avasadie

That is an interesting point. I did always think it was odd that Jake drove a motorcycle at 15/16, but I had never thought of Ham's inexperience on the bike. Nice job spotting that one.

lovea

First off, I have to declare that YA is the happy place in my head, this would be enough to explain any goofy things coming from me. Now to the issue, I've actually talked to a real life 5'1" girl who's been driving a big bike in bad country road for most of her teenage life. She's now in her 20s, still petite in form but still riding. She recently broke her foot after nearly colliding with a speeding SUV on a lonely country road. Plus there are kids not even in puberty flying light planes in the US so the comprehension part of driving a big bike is not an impossibility for a youngster.

In the first episode where Hamilton offers to help Jake hide the bike, the condition there was that he gets to drive it around sometimes. Although it wasn't shown that he actually did ride the bike, it can be assumed that he did based on the dialog in episode 2
JAKE: Hey, my bike is gone.
HAMILTON: Well, where'd you leave it?
JAKE: In that perfect hiding spot that you showed me.
HAMILTON: I didn't take it.

So he is allowed to take it out some time -- what teenage boy could resist that?

This coupled with Jake's invitation to him later that episode about "cruising by the Rawley babes". I don't think it would be a logical way to tempt Hamilton to "cruise by Rawley babes" if they both knew he'd embarrass himself by his lack of knowledge or practice.

s e r e n i t y

^That does make sense, Jake did say she would let him ride it, right?

Finnegan

The blooper than bothered me most (Dorm rooms that change their layouts are just really good Feng Shui, right?) is the disappearance of the video camera on the docks in episode 3. One minute Krudsky is holding a video camera. The next minute he's hugging Finn with no video camera in sight. It's at minutes 3:00 to 4:30 of this clip. Among the transcripts of cut scenes at Strawberry Lane one finds that a shot of Krudsky returning the camera to Finn, who presumably put it into his tote bag, was cut. However, given the centrality of the camera to the scene, it's sudden disappearance is jarring. -- What bothered me second most was that Jacqueline never pays for her bike repair at the end of episode 8, never even says "bill me."

Gee, I was so glad to be rid of Paige that I never really noticed her absence after episode 4. But it's not weird at all. Paige just wants to lose her virginity to Scout. She wants Scout to be "my first," and "a quickie," as she puts it. Consider it done after the cotillion, after which she presumably moves on to the second guy on her list. Paige is a moral zero, neither positive nor negative, who wants only unemotional sexual experience, and, although she is all too realistic a depiction of girls of her nationality, age and social class, she has no place in Antin's idyll of moral edification. Dramatically, she's just there to help Scout get over Bella.

Lena is more appealing, a study in a kind of "true love," playing match-maker at her own immediate expense. Her only reward is to see Jake and Hamilton together at the end of episode 4. She deserves more -- perhaps to date Jacqueline's look-alike twin brother in a "Twelfth Night" continuation ...

wolkenfuehlen

I'm not sure I ever even noticed the missing camera

Seriously, she was probably so used to getting everything on the house at the gas station that she didn't bother

So you really think Paige and Scout had sex after Cotillion? I never considered that. He seems so hung up and still in love with Bella, I somehow can't imagine him sleeping with Paige. Then again, maybe he'd do it to try to make himself fall out of love with Bella?

I was (and still am) incredibly sad about Lena disappearing. I get that they only had such few episodes and had to focus on the main characters. But I think she definitely would've returned, if the show had continued...

s e r e n i t y

I never noticed that either, interesing

I think one of the things we discussed if how Bellas family ever makes money cause she keeps giving people free things apparently Jake knew about this habit

Hmm I dont know whether they had sex after cotillion or not.. like Anja said he was much too "in love" with Bella to do it I think. but I certainly wasnt upse not seeing Paige anymore

Lena I would have loved to see return, very cool character, loved how she put her own feelings beside for Jake and Hamilton.

wolkenfuehlen

Yes, I remember that. It's so true. Jake probably got so used to never having to pay any money for anything at the gas station she just asumed she'd get this for free as well

Lena will forever be the Jahammer cupid I loved how strong and sure of herself she was. She wasn't.... whiny. She realized she had no chance with Jake (or Ham) and, instead of whining and crying about it and trying to win "him" over, she accepted it and tried to move on.

Finnegan

In several ways, it's hard to believe that Young Americans is set in 2000 rather than several decades earlier. In 2000, all the top-tier prep schools in New England already had been co-educational for decades. In 2000, a gender-segregated school was no less rare than a full-service gas station; both institutions are anachronisms that died in the 1970s. YA's ever-present Coke in glass bottles rather than in cans or plastic bottles also became rare during the 1970s. And diners without TVs blaring away in them largely vanished during the 1980s.

Moreover, Bella's gas station has a conspicuously anachronistic decor that seems designed to evoke the 1930s.

All this suggests to me that the time setting of YA, thinly masked by the presence of computers and cell phones, and by ubiquitous late-1990s pop-culture references, is essentially when Antin was 15 years old -- in 1973.

Finnegan

So sorry, but no. When one enters Scout and Will's dorm room, the windows are on the wall to one's left. So if the door faces east, then the windows must face south. And if the windows face north, then the door must face west.

Given the layout of the dorm room, it is physically impossible for the doors to face east and the windows to face north.

