Nominations now closed for Boston's cutest movie extra this year

Boys wore these "short pants", and they had a name: knickerbockers or "knickers". The major reason for this: growing and cost of clothing.

Wearing knickers worked well because their exact length was not important. Generally below the knee, but above the ankle, so a kid could grow several inches before getting to big or tall for them.

Girls wore skirts, which had the same feature. Some girl skirts had "growth stripes" and could be let down as a girl grew, then gathered up for a younger sibling.

"Short pants" was a put-down to youthful-looking men, getting your first pair of long pants was a metaphor for growing up. The kid is adorable, but his costume is more appropriate to an adult of the time.

Not as annoying to me as the long Hollywood tradition of doing period pieces where the actors all have haircuts from the year the movie was shot. Dean Martin in "Rio Bravo" in an oily pompadour, Rachel Ward's big 80s hair in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plain", the entire cast of "Young Guns", etc. The examples are endless. I understand the rationale -- it's more important for them to look attractive by contemporary standards than to hew to historical accuracy -- but it still chaps my hide.

It's one of the things that made "Mad Men" so brilliant to me: the costuming, styling, and art direction were scrupulously accurate, never trading glamour for correct period detail, down to gravy stains and clothing wear and eventual male pattern baldness (poor Pete Campbell.)

The only time I saw something that looked obviously wrong on that show was Betty's cocktail glass for the Gimlet she ordered in the Cuban Missile Crisis episode (right before she had a pending-nuclear-Armageddon-inspired tryst with a stranger in the bar's back room). It was a big 90s-vintage birdbath glass, the vessel for a billion watery Cosmopolitans, not one of the much smaller cocktail glasses typical of the early 60s.