I've been updating my Season Four time-line and I noticed something weird about GM and Maeby's ages. According to their marriage certificate in "Family Ties," GM was born September 23, 1990 and Maeby was born November 23, 1990. During the events of Cinco de Quatro 2012, GM tells the residents of Sudden Valley that he's 22 (which is almost correct) and Maeby tells Perfecto she's 23 (which is an unnecessary exaggeration). We can presume that GM just rounded off his age to be older, but with more than a year to her 23rd birthday, it just seems odd Maeby would uncessarily claim to be 23 when she's actually 21, four years older than Perfecto.
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I just chock this up to inconsistency in the writing and props departments. They're hand-wavey about some things like this. I don't think there's one true answer, but the wedding certificate is the best we have.
We do know the Bluths are bad with birthdates. From Season 3's "Fakin' It":
Michael: I’m “N. Bluth,” aren’t I? Legally, that’s my real name. You’ve been doing all the Iraq business under it thinking that it wouldn’t be traceable. But it is, and I’m going down.
George: For God’s sake, it’s a typo, Michael. What kind of father do you think I am? They even got your birth date wrong.
Michael: That is my birth date.
From "Fakin' It"(Edited by Ohmyn0)
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"So close to Christmas, did that bother you?"
Even the obvious errors can be explained away most of the time. It kind of leaves me asking: who filed the certificate? George Michael, the priest or someone else -
(Edited by Thor2000)
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We don't actually know when Michael's real birthday is, do we, since we found out that he and Lindsay aren't twins. Lindsay said in Development Arrested that her birthday was in a month, but that was before she found out she was adopted. Sitwell confirms that that's her real birthday, even though she got the year wrong. So when was Michael born? And how did the Bluths claim them as "twins" when their birthdays are months apart?
The show is not consistent with the kids' ages, either. In a scene from the extended Pilot (on the DVDs), GM says he's 13. Later in season 1, George Sr. says that GM is 14, This would suggest that he was born in 1989, not 1990. Plus Tracey was already pregnant during the 1989 wedding, which would tend to support 1989 as his birth year. His age is not mentioned in season 2, but in season 3, he has a birthday and states a couple of times that he's 16. But this is contradicted by the marriage certificate and Michael saying his son is 15 in the finale. So GM's age keeps fluctuating, and now in season 4, they make him 22, so he's born in 1990 again. It wouldn't bother me that much, except that GM said once that he was older than Maeby.
There's less data about Maeby. Her birthday is briefly mentioned in season 1, only in the context of Nana sending checks on her birthday every year. We also hear about her being "made in a cup like soup" but get no dates. In "Afternoon Delight" Maeby says she's 15, and GM throws her a 16th birthday party in season 3. Yet season 4 seems to suddenly age her up; she tells Kitty that she's 17 not long after the Queen Mary. She says that she's 23 by the time she seduced Perfecto in 2012, which means she was born in 1989, contradicting the marriage certificate. I'm kind of shrugging it off as a meta comment about how much she lied about her age when she started working at Tantamount Studios. Maybe she's lost track of the truth, and we know she's not good at math.
(Edited by Cress221)
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I'd say the birthdays on the marriage certificate are accurate and most incidents can be passed off as the propensity to round off or just the bad math skills of the Bluth Family -
(Edited by Thor2000)
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But GM said he was older than Maeby (I think in the episode where Buster lost his hand), and it always made sense to me that Lindsay and Tobias would take longer to have a baby given his never-nude issues and their claim of fertility problems, leading to the artificial conception. Plus I don't see how a baby conceived in 1989 can be born in November of 1990. That's at least 11 months pregnancy, instead of 9 months. Besides, we don't know who filed for the marriage certificate. Was it the priest at the hospital? Or were the kids given forms to fill out, and because they thought it was a mock wedding, they put fake info in there? It just seems fishy to me.
(Edited by Cress221)
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The marriage certificate says GM was born September 23, 1990 and Maeby was born November 23, 1990 so he is two months older.
I'm not sure where it claims they were born in 1989, but as far as who filled out the marriage certificate, there's no info there unless there's something behind the scenes that it was filled out by someone who knew the family.
(Edited by Thor2000)
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You've got it backwards. The marriage certificate says GM was born in November, and Maeby born in September. I'm looking at a screenshot I took of it, and I also checked this Wikia to confirm. (See the Goofs listed on the Family Ties episode.) So the marriage certificate is saying that Maeby is two months older than GM.
I'm sorry I was unclear. The show never actually says GM was born in 1989 (or Maeby). I'm saying that I subtract their ages from the year that the episode takes place, and I come up with 1989 some of the time. Like GM being 14 in season 1: 2003 minus14 = 1989. Maeby being 23 at the end of season 4: 2012 minus 23 = 1989. But the ages fluctuate, so sometimes it comes out 1990 instead. I trust the 1989 date more for GM because we saw Michael's 1989 wedding video once, and Gob has implied that Michael knocked up Tracey, making her pregnant before the wedding. If the wedding took place late in 1989, it is possible for GM to be born in the early part of 1990, but if he's born in November 1990, then he can't be conceived in 1989 at all. That's why I don't like it.
(Edited by Cress221)