)
They did not ever say what year it was bc they obviously wanted it to be timeless and dateless so to speak. Kind of like how you don't know what year Lord Of The Rings actually takes place. The setting in Streets Of Fire makes it feel like it's in the 1950's but there is a lot of modern style as far as clothes and music that make it seem like the 1980's. It is titled "A Rock & Roll Fable" so it's kind of like a fairy tale in that you aren't supposed to be able to actually identify a real time or place.