Another case of flag inaccuracy (at least strictly and technically): in the deservedly much-praised serial television adaptation, thirty-odd years ago, of Herman Wouk's The Winds of War: in a scene of a seaport of one of the Allied nations, early in World War II, ships were shown flying various national flags -- idea being, I think, to emphasise the breadth of the conflict, and the variety of nations taking part on the Allies' side. One vessel sported the Canadian flag; the present-day one (bold red and white, with the maple-leaf device). Canada adopted this flag only in 1965: previously, its flag had been basically red, with a small Union-flag device in the top left-hand corner, and on the red field, a smallish shield bearing "various different heraldic stuff in different periods".
I suspect that here, the series' makers (whose period detail was if I remember rightly, usually of pretty high accuracy) made a compromise -- in the interests of making the point that the ship was Canadian, they reckoned it worth being technically wrong on one tiny thing, and upsetting a few extreme vexillology-nerds; rather than show what would be to a large majority of the viewers, an unfamiliar and unrecognisable flag. Dare I suggest the possibility of a similar action, for similar reasons, on the part of the makers of the Sherlock Holmes film mentioned above by gg1 ?
