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Ye Goode Olde Days
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"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So said LP Hartley at the start of his novel The Go-Between. Any prospective time travelers should also add the following: "make sure you get your shots before you go — and don't drink the water. Also, pack your own toilet paper!" The fact is that while we like to think that the past was just like the modern day but with funny hats and folk music, many of the things we take for granted just weren't common — or even available — back then. Ye Goode Olde Days comes into play when a historical or quasi-historical work makes things much nicer than they would really have been. Usually it stems from only partly Doing the Research: they might get the big stuff right — authentic plate armour, the right kind of architecture, all that — but the details of life in the past can be lost. So the farm village is an Arcadia with beautiful green pastures and nicely kept paths, and everyone in the medieval village lives in a lovely half-timbered house with two bedrooms and a stone fireplace. The Renaissance maiden never gets mudstains on the train of her beautiful gowns, the Roman Senator has magnificent pearly white teeth, there's no infant mortality unless the plot requires it, no one ever needs to empty a chamberpot, and horses never take a dump in the street. It falls somewhere between subtle nostalgia and outright hilarity when dealing with ages closer to modernity, like the Roaring Twenties being an age of wild parties and shiny classic cars for everyone and not just the idle rich, or the Stalinist Soviet Union being a nice place where people happily work, drink, have fun and never have to worry. In short, it's Disneyfication of history. Wishful thinking about life in the past is also prevalent in chivalric literature, in which noble knights ride great distances to save beautiful damsels, who are never remotely bothered that their rescuers presumably smell of sweat, grease, and horses. We can only assume they're too glad to be out of mortal peril to care. Many champions of pre-industrial living are not stupid: they are well aware of the more unsavory aspects of those past eras. Their stance is that those problems weren't extremely bad or were suffered by only a minority of people, or even that those who indulged in degrading practices were not true exemplars of those societies and were ruining the social standards for everyone else. Others will simply argue that their problems were a better trade-off compared with ours. Something to keep in mind is that neither The Dung Ages nor Ye Goode Olde Days is "more" accurate than the other. The reality is that while hygiene was not good by modern standards, and living conditions were not what we'd call "comfortable" (what with the lack of air conditioning, flush toilets, and weekly garbage pick-up), neither did most people walk around barefoot, caked in filth, eating rotten food and living in tumble-down huts made of sticks. Because it is an Acceptable Break from Reality in entertainment— the average viewer prefers looking at good-looking people when they aren't watching a documentary, and most actors and directors aren't quite willing to subject themselves to a completely realistic version of history — please don't add examples that are just "[Character] had clean hair/white teeth/clear skin/shaved legs/etc." Strong aversions are probably examples of The Dung Ages. See also Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe and Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be. Not to be confused with Good Old Ways. Not to be confused with complaining about how things were better in the good old days. |
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Professor Welch in Lucky Jim is a Medievalist who loves Medieval arts and culture, seeing the Middle Ages through a very rosy light. Welch has Jim give a talk on "Merrie Old England", making his view on the subject clear. To butter him up, Jim plans to end his lecture with an extended digression on how much better those times were than now, and how the Medieval man would be shocked by modern society. | |
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The Simpsons took part in a reality show where they lived in a turn of the century lifestyle while their house is gassed for termites. The family had to ride Cugnot Steam Trolley to Apu's, and could only buy stuff that was sold in the era. In spite of this, largely they lived a pretty comfortable middle-to-upper-class life. Eventually though they got so into it — even adopting the speech mannerisms and mindset of the era — that viewers grew bored. The show then gets derailed when the producers try to get more ratings through introducing a washed-up '70s TV actor (who's entirely out of place) and endangering the family by sending them and the house they're in down a river. | |
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Ancient Japan seemed awfully tidy in Heroes, although there is a degree of accuracy here; cleanliness and hygiene were both quite advanced and socially important in Japan. The punishments for failing to uphold the proper level of cleaning etiquette could be draconian. | |
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The people and environments in Monty Python's Life of Brian, mostly likely due to the practices of the Ancient Romans, and even one of the characters mentioned how sanitation and hygiene have improved since the Romans have been in charge. The fact that it's set in the warm, dry Middle East as opposed to squalid, damp and muddy old England also helps things a bit. Of course, the majority still live in disgusting, tiny hovels, begging lepers are a common sight (unless Jesus comes along) and people are executed horribly for minor offenses. | |
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A Kid in King Arthur's Court had medieval England as a pretty nice place. It's moderately clean, and unless you stand under a window while walking down the street, you won't be covered in filth.note Watch out for the wives emptying the chamber pots! The Protagonist notes that his joust helmets smell something awful. Both the princesses are perfectly clean, but then again, they're princesses. | |
