I thought that Jethro Tull was a real person who led the band of the same name.
Dirty old man.
Other inspirations included Albert Fish and Gary Heidnik. Both involved cannibalism – especially Fish. Heidnik kept his victims chained up in his basement and had a pit were he’d toss them in for punishment. :eek:
Oh… You mean he isn’t?
When John Henry was a little baby,
Sittin’ on his daddy’s knee,
His daddy picked him up
And threw him on the floor,
And said, “This baby’s wet on me!”
– Tommy Smothers
I knew Johnny Appleseed was a real person, but I thought Mike Fink was a legend, like Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan.
I thought Orville Redenbacher was an actor shilling popcorn.
He might have led a skiffle band. He could’ve been a dynamite fiddle player.
I’ve heard a lot of people refer to Pink Floyd as a person, and I thought it was a musician during my first year of junior high school. I also didn’t know about several others until mentioned in this thread. Betty Crocker, Chef Boyardee…
I understand that Darius Rucker doesn’t much care for people identifying him as “Hootie.”
It use to bother him, but he got over it.
Yes. But they never dressed in black pajamas (the super conspicuous all-black gear is a convention that has its roots in Kabuki theatre) nor routinely flung throwing stars or killed people with karate kicks :).
For the most part they were just regular spies, scouts, saboteurs, mercenaries and so on.
I’ve met a few real people who might qualify as basically fictional, however up to now I have never mistaken fictional people for real ones including those on reality shows.
QueenOfClubs: by the sheerest of wonderful coincidences, just last night I wrote a short story where one of the characters was “The Queen of Clubs” (from the standard deck of playing cards.)
A few years ago some TV station was playing the movie Norma Rae. I told my wife I was sure it was based on a real person and she was convinced it was completely fictional. I looked it up and saw that I was right.
Awesome.
Anyone remember the line from Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo” where Cecilia says, “I just met a wonderful new man. He’s fictional but you can’t have everything.”
I always loved that line and in some ways it’s almost a little true all the time, even in real life. People are quirky, no one really knows what lies in another’s heart, sometimes people aren’t even all that clear on their own selves.
Winnie the Pooh also has his origins during World War One. “Winnie” was a bear in the London Zoo that had been brought over as a cub by the Fort Garry Horse regiment as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The name “Winnie” was short for Winnipeg, the owner’s adopted home town. The cub was left with the zoo when the regiment shipped over to France, and was donated to the zoo after the war.
Winnie was a favourite of A.A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne (yes, a character based on a real person). Milne created the stories of Winnie the Pooh originally for him.
Although Winnie-the-Pooh was based on Christopher Robin’s teddy bear, originally named Edward Bear, until Christopher Robin renamed him for Winnipeg (who was female), rather than Winnipeg herself.
Apparently, a lot of people thought Gilligan’s Island was real in the 60’s. The network and even the Navy and Coast Guard used to get calls and letters asking them why they didn’t take those poor people off the island. And the actors themselves used to routinely get asked “how did you get off the island?” when they were out in public while the series was running.
I watched that religiously growing up. I didn’t mistake them for real people, but about twenty years after the series was off t.v. they made a movie showing them all getting rescued and I think in all our hearts, even though we knew the crew and passengers were fictional, we all appreciated the closure.
Isn’t it funny how important fictional others can seem to us sometime? Open-ended movies and books always leave me wishing the author would enlighten us later.
And Deborah Harry used to hate being called Blondie until she heard what people were calling Shirley Manson.