It’s flashback time! I’m sorry.

And as far as flashing back goes, we’re flashing quite some distance back. All the way to 1925. I have no idea why I didn’t make that 1926, then it would have been precisely a century. But I guess “1925” just sounds more mid-twenties than “1926”.

The precise year doesn’t matter, I just felt it had to be the twenties, since that’s the classic period for this sort of adventure. The sweet spot: before WWI is too ancient, after WWII is too modern, and the thirties are already overshadowed by the upcoming war. The twenties are a flexible time in every direction, ideal for this sort of story-telling.

Of course there’s a bit of an issue with chronology here, Honest Abe-kun and Mihashi being far too young to have been doing much of anything in the 1920ies. So Mihashi drops a remark that creates just enough implausible deniability to work for a B-movie: Perhaps this isn’t actually the twenties, and these giant letters in the sky saying the opposite are just…well, giant letters that somebody put into the sky for some reason. Perhaps some sort of prank? So it’s either the twenties or it all happened last week, just in some corner of the world were everything still happens to be like the 1920ies. You can probably find some spot like that. Especially in Egypt, were some places might not even have made it to the twenties yet.

Although the same uncertainty can work for the location: this is either Egypt, or some place in Japanada that just happens to be like Egypt in every regard. Dunes, pyramids, sphinx, the works. Perhaps some retired Japanadian Egyptologist put his whole collection of Egyptian artifacts in his garden, and then everything gathered lots of dust, so now it looks just like Egypt.

And they were planning to go there by jet, but a wheel fell off and the old biplane happened to be the only other plane that was available for charter that day. See? No chronology/consistency issues at all. Right.

More on Thursday.