They down a few drinks (at the office, of course) and decide to go see a movie. After rejecting Zorba the Greek, The Guns of August and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, they wind up drunkenly laughing their way through a Japanese monster movie.

It's a hilarious scene, but I was surprised Matthew Weiner allowed so big an anachronism to slip into his otherwise meticulously-researched series. Generally speaking, any pop-culture reference in Mad Men is carefully chosen.

For instance, if you took a time machine to New York on December 31, 1964, you could have gone to the movies and seen Zorba the Greek, The Guns of August or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg -- were all released during the last two weeks of December 1964. But the movie they actually saw, Gammera The Invincible wasn't even released in its native Japan until a year later, and didn't make its way into American theaters until December of 1966.

I suspect the problem here was that there weren't any giant monster movies in New York theaters on December 31, 1964 (Godzilla Vs. The Thing was released in mid-September, and had probably finished its first-run theatrical release by New Year's Eve). And the sight of a giant, fire-breathing turtle attacking Tokyo was probably too much for the producers to resist.

More importantly, I suspect the producers figured it was just a generic monster movie and nobody would notice.

Unfortunately, for me, there are no generic monster movies.

And I always notice.