Misunderstandings you had about movies, TV shows, etc

When I 1st watched Bridge to Terabithia as a kid I had a very poor understanding of what was going on. I thought Jess and Leslie were really going to a magical land and not just in their imagination. And for the longest time I remembered the part near the ending being like this:

Jess's dad: Your friend Leslie's dead. Your friend? She's dead.

(silence)

Jess: You're lying. You're lying!

(Jess runs outside and sees the police cars and yellow tapes reading DO NOT CROSS)

Jess: She went without me.

I thought Leslie was beaten to death by the giant troll and it upset me because it seemed like such a brutal way to die.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I avoided it like the plague because "prequels BAD". I agree with that statement and I've seen multiple critiques especially RedLetterMedia's legendary reviews.

I was watching Star Wars Rebels and Asoka appeared at the end of the first season so I wanted history on her character. I went in pessimistic and I was flabbergasted with how good it was. It did a great job taking the new lore and giving it weight while adapting and creating likeable characters.

I thought Rugrats was a show for literal babies so I avoided it for long time

As a child I had an interest in science-fiction, but I had difficulty understanding lack of realism, at least for elements that weren't marked as fictional. I understood that the characters of Batman The Animated Series were all fictional, but was certain the Gotham it showed was an accurate portrayal of some period of history, and felt frustrated that I could not locate when it was. I could understand imagining the future (and I knew of obsolete science-fiction) but fantasy of any sort was something I refused to consider.

I thought Zuko from Avatar was part wolf instead of having a burn scar on his face.

• In the comic Father Christmas Goes on Holiday, I didn't realise that Father Christmas had food poisoning, I thought he just coincidentally caught a stomach bug.
• In Madagascar, I thought that "Sugar honey iced tea" was an Affectionate Nickname that Marty had for Alex.
• I thought amnesia was contagious, so whenever a cartoon character got amnesia, I thought they'd caught it off Mr. Forgetful.
• I thought that Kaa's name was Car.
• Because of a crazy childhood belief I had that all fictional women in authority had the surname Carrington (because of Mrs. Carrington from Clifford the Big Red Dog), and because I misheard her first name, I thought Vee from Chugginton was named Bea Carrington.
• I thought that the Futurama theme (heaven knows why my parents let me watch that at age seven) was written by Bender and that the woman crooning in the Star Trek: The Original Series theme was Uhura.

• I watched a lot of old cartoons without getting a lot of the cultural references that were stuck in, so I often made up random explainations on certain lines. One infamous one was when, after watching a Popeye wartime cartoon, I started believing that Nazis yelled "EEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOH" as a rallying call (I discovered years later that the scene with the yelling Hitler was actually a parody of a soap commercial from back then).
• I remember hearing for the first time about the Blarney Stone in Sylvester And Tweety Mysteries, except I misheard it as the "Daffy Stone" and wondered why Daffy Duck never appeared in the episode.

I saw the poster for Silence of the Lambs as a kid and thought it was actually about killer moths, and wondered why the title was about sheep. Similarly I saw the cover to a VHS of Monkeyshines and thought it was about an evil Cymbal-Banging Monkey - the antagonist is a maniac monkey, but they used cymbal clanging monkey imagery on the cover, I guess because it was harder to make the actual monkey look scary.

I made a Toilet Humor joke in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me potentially grosser by misunderstanding- Fat Bastard has a line about having "a turtle head sticking out"; I knew it was toilet humor but never heard of the expression before and thought he'd literally eaten a live turtle head-first, and it was now passing through him whole. He is supposed to be an Extreme Omnivore, and another gag refers to him eating babies, so it made sense to me

Edited by MikeK on Oct 11th 2021 at 10:30:59 AM

And a couple for songs:

Eric Clapton - Tears In Heaven. I thought the narrator must have done something horrible in his life, since he's so sure he doesn't "belong here in heaven" - when what the song was going for was probably more of a "It Is Not Your Time" kinda deal. (Otherwise I got it was a Grief Song but I obviously I didn't know if was autobiographical).

Phil Collins - Another Day In Paradise. I was naive enough not to know what homelessness even was when I first heard it, so I thought it was about some kind of fictional science fiction dystopia where anyone who doesn't conform is cast out and made an unperson.

Edited by MikeK on Sep 4th 2023 at 5:05:16 AM

When I was 10, and I knew nothing about The Fly (1986), I thought it was literally about a fly. A normal, regular fly, that everyone was scared of. No body horror anywhere. Similarly, when I was 12, I knew nothing about Breaking Bad and I thought it was about good guys stopping bad guys with no morally grey dynamics.

