I don’t know if they still do, but that scene was ALWAYS cut when it was shown on non-pay TV. Normally I’m not much of a fan of censorship, but in that case I agreed with it. I didn’t know that most aerosols were inherent ‘flame throwers’ until my big brother showed me when I was 11 or 12! BTW, the govt flunky that eventually processes the Blues Brothers claim at the very end was none other than Steven Spielberg! He wasn’t physically recognizable way back then.
Speaking of Spielberg, in regards to the scene I mentioned from* A.I.* it wasn’t until someone pointed it out* here on the SD board* that I realized that they weren’t aliens but the futuristic mecca robots!
A friend of mine went to see The Crying Game and must have sneezed or something at just the right moment about halfway through the movie, so he missed The Big Reveal and was puzzled as to why the main character was throwing up all of a sudden. Eh.
As it turns out, if you don’t know that Del’s a guy, it is a completely different movie from that point forward.
I read the Narnia series through at least 2-3 times as a kid, and completely missed the whole Christian subtext & symbolism until seeing other people talk about it many years later. This is despite being raised in a Christian home and at the time being a Christian.
I have one from Empire Strikes Back, too. In the scene where Vader is talking to the hologram of the Emperor, I thought it was the ghost of Gov. Tarkin. Since Tarkin seemed to be in charge of things in ep. 4, it made sense to me. I was ten.
Other than not being a Christian, that was me! I descriptions of the evil god at the end actually made me start to think it was an occultist book and I stopped reading it.
What’s worse is that I discovered them in my church’s library!
In my defense, at that age, that was the least explicit Christian fiction I’d ever read. Every other bit of Christian fiction ended with people talking about being saved and leading someone in a sinner’s prayer.
Here’s a kinda weird one, not really in line with the OP, but possibly worth mentioning:
In The Hospital (1971), one of the stars is Barnard Hughes. The first time you see him, he’s playing a surgeon. Then later, he shows up as Diana Rigg’s father, a completely different character. If you’re familiar with the actor, that could really confuse you wondering why he’s playing two different parts (not that that’s unheard of). I don’t know, either, but one of the stories is that the person originally cast for Dr. Mallory, the surgeon, was not available to do the role (for whatever reason), and Hughes, capable actor that he is, gladly stepped into it. They did disguise him a little (surgical cap, hairpiece, glasses, fake mustache), but it’s undeniably Hughes. Some sources list a “Douglas Owen” in the role (the character and actor do not appear in the credits). The best indication for that credit is that it’s a made-up name created by using Hughes’ father’s and son’s first names.
There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Miss Hoover tells Ralph to put his head down and go to sleep. Ralph excitedly declares, “Sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!”
For the longest time I thought this was Ralph’s way of saying sleep was something he excelled at.
Eventually I realized when Ralph sleeps, he dreams he’s a viking.
The first time I saw that movie that bugged the freakin’ hell out of me! I was always very good at spotting actor’s voices, so I knew that they were both the same actor. But my older sister (who was showing me the film) insisted they were different. It didn’t make sense to me, like they were trying to do some kind of big twist ending, that the normal surgeon from the beginning was actually a psychitzo lunatic. But Paddy Chayefsky just didn’t write such ridiculous, tawdry stories!
I came across “Brokeback Mountain” in a collection of short stories well before the movie was made. I definitely had to go over some excerpts more than once to make sure I wasn’t misreading it
I was about 2/3 of the way through Kafka’s The Trial when I realized that whatever plot point I had just passed could be seen as a symbolic statement on religion. Then I felt like an idiot for not having realized it sooner.
