I mentioned, earlier, liking Frozen, "warts and all". My kids have got me listening to the soundtrack quite a lot, which has resulted in noticing a few more things.
So, I just want to get a list of these things written, so I can hopefully ignore them in the future. Most of them are anachronisms, but there are a few other issues as well.
The biggest is that I have to wonder if these people ever get cold. I wear shorts in temperatures down to a little below freezing, but I don't go through water while doing it (seriously, at one point Anna's dress gets soaked in water and freezes solid. And the only problem with this is that it's stiff!). And I sure as hell wouldn't do it on a mountaintop (which is guaranteed to be a lot colder than freezing).
Olaf, Olaf, Olaf... He knows that he's frozen, which means that he knows what frozen is. But he still doesn't know what'll happen to him in summer? He knows that snow is solid water, too. And he drops a rhyme that would've been puddle (funny line, granted, but doesn't make any sense if he's the one singing it). Oh, and he's never seen summer, but knows what a tan is (and what a dandelion is). First anachronism there: they show someone tanning, which is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Taking it further, they're using something to even out the tan on the neck, which is something invented while I've been alive.
Anna... She's a princess who hasn't dealt with people since she was around four, but isn't completely weird (ok, that's almost a Disney trope, but still). Her parents never saw fit to educate her, apparently. As a younger princess, her entire life is going to be focused on getting her married advantageously (to the kingdom, not necessarily to her), but she wasn't taught to deal with suitors with unsavory motives? And she's dreaming of romance, which is also a modern invention (in that form, at least. Courtly romance, which goes back further, has nothing to do with wanting to sleep with your spouse. It evolved out of having to marry someone you didn't love, and pining about someone else). And sandwiches? I don't know if they go back that far (hard to say since we don't have a solid idea of how far back that is), but they're definitely not food for royalty, if so.
Actually, I have to take back the bit about sandwiches. They go back at least to 1762, where the OED quotes Gibbon as saying "Twenty or thirty... of the first men of the kingdom,.. supping at little tables... upon a bit of cold mean, or a Sandwich". So it goes back rather further than I thought, and does get attributed to the rich. That seems very weird to me, but ok.
Getting back to Anna, where does she carry her money (they didn't even have paper money, let alone credit cards)? And does she worry about thieves (one of the many reasons she'd never be allowed to run off after Elsa, alone)?
Kristoff. "I just finished paying that off"?!? Who gave sled loans? Buying things like that on credit is definitely a "latest century" type of thing. And "it's the latest model"?!? You have to get all the way to assembly lines for that phrase to have any meaning. And cup holders? It's only in the last twenty or thirty years that people thought about that in vehicles.
It was also a little weird to hear his blondness described as "unmanly". And fixing someone up with someone else? I thought that was within my lifetime (the phrase, that is), but Google's NGram viewer has it appearing in 1933.
There's even the name of the song, "Fixer Upper". Phrase first appearing in 1940 (capitalized only since '65), again per NGram. I don't know how to check it, but "quote engagement" is also a very modern turn of phrase (as a side note, why am I now seeing, for instance, "tailor/lawyer" now being written (yes, WRITTEN) as "tailor-slash-lawyer"? It makes a little sense, spoken (though there is the old "tailor-cum-lawyer" that borrowed from latin), but none at all when written). "Flex arrangement", huh? Another neologism, although flexible arrangement goes back a ways (Civil War, roughly).
And that line about not seeing a ring? Let me count the issues... Do kids know about these things? I know I sure didn't (in fact, my first serious girlfriend got mad at me for wearing my graduation ring on my left hand; I had no idea why until she explained it). Also, engagement rings are a modern assumption (though engagement gifts (including rings, though I'm sure that was rare), of course, go back centuries). But the diamond solitaire as a recognition of engagement mostly come out of de Beers advertising about diamonds lasting forever, and that campaign was a bit less than a century ago (1935, again per NGram).
Anyway, I feel better having gotten all that out (plus, I have a much better idea of how to use ngram). Now maybe I won't think about all those things whenever I hear the songs.
Update: I was reminded of two others this morning. One was the "frozen fractal" phrase in "Let It Go"; I remember when fractal entered the common lexicon when I was in high school.
And Anna mentioned "actual, real life people". What other kind of people did she experience? I doubt they had movies (120 years or so), and they certainly didn't have TV (last 60-70 years).
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