When Phineas and Ferb first came out, when I was 6, I thought Dr. Doofenshmirtz's name was Toby for some reason even though those names obviously sound....nothing alike. I guess there was a line I misheard or something but I have no idea.

Also, before I watched Osomatsu-san, for some reason I thought it was about a group of six amateur comedians being trained by a famous old comedian, Iyami. I think I got this from seeing a screenshot where Iyami is telling the sextuplets that people had been laughing at him since the 60s and I didn't know the show was a reboot/sequel at that time.

I also tended to take covers and titles too literally. The long-standing examples must be how I thought "Runaway Train" was about a literal train, and not using an out-of-control train as a metaphor for being unable to give a direction to your life. This set in when I first heard it as a child, and at that time I heard various train-centred children's songs from the likes of The Singing Kettle (and because my hearing was badly attuned to speech back then, I could only hear clearly the first two lines of the chorus); but the misconception stuck around long into adulthood, until I listened to the song again through Spotify, long after I should have known better.

Wait... It's a metaphor? I didn't know that either (I assume you're referring to the one which goes "The fireman said he rang the bell, the engineer said, 'You did like—' *Sound-Effect Bleep*")

Speaking of which, I always took the literal interpretation of Hotel California as the correct one.

When I was a very little kid and watching One Saturday Morning, I somehow thought Pepper Ann was a boy with long hair. My reaction to realizing she was a girl (despite still being waaaaaay in the Girls Have Cooties stage at the time) was basically: "Oh no! Anyway..." and I kept watching the show because it was one of my favorite shows on at that time.

Took me way longer than that to realize her younger sibling Moose was a girl, too, though.

At the age of 10, with only the knowledge that Ren and Simpy was a Nickelodeon property, I stayed up late to watch Adult Party Cartoon on Spike TV. All I remember of my experience was that the episode was Ren Seeks Help and I didn’t laugh.

Edited by ChicoTheParakeet on Oct 13th 2021 at 6:50:08 PM

(Should have realised there was more than one song with that name) The one that goes "Runaway train, never going back/Wrong way on a one way track". The next line of the chorus makes its metaphorical nature clear: "Seems like I should be going somewhere/Somehow I'm neither here nor there".

I have some song-related ones too:

• I thought "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" was about a lesbian with a girlfriend named Bonnie who was floating on her back in the ocean.
• I thought "Stop! Hey, Hey! What's That Sound?!" was about someone who was really easily distracted.
• I thought "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" was about someone just being really dramatic about winter approaching.

When I first discovered Touhou through music videos for remixes, all I heard about the series was that it was a shooter. ...Except my mind immediately went to first person shooter, and I just imagined shrine maidens and witches with guns.

Also way back when Pokemon Gen 2 first came out I thought the rival's name was literally "???" so that's what I put.

Also thought the Ho-Oh Ash saw in the first episode of the anime was supposed to be a Fearow. I mean, it looked like one to me and it came after a bunch of Spearow showed up so it made sense. So as a kid I thought Fearow was supposed to be a rare and powerful Pokemon. I was convinced it was one of the strongest when I started playing the games, lmao.

If you want, you may try a fangame called Dyna Marisa.

For me, I'll quote a conversation I saw on other website (they were talking about childhood misconceptions):

I had the same idea from watching Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura (which I loved anyway). But after Sakura, the channel where I watched cartoons aired Digimon Adventure and destroyed my stereotype. (Actually, before this I watched Pokemon, but at that time I didn't understand it was Japanese, because it was a translation of a 4kids translation.)

Edited by tehSmile on Feb 28th 2022 at 1:44:27 PM

Saga, I was too into superheroes at the time it came out. I feel like an imbecile.

• I thought "I've Been Working on the Railroad" was about a train engineer and was devastated when I learned it was about slavery.
• I thought that Samantha Stephens was just bluffing when she said, "I'm going home to Mother", so I was taken aback in that one episode where she did.

For a while, I was a bit confused on why the song "Take Me to Church" used female pronouns when referring to the lover when the singer is male and it's about a gay romance, but I realized that was probably intentional in order to trick conservative people who aren't found of LBGT people to listen to the song.

Plus you can always imagine this is about lesbians lol

Wait, you mean it wasn't about a train engineer?

My whole life is a lie.