Yes, Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed announced in one episode that “Sing a Song of Sixpence” really was originally used to recruit men for Blackbeard!
See what happens when you don’t have Cecil Adams on your staff?
That show is pretty bad anyway. Every story they did on the one episode that I watched concluded with “this tale is untrue because we cannot trace it back to a reliable source”.
Hang on. The area you’re getting that story starts like this…
We created The Repository of Lost Legends (TRoLL for short) for those of you who don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Doug, I think that’s the point. The show was fooled and Jeff Olsen was just pointing out how silly they now look.
Or, you’ve been unintentionally whooshed.
Well, Lost Legends fooled me for at least half an hour the first time I saw it (naturally I take the site as gospel). Does the average TV show spend longer than that researching a story?
Seriously. That’s an unusually well-disguised joke for Snopes to be playing. While I think it’s funny now that I get it, I wouldn’t realize that it was a joke at first. They even use the same traffic-light truth-rating system.
I do think it’s interesting that the TV show got caught cribbing from snopes. Maybe this is their version of a copyright trap.