Dumb things you used to believe as a kid

That would make for a neat plot point in a horror story ngl.

Edited by Cutegirl920fire on Dec 5th 2023 at 10:26:54 AM

could be a cool special effect, as well as maybe impetus for a twist - the villain somehow magically kills their victims this way, which initially throws off investigators / the heroes because the remains look like they've been dead for years when they've just been recently killed. I think there was a Buffy episode that sorta had something like it as a plot point - what looked like an ancient mummy in a museum was actually a missing high school student, with the tell-tale sign being that they still had modern braces on their teeth.

I had H. G. Wells, Orson Welles, and George Orwell mixed up as the same person for a while. Maybe the fact that my dad had a tape of the Orson Welles radio adaptation of HG Wells' War of the Worlds contributed?

Edited by MikeK on Dec 8th 2023 at 11:54:53 AM

Recently, I watched Megamind for the first time in many years.

When I was a kid, I did not pick up at all on how much of a creep Hal is from the beginning. When he invites Roxanne over for a "party," I thought he was just trying to be nice. When I rewatched the movie as an adult, it finally hit me how he's actually creepy even before his Big Bad Slippage.

Edited by DrNoPuma on Dec 7th 2023 at 7:59:27 AM

I used to think that Poland was in the North Pole.

I thought east was west, and vice versa.

I thought there was a monster in the electric kettle because of the noise it made.

I thought well into my teens that there was a big island of ice separate from Greenland in the North Pole, and they just forget to put it in all maps like how they sometimes forget New Zealand.

Edited by Hqami on Dec 9th 2023 at 7:11:51 PM

When I was about 5, I saw footage of a crash test on TV. It was most likely part of a news report on a major traffic accident. I believed for at least 3 months that people turned into crash test dummies when they died — and not just in car crashes.

As someone who lives there, it might as well have been during the heatwaves.

Edited by Riolugirl on Dec 10th 2023 at 6:06:52 PM

As a little kid, I assumed the UK was mostly desert for whatever reason.

The following paragraph is a repost from another thread:

In 2013, which was both the year when I started watching The Simpsons and the year after I started watching a lot of shows on Teletoon, I think I was worried about sending subliminal messages to my mom about me being immature in my taste of movies. For this reason, I didn’t tell her, or anyone else in my family, to take me to any mainstream animated films released that year, with the exception of Monsters University due to that being the prequel to one of her favorite movies. Also, my dad took me to see Frozen (2013) the following year, but other than those two movies, I missed the mainstream animated films of 2013 due to this edgelord phase of mine.

Something I believed as part of this phase was that one thing that made Regular Show mature was that normal scenes had no background music; it was only used in suspenseful scenes and stuff like that. In my mind, I was contrasting this with shows like Max and Ruby where recurring music plays constantly. I don't think I considered that it was possible for a "mature" show to have constant background music.

I used to think Shy-Guys were ghosts. Even though Boo Guys were a thing in Yoshi's Island.

I used to think that Kwanzaa was the Islamic equivalent to Hanukkah.

When I was younger, I remember asking a friend of my family why people said "my gosh". He claimed that a "gosh" was a small creature everyone apparently owned, given that everyone's always talking about them, and that there should be a "Bring Your Gosh Day".

I kinda had a feeling he was messing with me, but I liked the idea of "goshes" (to the point in which I tried to imagine what mine looked like) and decided to share my wisdom with my classmates the next day. They were like "Um... it's just a thing people say."

On a related note, I once heard of a kid who assumed that "Gosh" was God's wife.

I played Plants vs. Zombies as a kid and didn't know much English yet, so I called Bungee Zombie "spider zombie" and though that Starfruit was a starfish. I also thought the Tree of Wisdom would tell you a cheat on how to get infinite money if you grow it tall enough.

Edited by Hqami on Dec 23rd 2023 at 8:49:45 PM

Since I saw an ad the other day stating that a TV channel was going to be airing The Polar Express, I was remembering the time I first saw that movie as a kid and thought it was a live action film. In all fairness, the animation is pretty realistic.^note Maybe a little too realistic at times...

That was my first thought on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within too, which came out three years before. It was until I figured out when I viewed the press' reception that it was all CG.

I thought that too.

I thought you could jump into pictures. I found "3D Chalk" at a store once (they came with 3D glasses), which had pictures of live-action kids interacting with chalk drawings on the packaging. Let's just say I was very imaginative and thought I could do the same.

I drew a picture and then tried to "jump into" it, alongside my mom (who wasn't really willing to correct me). I was quite disappointed when it didn't work, haha.

I thought all Straight Gays and Lipstick Lesbians were traditionally masculine or feminine(respectively) because they were in the closet.

I remember that one time when I was younger, I saw some shoes strung up on a telephone wire, and asked my mom why they were up there. She guessed that someone had gotten so frustrated with trying to tie their shoes that they threw them up there, and I believed her for a long time.

Then when I was in my early teens, I heard that rumor that shoes on a telephone wire means that someone's selling drugs near there. Uh... yeah, I like that first misinterpretation better...

I believed that for timeskips, they had to wait for actors to grow up to continue.

I thought a movie's "Unrated Edition" was the clean version of the movie - instead, it typically means exactly the opposite.

(I mean, technically there's nothing saying an unrated edition can't remove any of the adult content from the original release, but that's typically not what it means.)

I thought "woodwind" was a made up fantasy word, because I thought it sounded too whimsical to be an official term.

I also thought that this bar in my town called "Billionaire Club" was an actual club for billionaires, like in Scrooge Mcduck comics.

x4: To be fair, the "they mean someone's dealing drugs/killed someone/some other salacious reason" stories are just as much urban legends as that.

There's a bunch of reasons people do it (bullying the owner of the shoes, fly tipping a worn pair, fun and whimsy), but it's unlikely to be anything criminal (less overt signs that don't cost you a perfectly good pair of shoes make more sense).

There were always shoes hanging from lines when I was a kid, and i cannot imagine stereotypical "drug dealers" as implied by the urban legend in my tiny rural predominantly white town