Steve Antin's a genius, but he seems to be directionally challenged. Perhaps the dorm room layout was different in Atlanta, but Antin failed to re-write this line between the unaired and the aired pilot. This scene was in the unaired pilot, but the dorm room shown in the aired pilot is in Tyrconnell Mansion in Towson, Maryland, not in Atlanta: we see the same room again in nearly every episode of YA. Regrettably, I've not seen this part of the unaired pilot.

wolkenfuehlen

Ha, I hadn't noticed that. I'll have to dig out my copy of the unaired pilot and check if the Feng Shui actually fits there.

s e r e n i t y

Well, thats a veryyyy interesting find

Finnegan

Watching YA, it has often struck me that all the cars look decades older than 2000. Mercedes sedans, Corvette Stingrays, and pick-up trucks are timeless and hard to date, but the background vehicles all look boxy and ancient to me. Reading the commentary on YA episode 2 at "Television Without Pity" (whose author pans everything on TV, not just YA), I find I'm not the only one who has had that impression:

So, are the cars in Young Americans -- like gender-segregated boarding schools, full-service gas stations, and Coke in glass bottles -- yet another anachronism from the 1970s, i.e., from the time when Steve Antin was young?

wolkenfuehlen

I hadn't really noticed that... then again, I don't know anything about cars. I totally would've thought the Corvette was a "new" model... it looked so shiny Like the other things you mentioned, it might be a sort of recreation of some 70s things by Antin. Come to think of it, Friendly's looks pretty old-school from the inside as well.

The only other solution (that I personally don't even find that convincing) is that maybe the majority of the New Rawley inhabitants are relatively poor (at least compared to the Rawley people) and thus drive older cars because maybe they can't afford new ones, and in turn the Rawley people drive old, well-preserved cars because they're symbols of wealth and status.... yeah, I don't know, not really convincing...

Random, but I love the TWoP reviews of the show. Verve.

Finnegan

Anja,

Yes, the interior of Friendly's does look much older than 2000. But Bella's garage looks even older - like something out of the 1930s. The rounded-cornered gas pumps were old even when I was a kid, back in the 1950's. I can't recall ever seeing anything quite like the pump activation cord that Jake doesn't know to pull in episode 7; that's something from before my time. It's been decades since I've seen a rounded-cornered red waist-high Coca-Cola refrigerator, with a bottle opener on the front, out of which Scout grabs two Cokes in episode 1 -- although they were ubiquitous in the 1950s. The Cola-Cola Store now sells reproductions of this antique under the name, "1930's Coca-Cola machine - referigerated," and one can be yours for only US $860.



Then there's the large electric Pennzoil sign that illuminates Scout and Bella as they dance in episode 1 -- haven't seen one of those in decades, either, although they, too, were once common. In designing the set for Bella's garage, somebody worked very conscientiously to take us time-travelling far back from the year 2000, far back past even 1973.

It all comes together at the end of episode 8, when Krusdsky, in his voice-over, finally starts speaking in the past tense about "that summer." At the end, Antin discards the pretense that the show is set in 2000. We must realize then, if we didn't earlier, that Krudsky-as-narrator is not a kid talking about contemporary events; he's an adult reliving and idealizing his own youth. That's part of why the kids seem so much wiser and better than real 15-year-olds ... and it's why the show can depict events (like the Pratt-Fleming storyline) unknown to the narrator at the time when they were happening. The late 1990's songs and pop-culture references and cell phones are all part of an illusion of contemporaneity that's part of recovering the possibilities of youth, but is ultimately discarded. It's a reminder that success in recovering the possibilities of youth really must entail an appreciation of contemporary young people and youth culture. And, of course, it's a way of rendering a teen TV audience receptive to a middle-aged man's fantasy.

I don't know much about cars either. That's why I didn't include them in my list of YA anachronisms until I found someone else (TWoP) who also thought the cars on YA looked ancient. I do know that working-class folks rarely drive decades-old cars; they tend to be costly to maintain, and finding spare parts can be a nightmare. (Try finding a carburetor nowadays -- they're available chiefly from junkyards, and when the junkyard supply dries up, as it will in a few years ...) That said, it's not the Rawley kids' cars that look ancient -- the cars in the school parking lot in episode 6 look credibly 2000 and Ryder's Corvette looks merely timeless, not old; the body shape of Corvette models has been pretty static since the 1960s. (And a re-watch shows that Ryder's Corvette is not a Stingray -- my bad.) It's the cars in town that look decades-old. That seems consistent with what I've recently suggested on another thread: that wealth may be a metaphor for youth not just in Finn's speech to the crew team in episode 1 but throughout YA, and that the working-class townies are metaphorically adults. Perhaps things in town are old because the townies are old; perhaps the town is adulthood, from which Krusdsky arrives at Rawley to recapture the possibilities of youth, although he doesn't really want to leave adulthood, just as he doesn't really want to leave his friends in town. He wants to recover youth without losing wisdom: like all of us all the time and with respect to everything, he wants to have his cake and to eat it, too. To enable us to do that is why we have art, but although it can be edifying, it ain't life unless we work hard to make it life.

wolkenfuehlen

I had never even heard of something like that before, either. When I first saw the scene I had no idea what was going on

That's quite an interesting interpretation and certainly one I'd not thought of before! I suppose if you accept cell phones, computers etc as something that was added to make it feel more contemporary, then it's certainly a possibility that this is what Antin might've intended to do with the show.