Misunderstandings you had about movies, TV shows, etc

In 2004 or 2005, I found out about Family Guy when I saw the beginning of the episode “Family Guy Viewer Mail #1” on The Detour on Teletoon. (It was the first show on The Detour and aired after The Flintstones and The Jetsons.) I had just watched the escalator scene when my mom told me that the show was intended for an older audience. I had several misconceptions about the show:

• I thought that the Griffin family’s last name was “Pretson” because I had misheard the theme song lyric “and sex on TV” as “Pretsons on TV”.

• I obviously didn’t know what was going on in the scene with the heart-eating alien, since I didn’t remember it. Ditto for the suggestive scene of Peter and Lois going to bed.

• I must have not caught on to the genie aspect of the plot, and I must have not known about any buses other than school buses at the time, because for years, I lived with the following false memory of the bus scene where Peter becomes boneless: Peter is inside a school bus, presumably driving it, and the kids running out and cheering somehow causes him to become a blob. (In the actual episode, the genie made him a blob, which caused the adults on the bus to run out screaming in fear.)

• I didn’t notice the fart joke at the end of the above scene, and I misremembered Peter as saying “Oh well,” instead of “Oh no.” I also didn’t catch on to the pee joke at the end of the next scene, although I did notice that Stewie’s angel shape in Peter’s skin disappeared when he got off of Peter.

• I also had a false memory of the aforementioned escalator scene: I thought that Peter went all the way from the inside of the top to the inside of the bottom before appearing on another escalator in the same way.

It wasn’t until I saw the theme song again (in what I think was a syndicated airing), that I found out/remembered the title of the show. (I figured it was the same show because of the piano and the phrase “on TV”, which are all that I correctly remembered about the intro before then. By the way, I don’t know how much time passed between those two days.) However, because I probably didn’t see all the visuals (presumably because I didn’t want to watch something I was too young for), I thought that there were multiple Loises onscreen after the second half of the song began for some reason.

Edit: Correcting “Uh-oh” to “Oh no.” How about that? Another false memory!

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Jan 8th 2023 at 11:06:42 AM

This isn't that drastic, but I remembered another Phineas and Ferb one. There was that one episode where they build a haunted house (I think it was that one) and at the end Phineas asks Ferb which part was the scariest. Ferbs answers it was the floating baby head, and the ending music cue starts. Phineas asks "yeah, where did that come from?" and the music cue finishes. When I first saw that episode I thought Phineas asking that in the middle of the music cue was a fourth wall breaking joke about not knowing where the music came from.

Ditto on the previously mentioned Viewer Gender Confusion for Pepper Ann. I also had a similar issue with Nermal from Garfield, since I'd seen Garfield and Friends and Nermal was clearly voiced by a woman there, ergo Nermal was a girl in my mind until I actually read some more strips and learned Nermal was male.

Same though the Garfield Show remedies this misconception.

x4: I was an adult but it still kinda counts - once I turned on the TV and thought "oh, I guess Family Guy is doing some overly long Cutaway Gag where everyone is speaking un-subbed Spanish?" - it was the actual Spanish dub of the show.

I don't think I brought up when I briefly thought Indecent Proposal was about a nudist wedding as a kid ^note I don't think I knew what nudism was, but that's basically what I was imagining. I heard my parents talking about wanting to watch it or something, but only the title was mentioned - I had the idea that "decent" meant clothed (because when I was taking too long to get ready for school my mom would knock on the door and ask "are you decent?"), so obviously "indecent" is "naked", and a "proposal" is when you get married. Then I asked about it and my mom gave me the most g-rated description possible, so I then thought it was about a rich guy who wanted to pay to go out to dinner with another guy's wife and didn't see why someone would make a movie about that.

In general I remember being blown away when I saw behind the scene footage of some animated show/movie on tv (probably something disney) and first learned Voice Actors existed - I knew cartoons weren't "real" so why would their voices be? I don't know how else I thought it would have worked though.

Finally, I saw graffiti of the Grateful Dead "Steal Your Face" logo on a playground as a kid and it scared me - I thought it was either a gang or the darkest, heaviest heavy metal band I could conceive of at the time. I found this hilarious when I started listening to classic rock as a teen and heard some of their more accessible songs (e.g. Touch Of Grey)

I was already vaguely aware that One Piece was a show about pirates and the King of the pirates and what Luffy looked like, but my first real contact with it was this image without any other context.

