 DATE: Early on in the movie, Adrian Cronauer pretends to play a  record backwards, mimicking it saying, "Freddie is the  devil...Freddie is the devil". The film takes place in 1965, and  backward messages on records were a generally unknown phenomenon  until the Beatles famously made use of this technique several years  later. Furthermore, backward "devil" messages on records did not  become an issue until a few more years down the road in the 1970s.