Misunderstandings you had about movies, TV shows, etc

When I was a child, I thought that the King Harvest song "Dancing in the Moonlight" was about a bunch of dogs and cats going into someone's back yard at night and having a party (the line "they don't bark and they don't bite" was what threw me).

When I first read the Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin and his family see some monkeys at the zoo, I thought the intended punchline was that the monkey was just picking its nose or something.

In all fairness, it's never actually stated what the monkey is doing, just that it's "gross" and Calvin is amused because he's not allowed to do it, so there is still some possibility that I was right.

("Zoos let people see how wild animals really behave", indeed...)

Dad said a poem he learned from his grandma: "One drink, two at the most, three, under the table, four, under the host". I took it to mean that you'd be so drunk that you'd just be lying on the floor in a drunken stupor, not noticing that the host was walking on you like a rug or something.

A few years later, I realised it was probably referring to the other meaning of "under".

Same. I thought nose picking because that was the grossest thing kid me assumed Calvin would not be allowed to do.

Once I grew up and realized how disgusting monkeys are....it could be doing ANYTHING else.

One Boston Pizza restaurant location has a big poster of Devil in a Blue Dress. Since all the poster shows is Denzel Washington and the film's title with nothing to let me know that it's a film, it made young me think that he was the Devil!

The only think that my imagination cooked up from this was a young child running up to him, both of them being happy, and the scene fading to a zoom-out (I think) of an Establishing Shot as you're left thinking, "Stop, kid! You don't know what you're getting yourself into!"

When I was very young, I thought the Lakitu Cloud item in Super Mario Bros. 3 was a tooth and so I thought it turned Mario into a giant tooth when he was on the world map. I nicknamed it "Wrigley's Tooth" or something like that (I probably got the name from a pack of gum) and wondered why Mario wasn't a tooth whenever I went into a level with it.

Of course, I found out what the power-up actually was and its actual purpose later.

I remember there was this one short on Sesame Street where this cartoon guy is talking about the letter G and keep saying "G is the first letter in the word (starts laughing, has to take a break and try again) before he finally says "Giggle!" at the end and bursts out laughing. As a kid I thought for a long time that he was saying "eagle", and was very confused, as even as a kid I knew that was incorrect, and didn't get why he found the word "eagle" funny.

Edited by Bootlebat on May 9th 2024 at 8:23:03 AM

So a few James Bond related ones:

When I saw Goldeneye (the first Bond film I ever saw) I thought the themesong was supposed to be Xenia Onatopp singing (which makes sense, as it still sounds like a Villain Song to me.)

When I started watching the previous ones with my dad later on, I figured the first film in the series would just be named "James Bond". Oddly, I did see Dr. No at some point with my dad but he didn't say anything about it being the first one, so I guess he didn't know either. Later, when I saw Licence to Kill I thought it was the first one due to the name.

When I saw The Living Daylights I thought that Necros was actually named "Smiert Spionom", since that's what it said on the balloons he left. I figured it was meant to be him bragging that he did it, rather than a False Flag Operation.

Edited by Bootlebat on May 10th 2024 at 11:41:22 AM

I remembered one of My Hero Academia. When I first saw an image of Mirio (specifically in One's Justice 2) with no context after only reading the first few arcs of the manga, I assumed because of his Nonstandard Character Design and for some reason the "1000000" on his costume that he was a young All Might. As in, I thought they were literally the same character, and that's what he looked like in the past. He went from looking extra-cartoony to extra-outlined/shaded. And video games giving players the option to play as past versions of characters isn't unheard of. I did look at All Might's character page some time before and remembered that there was a tab to show him at his prime, but I forgot what that looked like and didn't look back until I found out that, yes, Mirio isn't "past All Might" but a different character altogether.

Growing up I always thought Godzilla was supposed to be a normal reptile somewhere that got mutated into a giant monster from radiation. Normal thing + radiation = monster was kinda the standard for old science fiction so I assumed it was the same thing. I also watched Star Trek growing up and just completely missed the weirdly abundant references and metaphors for sex stuff.

Edited by unregisteredaccount on May 18th 2024 at 11:56:38 AM

They did that for the 1998 version of him.

When I learned there was an episode of The Simpsons titled "The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons", I thought it would be about adultery.

I thought Sebastian Shaw the X-Men villain was connected to Star Wars cause Sebastian Shaw the actor played unmasked Vader/old Anakin in ROTJ and they had the same name.