And you might have been the only one who noticed it!

Lucas Dul wrote:

Not entirely sure if this was posted about before, but I was recently recommended by a friend to go see Wonder Woman. While I’m not at all into superhero’s or anything of the sort, and tend to dislike their butchery of traditional Greek mythology (the Thor franchise) I found it to be a really entertaining movie. But this isn’t a review. I was bothered by one tiny tiny continuity error. The movie takes place in World War One, which we all know lasted from 1914-1918, but in the scene in the British war office where the secretary is on the phone with the protagonists, a Royal 10 is seen in the background...with a single pane of glass. Wait...what?!
That machine couldn’t have been made before 1921, and that rubbed me the wrong way throughout the entire film. Yes, I understand how hard it is to film such a large production and keep it 100% historically accurate, and yes, the machine has mere seconds of screetime and is no plot element, but still. It bugged me. Oh well, nothing I can do about it.

By the way, I can't resist noting that Thor is from Norse, not Greek, mythology! 

Not a movie, but there was a manual Smith-Corona (I'm guessing 60s) in the most recent episode of The Blacklist titled "Minister D." The villain-of-the-week was using it to transcribe incriminating phone calls to blackmail people with. 
The techie of the show said typewriters were impossible to use and you had to slam the keys into the ribbon to type. So they "read" what the villain had last typed by looking at the ribbon. It didn't show them doing it of course.
My mom and I had a good laugh at the absurdity. 

Fascinating information on old-school data protection.

Reading the ribbon seems to be a repeated theme in movies and television. I think that I watched an episode of Columbo where the disposed ribbon from a manual Royal was read too. Technically you could make something out from a fresh ribbon in a manual machine if it had only made one pass. And then there's the dual colour ribbons; many times I've been able to read snippets of what someone was typing in the red portion of a ribbon because it had been used so infrequently.

I came across this Italian poster today (bottom right) for the 1948 film, Come Live With Me. On the left is the North American poster for the same film. I thought it was amusing because the Italian poster prominently features what appears to be an Olivetti MP1 ICO.

I've never seen this film (nor heard of it), but a few stills I've found show Stewart and Lamarr using a standard typewriter instead. Maybe someone who has seen this film can shed some light on this. If there isn't an Olivetti in the actual film, the Italian poster is a wonderful example of product placement from 70 years ago.