I ended up believing that the other characters were the rivals of Luffy, and the captains of their own themed crew (for exemple, Chopper the captain of a crew composed of animals) and that Brook was the King of the pirates (because he had a crown) who died, but then became an undead and was now waiting for his successor.

When I first discovered One Piece, I thought everyone in Luffy's crew ate some kind of Devil Fruit. Like, Sanji had the Kick Kick fruit that works like the Gom Gom but you can extend only your legs, Usop ate the Shoot Shoot fruit that turns his nose into a scope and so on.

Because Diddy Kong Racing came out before Banjo-Kazooie, at first I thought that Banjo had been created for the former game before being spun off into his own game.

I thought until an hour ago that the actor for Scott Pilgrim was Jesse Eisenberg, but it was actually Michael Cera.

I didn’t know their names but I’ll admit I’m guilty of this too. I don’t know why.

Edited by ChicoTheParakeet on Nov 6th 2021 at 4:12:16 PM

I actually thought at one point that UB40 sang "Baby I Love Your Way" before realising it was by Big Mountain.

Edited by AlternativeCola on Nov 7th 2021 at 10:40:43 AM

I misinterpreted that Pokedex entry for Yamask that said the mask was its face as a human as the mask literally being the face it had as a human and it ripped it off the corpse to carry it. As a result, I ended up being freaked out by Yamask for a very long time

I recently heard "Mr Wendal" by Arrested Development for the first time in a long while: The song starts with a wordless scream and part of the hook is a sample of Scatting ^note taken from a Sly and the Family Stone song, it turns out - as a kid I thought both were supposed to be "Mr. Wendal" talking, and that he was an unintelligible crazy homeless person, which definitely would be at odds with the actual message of the song, being that homeless people should be treated with kindness and have wisdom to share.

Edited by MikeK on Nov 15th 2021 at 9:49:38 AM

My first exposure to Warrior Cats was in a sort of graphic novel of them I got when I was seven.

They only mentioned Starclan in one of Graystripe's dream sequences, so I thought it was like an exclusive club.

When Graystripe asked if his son had joined Starclan and Feathertail replied, "No, father— Stormfur is alive and well", I thought the club consisted of both ghosts and sick or disabled cats.

My mom deadass thought Tanjerin from Bug Fables was an elephant because she had never seen a Rhinoceros Beetle before.

Edited by RainbowPumpqueen on Dec 22nd 2021 at 5:07:26 AM

I used to reckon that the romanization of Magmortar's Japanese name was Booblast, not Booburn. I swear Booblast was on Bulbapedia at some point...

As a kid, I thought Simba married his mom in The Lion King, and the bad guys hypnotized Bigweld in Robots which is why he acted crazy, because I forgot the part where he gets hit on the head.

No idea lol. I was a dumb kid

Edited by Hqami on Dec 29th 2021 at 5:35:31 PM

For a long while, I thought the Tom Clancy book The Bear and the Dragon was about the Russo-Japanese War.

How? Nala looks nothing like Sarabi.

I feel like I may have said this in another post, but I never mentioned it before in this forum.

When I first played Epic Battle Fantasy and saw the Beholder's "censored attack", my innocent kid brain didn't get the Naughty Tentacles joke of it and instead I thought the Beholder was ripping the target apart and putting them back together

In my early teens, I misinterpreted the "He was no good so I... hahahahaha!" line from 'Macarena' as meaning she did something really heinous to her boyfriend, like killed him or raped him or whatever.

I mentioned this in a different thread, but for the longest time I was convinced Goofy was a hippo instead of a dog.

It's the teeth, mainly

I watched Monsters, Inc. so many times. But up until I was like 14, I always heard Waternoose saying "We're M.I" at the end of the company commercial as "Where am I?". It confused the shit out of me for a long time as to why this random line was included.

I'm not hugely familiar with the franchise but this makes me wonder if they've ever used the initialism as a gag - something like "M.I." "I don't know, are you?"

The very first episode of the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! Saturday morning cartoon I ever saw was a Perspective Flip episode following the villain, Dr. Gangrene, so until I saw the next one, I thought it was just a show with a Villain Protagonist, which I don't think I knew was even a thing.

Edited by MikeK on Jan 3rd 2022 at 1:50:40 PM

When I first saw the Pillgrums sketch on 'Tim and Eric'' I had never heard of ambrosia salad. When they said "ambrosia" I thought they were talking about the actual food of the gods in Greek mythology, and honestly that's way funnier.