Let’s discuss books, movies, songs, etc., whose titles give the impression of something totally different than what the work is really about.
My nomination: *On the Beach, *which is not about a nice day at the seashore, but about . . .
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The end of the world.
If you heard of a movie called Sorceror, would you think it’s about……four desperate outcasts in Central America hired to drive truckloads of unstable dynamite through the jungle to put out a forest fire?
Fried Green Tomatoes
Worse yet, the tagline, "The secret’s in the sauce."One main character barbecues her lover’s husband & secretly feeds him to the town. Yep, that secret.
If you saw the classic “Curse of Bigfoot” in the late 1970s, would you think it was really about an American Indian mummy awakes–with quite an attitude-- from its millennial slumber by some hapless college students
Or that the planets Abbott and Costello land on visit in “Abbott and Costello Go to Mars” are actually Venus and. . . New Orleans during Mardi Gras?
Ooh, an “art film” from Europe playing in “art theaters” called The Nasty Girl? The pretty and young lead girl is so nasty that she
[spoiler]pisses off her little German town by investigating and digging up the truth regarding the town’s collaboration with the Third Reich, rather than the resistance that town elders claim occurred.
My then-wife thought I was buying softcore porn when I came home from the laserdisc shop with that one.[/spoiler]
The song “Wichita Lineman” is not about a college football player.
The Nutcracker had zero physical comedy. And, and, with a name like the Nutcracker, I thought, oh, this would be worth a few yucks. But no…that title wrote a check those queers on stage refused to cash.
Bare Naked Ladies are not…
I thought it was about some monsters that were giant green tomatoes when I was a kid, and that sounded lame even then. I’m glad I never thought as an adult to watch it for the lulz.
My wife thought I’d picked up hardcore porn when I brought home a film marked XXX; instead, of course, Vin Diesel plays a wisecracking snowboarder turned secret agent, who, uh, drinks cranberry juice, and, er, is good at parachuting.
Fiddler on the Roof doesn’t actually have a character called The Fiddler (aside from a few visions of him by the protagonist).
In the immortal words of The Simpson’s Nelson Muntz about the movie Naked Lunch: “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title!”
I remember a guy I knew in college said that he had gotting a Talking To by his father over a receipt for “Dirty Pair” and “Dirty Pair Flash”, both SF animes.
The Last King of Scotland
Who’d a thunk it was a movie about Idi Amin with a title like that?
There was an rap group in the 90’s called Young Black Teenagers comprised entirely of white kids. It’s incredible they weren’t completely laughed off the stage at every show.
In other news, the Presidents of the United States of America never actually lived in the White House.
“Serenity” is not about someone meditating with Buddhist monks.
I don’t know about their attitudes, but the Violent Femmes are (or were) all guys.
Blade Runner was a great title for a book about black-market medical supplies being run past the Nazis. It’s kind of arbitrary for a movie about hunting down androids in the rain.
It’s non-union Japanese equivalent, Bubble Gum Crisis, had NOTHING to do with the crippling candy and snack food shortages of the early 1930’s. In fact, it was about girls of ambiguously sexuality hunting down androids. In powered armor. And the androids have ORBITAL PARTICLE BEAMS. It’s cool.
Actually a lot of 80’s anime had really random titles . . . I’m not sure what you would expect a show titled Genesis Climber Mospeda to be about, but unless you guessed a gurilla war against aliens across the exotic USA, you’re wrong.
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No, Blade Runner doesn’t get a spoiler. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the internet. Now.
I’ll never forget that day I listened to an album with a lightning bolt skull on it, and ‘dead’ in the band’s name. I was disappointed.
