Easy Rider 2: The Ride Back Corrections and Omissions

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

This might be a nitpicky kind of thing, but whatever, this is a podcast about weird shit in movies so here we go. In the scene where Wild Bill is telling his kids all about who Jackie Robinson is, how he's the first "colored man" in baseball, etc., they are listening to a radio broadcast of the Dodgers winning the World Series for the first time (in the background, you can hear the announcer say "and at last, the Dodgers are the world champions"). Ok, the Dodgers won their first World Series in 1955, a full six years after Jackie Robinson debuted in 1949. Not only had he been an all-star and a superstar athlete all that time (including winning the MVP in 1949), but breaking the color barrier was obviously a major national news story, becoming one of the seminal events in all of sports history and a landmark for the Civil Rights Movement. This is not new information. For a dad to tell his kids in 1955 who Jackie Robinson was would be like if Lebron James was named Person of the Year by Time magazine for finally apprehending Joseph Kony and these sports-loving boys STILL did not know who he was.

 

Maybe Wild Bill kept his kids sequestered and hidden away on that farm, away from all civilization? Indoctrinating them in his own twisted moral philosophy, like a more racially tolerant, motorcycle-loving Fred Phelps? Who knows.