Likewise. Specifically, I thought he was Graham Chapman.
For a very long time, I thought Rex Stout was the detective, in novels written by Nero Wolfe!
(And I still don’t fully comprehend what’s going on with “Ellery Queen.” Real person? Character? Huh?)
Rin Tin Tin was an amazing dog his owner found in the trenches of France during WWI that eventually gained stardom in films and television (his offspring taking over the mantle of each generation). He was not, as I first thought, a character that was created first and then cast.
I highly recommend Susan Orlean’s biography of RTT and his owners.
On the other hand, Duncan Hines and Chef Boyardee were.
(I’d love to get my hands on some of Chef Boyardee’s original recipes to see what all the hubbub was about, back in the day. :p)
That’s…not really true.
He’s met a lot of…highly fictionalized versions of real people, but the vast majority of significant figures were quite fictional. The Pimpernel is an interesting case, though, in that he’s neither a real historical figure, nor created by the Blackadder writers. (The first, but not the only, case of that - the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future appeared in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, and Robin Hood (ok, he’s debatable) in Back and Forth.)
My wife’s always confusing actors with their roles. A few minutes into the third Harry Potter movie: “Didn’t he die?” “Who, Dumbledore?” “Yeah, I thought I read…” “Oh, Richard Harris, the actor who was playing the role of Dumbeldore died.” “Are you sure?”
I thought it was Springfield, Ohio. Remember that episode where Marge goes “…right here in Springfield, Oh…hi Maude!”
Wait, what? Me too. Well I know what I’m Googling today.
I used to believe that the actors were all still alive and doing the shows on TV live. I think it was because my parents and grandparents had once discussed live tv, and explained to this little 5 year old that the tv shows used to be done live, so when I made some comment about Errol Flynn in Robin Hood it was baffling until my parents figured out that I thought he was alive and performing the 1930s movie live right then. I honestly don’t remember the comments or discussion, but my parents would bring it up every now and again. I can actually see that as a fairly valid belief given the mid 1960s and my parents/grandparents generations and the TV practice of live shows even in the mid-late 60s. [typically holiday specials. I remember the Bong Crosby live Holiday Specials with some fondness. Sitting in the dining room with the fire going, doing personal fondues - we had enough fondue pots for everybody to have their own pot. We did thechinese steamship style with broth instead of cheese or oil. Dad would roll the TV over to the door between the library and the dining room and we would watch the specials and eat very casually. It was fun having Dad home on leave for almost the whole month of December so meals tended to be funner to celebrate his being home.]
I didn’t understand Karl May’s use of first-person narration. Mainly I didn’t understand the use of his real name as the narrator’s name, even though my parents patiently tried to explain the issue.
Apparently, though, the author himself had some trouble differentiating fact from fiction in this case :eek:
Same thing happened to me, but with radio. I was 5 or so and was disappointed when my dad told me orchestras were only records.
Who would that be? David Crosby?
When “This Is Spinal Tap” came out, there were movie critics who chastised Rob Reiner for making a documentary movie about a band nobody had ever heard of. And I couldn’t get over some of the people who thought Forrest Gump was a real person.
:smack:
I thought the “Land of Make Believe” on the Mr. Rogers Show was a real place.
I first read Stephen King’s “The Stand” around 1980, and even though I KNEW it was fiction, I got a bit nervous at the beginning of the summer of 1985.
I bet there are some kids these days who wonder where Panem is.
Conversely, lots of people thought “Midnight In The Garden of Good And Evil” was fiction. I knew it couldn’t be, because you just can’t make people like that up. The James Frey book “A Million Little Pieces”, however? I read it after it was revealed to be fiction, and would have figured THAT out on the very first page.
Kunta Kinte wasn’t a real person, either. He was more of an archetype.
At the risk of being whooshed, St. Nicholas was real.
By the way, which one’s Pink?
That’s just one band whom I was sure was named after a member-same thing with Jethro Tull. Judas Priest. Pere Ubu. Lynyrd Skynard.
I always thought Lou Reed had just made up a bunch of characters for “Walk on the Wild Side” or at most based them on real people. But I later found out that Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, and Jackie Curtis were all real people.
That’s wild – reading their biographies on Wikipedia, they were pretty much as Lou described them, too.
Um, as in your sources . . . made sure?
On the Simpsons episode “Burn’s Heir” when he has a flashback to being on a GreenPeace ship, takes off his costume and says, “The man you trusted wasn’t Wavy Gravy at all.” I thought he was just making up some hippie name.