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The Daily Show once had John Oliver try to track down when "The Good Ol' Days" were, after hearing the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly lament their passing. He proceeded to interview people who'd grown up in each preceding decade (starting at the '70s), all of whom disproved the notion by listing the things that were screwy during that period, culminating in a woman who'd lived in the '30s describing The Great Depression. He concluded they all felt the good old days were when they'd been children, since everything usually seems better at that point, largely because parents will go to great lengths to protect their children form poor circumstances. | |
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In Superior Spider Man, this is made into a plot point with a nascent superhero/villain calling herself Livewire believing that this was true. She brought New York into a massive blackout during an alien invasion to "bring mankind back to a purer era when they followed the moon." Superior Spiderman is quick to point out the problems. | |
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The "[Decade/Setting]House" genre was neatly parodied by The Mitchell and Webb Situation, with "1990s House". Which was then done for real (to an extent) by BBC Four in 2009. | |
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Household Gods by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove plays with this trope. The protagonist, a female lawyer who lives in modern LA (c. the late 90s when the book came out) wishes for something else than her difficult life juggling a career and family, praying to a statue of two Roman gods she bought, thinking it was better in the era they came from. When her prayer is granted, and she's woken up in the body of a female Roman tavern owner in the 2nd century AD, it turns out to be quite unpleasant in many ways. She's disgusted by the lack of hygiene, slavery and the Romans' attitudes toward many issues. Then things become worse. Ultimately it boils down to finding appreciation for what she has in her own time. | |
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In Eragon the hero, an ordinary farmboy, lives in a house roughly the size of an aircraft hangar despite the fact that his family is portrayed as so poor he has to sleep in the barn with the animals rather than having a bedroom of his own. | |
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In the Animorphs novel Elfangor's Secret, averting this trope is a plot point. The soldiers and villagers of Europe circa the Hundred Years' War are notably ridden with diseases and parasites. This becomes a plot point when the Animorphs need to figure out which soldier of the massed armies is a fellow time traveler; they eventually look for the one person who is as healthy and unmarked as they are. | |
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An Al Hartley-era Archie comic has the gang transported to an idyllic 1890's small town with none of the ills of today's world...and none of the ills of the 1890's either. The result is a ridiculously naive reactionary fantasy land that any perusal of a credible history book on the era, or Upton Sinclair's classic novel written in that time, The Jungle, could puncture. | |
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Septimus Heap, despite being set in a world like the 17th century, has quite high living standards and sanitation. | |
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The Pyrates is set firmly in a Ye Goode Olde Days version of The Cavalier Years. The author lampshaded this immediately following the idyllic introduction, saying that historians would no doubt point out the complete lack of sanitation, hygiene, or social services. He concluded that the historical characters, "happy conscienceless rabble that they were," likely wouldn't care, and urges the reader not to, either. | |
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Despite being a comedy, Up the Chastity Belt plays the environmental aspects of chivalric romances remarkably straight, with no one ever being besmirched by their physical exertions, whether it is in sodden England or the scorching heat of the Holy Land. The Dung Ages is only invoked when needed for a particular joke. | |
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The BBC Historical Farm Series loves to avert this trope, but at the same time likes to call out misconceptions that exaggerate The Dung Ages reputation of past societies. | |
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Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: Our heroes travel to — and pick up hitchhikers — from ancient Greece, ancient Mongolia, and medieval Europe (among other eras), without needing to bother with unpleasant hygienic issues. | |
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Time Changer: The film treats 1890 (and by extension, American society up to around 1930, when the Hays Code was introduced) as far better, as the time-traveling protagonist complains about rampant disobedient kids, alcohol abuse, crime, poverty and blasphemy. Of course, those things were common not only in 1890, but before and into the 1930s too (the alcohol problem is especially funny, as people took it so seriously this led to Prohibition). He would also have to be extremely sheltered if a film character blaspheming God's name sent him fleeing in shock from a theater. | |
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Industrial Society and Its Future: Kaczynski thinks life really was better before the Industrial Revolution, and is opposed to all technology beyond the things an artisan could create (e.g. a water wheel). Given that claim however, he admits those times also had their problems, but feels they were far less than now, asserting that as humans evolved in pre-industrial times we're maladapted to the modern industrial society, which deeply harms us along with the whole environment, while also threatening our future freedom as in his view most technology increasingly enslaves us. | |
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Merlin: Camelot is awfully cosmopolitan and clean for the Middle Ages, though the former is potentially justified by the setting being loosely (what with the castles in particular, very loosely) post-Roman Britain, which was actually very cosmopolitan — graves of highly-ranked people of North African origin, for instance, have been discovered in Britain, and a number of Roman legions (which recruited from all over the vast Empire) were garrisoned in Britain for hundreds of years, meaning that the cosmopolitanism isn't entirely surprising. The cleanliness, on the other hand, is. | |
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