If you’re as dim as Finn, at least. This is the guy who thought he got his girlfriend pregnant by ejaculating into the hot tub they were sharing…
It’s true, all right.
I’m pretty sure the people who pretend to not know it are just trying to piss me off. Yes, even the ones who’ve never heard of me and who I will never meet.
In various Mercedes Lackey stories the skeptics are on occasion right despite magic being real in the setting; just because magic is real doesn’t mean someone can’t fake it. In fact more often than not the skeptics in question are genuine mages/psychics/whatever.
In comic books, Atlas/Marvel’s Kid Colt, Outlaw between 1949 and 1962, featured several “weird” tales with ghosts and monsters and curses and space aliens all of which turned out to be hoaxes. In '62 the series finally jumped the shark with issue #107 in which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had Kid Colt come to the rescue of an honest-to-goodness ET.
What about the famous Hawaii story from The Brady Bunch? The little tiki created havoc for whoever possessed it (including making Greg swim a bit — never understood what the big deal was with that) — until it was returned.
Sort of like how Lovecraft was a skeptic.
The show that came to mind for me while reading the thread was a short runner called Project U.F.O.. Two Air Force investigators check out reports of UFOs and, as I remember it, usually said they were weather balloons or some kid’s vivid imagination. The Wikipedia article says they often left it unexplained and encountered an alien in the second season, so not a 100% skeptic’s show.
“In an odd reversal of the Scooby-Doo dynamic, the series eventually settled into a pattern in which the investigators would spend most of the hour uncovering some conventional explanation for a UFO sighting, only for the last five minutes to reveal that UFOs (or some similarly unexplained phenomena) were involved after all.”
I guess I only saw or remember episodes from early in the series.
Do Penn and Teller’s Bullshit or Mythbusters count?
Sorry for repeating your example, CalMeacham, I thought I was replying to the end of the thread, not the end of the first page.
In the LAST scene of the final episode, though, their Dad rightly pointed out that the “bad luck” brought by the “curse” was really just a matter of perception and interpretation.
Did the tiki put that tarantula in Jan’s bag? Maybe- but she never got bitten and it wasn’t poisonous anyway. So, where was the bad luck?
Did the tiki give Greg bad luck and make him wipe out on his surfboard? Maybe- but Greg wasn’t hurt, so maybe that was GOOD luck!
Mr. Brady finally convinces Bobby that good luck and bad luck are often in the eye of the beholder.
No es problema. I do it all the time.
Doyle was really good about keeping his character’s sensibilities different from his own. Holmes is similarely skeptical about vampires in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire (“This agency keeps flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”
His Progfessor Challenger was pretty skeptical, too, in his earlier stories. But in The Land of Mist he has him encounter spiritualism, and Diyle harangues those who don’t believe.
Another time Doyle did let his spiritualist leanings get hold of the story was in The Maracot Deep, where he created a quasi-Challenger. The story is appallingly bad.
In that same episode (season two’s “Grilled Cheesus”), Kurt tries acupuncture treatment on his comatose dad, but by his own admission there is zero evidence that it had any effect.
And in Sue’s speech about being an atheist, she says something like “It’s cruel to ask someone to believe a fantasy,” which struck me as being somewhat similar to James Randi’s “It’s a dangerous thing to believe in nonsense” mantra.
Stephen Fry’s novel The Hippopotamus has a woo-debunking end.
It’s a very funny novel, but very NSFW.
I got a chuckle at the idea that a novel might be unsafe for work. I mean, unless you were reading it aloud.
YMMV, but I thought it was one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. If you laugh as hard as I did, somebody may ask why. And it has very “mature” content which may offend others.
Anyway, I was kind of using NSFW as a way of saying if strong language, “adult situations”, etc., bothers you, so will this book.
I don’t know if maybe you misread my post, but the “miraculous” events in the episode in question were explicable to someone who wasn’t stupid, e.g. the football team won the big game because they had a new, better coach.
It has really bugged me that recently “Bones” has turned to woo. Originally the main character was so scientific and she was right all the time. Now she has NDEs and other stupid shit on the show.
A lot of examples of “anti-woo” seem to be from pre 1980s pop-culture – not that “pro-woo” didn’t exist back then, just that it wasn’t dominant in all entertainment.
I believe that the last popular show with a consistently “anti-woo” theme was the original version of Scooby-Doo.
Although I despised Scooby Doo I do have to give it respect. Just like Tim Minchin.