History Headscratchers / Pleasantville

** The best guess is that it works similarly to Sam Beckett in QuantumLeap. They are different people, but everyone else sees and hears the original people. Just like in QuantumLeap, nobody would make the assumption, "Gee, they sure are acting different. I bet they've been replaced by somebody else temporarily." Because that's pretty far fetched. The only difference is that there is no goal of "leaping", hence no point of keeping their identity a secret and thus you have the ending where the Pleasantville folks understand that Bud and Mary Jane aren't the same people.

* Did David and Jennifer's intrusion forever alter those ''Pleasantville'' episodes? As in what we saw in the movie are what viewers in-universe are going to see in those episodes from now on. This may also confuse hardcore ''Pleasantville'' fans as well as any of the show's living creators or cast members not recalling doing any of that during filming. Could the alteration have worked retroactively making whatever happens in those episodes now ''what they've always been''?

* Did David and Jennifer's intrusion forever alter those ''Pleasantville'' episodes? As in what we saw in the movie are what viewers in-universe are going to see in those episodes from now on. This may also confuse hardcore ''Pleasantville'' fans as well as any of the show's living creators or cast members not recalling doing any of that during filming. Could the alteration have worked retroactively making the episode?

** Maybe Pleasantville runs on Comic Book Time and she won't age...

*** It's not out of the realm of possibility that a town has more than one highschool. Like Beverly Hills High vs. West Beverly for example. And makes sense in the scheme of no "outside of pleasantville."

* What good is it for Jennifer to go to college in the Pleasantville universe? It's not like it'll change her (presumably shitty) real-world grades, nor will her Pleasantville degree be honored by real-world employers. Does she plan on staying in Pleasantville forever?

** Taking into account that Pleasantville is a show, you could think that it poofed into existence with all of them in their pre-defined positions, and not knowing anything else than they need to make their sitcom.

** Pleasantville parodies older TV shows, and one aspect of this parody is that they never address things like sex, or even allude to it. Shoot, in the 1950's, married couples on TV couldn't even share a bed.

* Wow the mom is in color now! Great huh? Until you realise gaining colour is usually associated with sex, [[ADateWithRosiePalms her husband was still black and white]]
** Gaining colour was associated with CharacterDevelopment. The husband gained colour when he felt real love for the first time. With regards to sex, the mom said her husband "would never do that kind of thing" for her, meaning he is oblivious of sex as much as she was. Hence the bathtub scene and [[WhatDoYouMeanItsNotSymbolic the tree bursting into flames]].
** The above is correct. Though it's quite clear what she's doing in the bathtub but not everybody who had sex was in colour and not everybody who was in colour ended that way because of sex. Bud's change occur when Bud he defends his TV mom from the bullies and Mary-Sue's when she decides to study instead of having sex.

** Because they're in the show's narrative universe. Think of it as stepping into a book -- you're meeting the character, not the author. Thus, while actors may have come up with explanations for various things, their speculation never made it into the series -- inside Pleasantville, anything that never appeared in the series simply doesn't exist.

* So is this film basically an allusion of how boomers ruined society? Because if you ignore the obvious bias that the film shows towards most of the male characters in Pleasantville and focus solely on the teenagers as a whole, you start to see the film starts portraying that not everything about the counterculture movements in the 50's to the 70's as a good thing. As Pleasantville literally starts falling into disarray.

* So is this film basically an allusion of how boomers ruined society? Because if you ignore the obvious bias that the film shows towards the most of male characters in Pleasantville and focus solely on the teenagers as a whole, you start to see the film starts portraying that not everything about the counterculture movements in the 50's to the 70's as a good thing. As Pleasantville literally starts falling into disarray.

** When things start colorizing, a background character mentions seeing something that was "''red'' red." I got the impression that while characters are aware that everything's in black & white, the conceit that it was black & white versions of colors was kept in place.

** It's the inverse of ''InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers'', with emotions being ''introduced'' to the citizens, seen from the POV of the "invaders".

** He may not have to. Note the ending — the whole events of David's time in the show take up just one hour of real time. So Jennifer could conceivably spend three years in college and then return with about a weekend passing in the real world. Now given Jennifer being who she is, would it really be so surprising for her to just vanish for a random weekend? Doubtful.

*** This explanation falls apart when you consider one of the last scenes, in the courtroom, where the mayor becomes colored because he's the one trying the hardest to keep things the way they were.
*** That's not why he becomes colored. He becomes colored when he stops trying to hold back the changes.
*** Actually he becomes colored when he lets himself feel anger.

*** We have entire tropes like [[ScienceMarchesOn]] dedicated to why a world set in the 1950s would give Jennifer a nearly worthless science education in the world of the late 1990's/early 2000's.

*** This is also seen at the town meeting once the issue starts getting more urgent. One woman accuses a man's door of being "blue". His response is "its always been blue!" so they've always known the color things were, but now they can actually see it.

*** It's more than "several days". They arrive in April 1958 (we see the calendar in the first scene inside the show), and Jennifer is leaving for college when David comes back. Since she would have to finish high school first, it's at least June and more likely August at the end. If four months = one hour in our world, four years of college is twelve hours. So at worst, Jennifer would only be gone for that one night. I rather suspect her mother is used to that!