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...)
Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.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".
For every low there is a high.![]()
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.
"COCONUTS HAVE WATER IN THEM!"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.
"Hey, least I didn't lose all my artistic talent when I crash landed in the arena here."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 Non-Standard 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.
I made my username back in 2009 when I had no idea how capitalization/camel case worked. That's why it's in all lower case.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
When I learned there was an episode of The Simpsons titled "The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons", I thought it would be about adultery.
For every low there is a high.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.
The Protomen enhanced my life.This is kinda hard to explain but when I first got a Sega Genesis as a kid I didn't quite get how video games worked, so I figured a videogame cartridge was like a vhs or cassette tape in that it would get to the end if you left it playing long enough. I specifically remember one game (James Pond) Where my brother and I left it playing at the intro without pressing start for as long as possible to see what would happen. The game did have two different "splash screens" it cycled through, but thats it. Also, I remember we went somewhere and left it running and when we came back the music had stopped, which added to my belief that we would get to the end of the cartridge eventually, though obviously this never happened for us.
In the song "Your Woman" by White Town I thought the singer was a guy since her voice was deep. As such, the bit about she can't be "your (the subject of the song's) woman" confused me, so I figured people would sometimes sing songs from the point of view of the opposite sex (maybe there are some songs like this, but I can't think of any).
I used to think Captain Qwark was voiced by Patrick Warburton, solely because whenever I heard him as a kid I thought "yeah, he sounds like Kronk, must be the same guy". I don't know why I thought he sounded like him, because he absolutely doesn't.
Disney100 Marathon | DreamWorks MarathonI thought the reason the other girls in Madeline wanted their appendices out too at the end was because they'd caught Madeline's disease. Then, when I learnt appendicitis wasn't contagious, I thought it was a pragmatic choice because they wanted to avoid getting it. I didn't realise until later that they just wanted to get it done for kicks.
For every low there is a high.![]()
The singer / main member of White Town is male, and he basically wrote "My Woman" that way so that it could be read as being from different perspectives. He did apparently have a female vocalist sing a few songs on the same album though, and I think one of them was a follow-up single to "Your Woman". One of the few other times I can think of where a singer of one gender wrote and sung a song from the other's perspective is Suggestion
by Fugazi, which at least starts out from the point of view of a woman experiencing sexual harassment (my personal interpretation is that the second half shifts perspective to someone else who witnessed the harassment and is now wondering why they didn't do anything to stop it).
When I was little, I thought that the title of James and the Giant Peach was James in the Giant Peach. James does go inside the peach, after all.
Frankly, we'd prefer the spanking machine.At the age of 3, when I watched my cousins play Monsters, Inc.: Bowling for Screams on the computer, I didn't recognize the tentacle that rolled the ball as a tentacle. Instead, I thought of the ball of string that appeared "one day in Teletubbyland".
Edited by MisterToodleoo on Jun 22nd 2024 at 12:02:42 PM
I thought that Master Mold from X-Men: The Animated Series was named Master Mole, and wondered why he didn't look like a giant robot mole man.
Edited by Bootlebat on Jul 4th 2024 at 9:13:04 AM
Oh, a couple from the Sonic the Hedgehog games (which were some of the first video games I played as a kid)
- I thought that Dr.Eggman's giant mustache was some kind of scarf he was wearing (due to how it seems to "flutter" in the wind in the first game), and that he was wearing a helmet rather than being bald (which kinda makes sense, as what if his Egg-o-matic crashed?) I realized what they really were when I first saw him outside of his Egg-o-matic (which doesn't happen until near the end of the first game).
- When I discovered the Sound Test in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 I thought that track 10 (which is unused in the final game, but was going to be used for a cutscene or something in the cut Hidden Palace Zone) was the theme for the bad ending, which was why it was so sad. I figured I just never got the bad ending while playing so I never heard it.
Edited by Bootlebat on Jul 4th 2024 at 9:21:48 AM
As a preteen-young teen (so in the mid to late 2000s) I thought Vocaloid and Touhou Project were the same thing, because of how much of the English-speaking Touhou fandom at the time revolved around the music and music videos and the fact that both had a ton of "what anime is this?" "It's not an anime" confusions. Black Rock Shooter probably didn't help
HAPPY HALLOWEEN FOR MARIAWhen Big Hero 6 first came out, I initially thought that I had somehow missed 5 other "Big Hero" movies.
Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.

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).