I find urban legends to be way more fascinating in a pre-internet setting than the current viral environment.
When I was a kid, the most pervasive meme was pop rocks and coke, and how the fusing of the two killed a kid out in iowa. A close second was the LSD mom who either baked her children, nuked her children, or took a bat to them.
What were some of the most pervasive, pre-internet memes that you can remember?
You could turn in the pull-tabs from soda-pop cans to get guide dogs for blind kids.
If you want a huge compilation of such pre-Internet memes, you might want to read Jan Harold Brunvand’s books on urban legends:
Acid on the lollies that drug dealers are passing out to the elementary students to get them hooked.
My teacher had a ditto sheet I think they passed around to all the classes pinned up by the door I think in around sixth grade. I remember reading it often as we stood in line to go to lunch and waiting for some creepy guy to offer me candy on the walk home.
oh, that reminds of the “don’t check payphone coin returns because people stick drug (HIV) needles in them” tale that somebody’s MOM told us when we were on a field trip once.
and @wendell, i’m not necessarily looking for a complete listing but rather gauging a sense of how universal/pervasive certain urban legends were.
The version I always heard featured “Mikey” from the Life cereal commercial as the unfortunate victim.
No, it was to pay for kidney dialysis for children waiting for transplants.
Or to pay for a transplant.
Kidneys were involved, though.
Bubble Yum gum is contaminated with spider eggs. That’s the version I heard, anyway; another version was that the spider eggs were an actual ingredient.
I think most of us know why Richard Gere isn’t welcome at the Gerbil Store. That meme / urban legend has to be pretty widespread.
There were all sorts of gang initiation ones, spread by fax. The most common one was the “lights out” gang initiation, where the supposed gang bangers go around in a car with the lights out, and the first person to flash their highbeams at them would get beat up/shot at/murdered. That one I actually did recognize as hysterical nonsense immediately when my high school girlfriend mentioned it to me, who got it from her dad, who got it from the fax at work.
That said, there were a bunch of science ones that were taught as fact in my high school, and I do not remember questioning at the time. There’s the “water goes down the drain the other way in the Southern Hemisphere” one. The Philadelphia Experiment was either passed down as fact or our teacher was having a bit of fun with us (it could go either way.) There’s the philosophy test one: “Q: Prove this chair exists. A: What chair?” The one about the kid whose professor won’t accept a late exam, to which the kid retorts “Do you know who I am?” and the professor says “no” so the kid shuffles his test paper/blue book in with the pile and runs out of class. Richard Gere and gerbils. The semen-salty one, or the variation involving a cheek sweeb.
In other words, slews of urban legends. These are just the surface of what I remember. It seems like a significant portion of stories I heard from teachers and students in high school (late 80s/early 90s) was one urban myth or another
Before Richard Gere met the gerbils, Rod Stewart’s plane had to make an emergency landing so he could have his stomach pumped. Or maybe it was Elton John. We won’t go into what the doctors found.
Going back to when I was a teenager, back in the pre-pre-pre Internet days when you could only get a telephone in black, there were a number of stories that I still here versions of.
There’s a Corvette out there that you can own for only $300. The only thing wrong with it is that the owner died in it, and wasn’t found for three weeks. Corvettes having a fiberglass shell and all, the entire vehicle is permeated with dead-guy stench that the insurance company can’t clean up.
An escaped prisoner with a hook hand tried to break into a teenage couple’s car while they were making out.
The telephone company could tell when you hooked an unauthorized extension on your line and had a squadron of jack-booted thugs ready to break down your door when you made a call.
Hands down, the one I saw the most was the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe. That sucker would show up re-xeroxed so many times you could barely read it.
I also distinctly remember the Richard Gere one long about 1987.
The dull/bright side of aluminum foil is coated with something toxic.
Boot camp/schools/whatever put saltpeter in the water to suppress the sex drive.
Blue M&Ms are poisonous.
Coca Cola/Pepsi is a good method of birth control when used as a spermicide.
Starting around 1981, maybe 1982 & twice in 5-6 year cycles, I had to deal with fellow Christians who were spreading the P&G Satanism story. In the late 1970’s, it was Ray Kroc of McD’s who was the supposed admitted Satanist on a TV talk show. But what would you expect of a man who made his hamburgers with either ground worms or ground kangaroo? At the same time as that, Pizza Hut was supposedly making their pizzas with dog food.
And of course, the Belgium Supercomputer keeping track of every person in the Western world & nicknamed by its programmers “The Beast”.
My favorite pre-Internet memes are the various methods for starting fire. Man, did those ever take off!
I also like the one about using money. It’s hard to think of a more self-replicating idea.
Oh, and there’s the one about how markings on highway signs are secret guides for the impending conquest of the US by the UN led One World Order. And in preparation for this US naval personnel are dumping M-16s overboard and secretly re-arming with Kalashnikovs.
the color and the soda references reminded me of the summer of 1995 when all of my friends instantaneously stopped drinking mountain dew because yellow dye number 5 made you sterile, not that any of us 9 year olds knows exactly what that meant. we just knew vaguely that we would never be able to have babies ever again, and it maybe involved our peckers.
pancakes3, if you’re looking for people to tell you the urban legends that they heard as kids, the SBMb is possibly the worst place to ask. We are the people who were skeptical even as children. When our friends told us urban legends and expected us to believe them, we laughed and tried to explain to our friends that the stories they told us make no sense. Our friends then decided that it wasn’t worth warning us about all the dangers in the world like Pop Rocks and Coke or spider eggs in bubble gum, since we were just a bunch of stupid skeptics, so they quit telling us about them.
Incidentally, I didn’t mention it because I had assumed that everybody here already knew about it, but there is an even better source of urban legends at the website Snopes:
I was a kid in Iowa and we never got this particular UL.
PCP, and “fried her own baby in cooking oil.” A direct quote from a “public information” film shown in schools circa 1981.
Like it’d be ok if she fried just any baby.
I’ve thought of other ones I believed to various degrees as a high schooler or beyond:
The “Welcome to the world of AIDS” one.
The Wizard of Oz suicide.
The aluminum/cancer/anti-perspirant.
The vacationing couple who gets their stuff stolen, except for a roll of film, and after the film is developed discovers pictures of the robbers with the couple’s toothbrushes up their asses (which, of course, they left behind).
If your college roommate kills himself, you get an A
The library is sinking at a rate of X inches per year because the engineers forgot to take into account the weight of the books
Catherine the Great dying in an equine tryst
The Dan Quayle Latin America/speaking Latin story.
LSD rub-on tatoos
Guys hides a sheet of LSD under his shirt, all the LSD is absorbed by his body, and he now lives his life thinking he’s a banana/orange/etc.
The Coke dissolves a tooth overnight/in a week/etc one
All sorts of bad etymology
“Ring Around the Rosie” is about the Black Plague (I only just learned this supposedly isn’t true)
Suicide rate is highest on Christmas/during the holidays
And so on, and so forth. I’m still sorting out fact from fiction, with the “Ring Around the Rosie” myth being the most recent one I’ve become aware of.