Dang! You can’t trust myths to stay mythical anymore.
The Zombies’ Odessey And Oracle.
Not exactly the same thing, but: before Luthor got his iconic status as Superman’s archenemy, he was a criminal genius (a) with a full head of red hair; and (b) who’d appeared in a story with some bald dude. And an artist tasked with drawing Luthor apparently saw that previous story, and saw the bald dude, and said oh, okay.
And the look stuck, because, honestly, that’s a great look. I mean, if the guy isn’t wearing a costume, how do you show the reader who Luthor is in every panel? Yeah, having one redhead in the shot works; but having one bald guy works better.
The band Foster the People which is led by singer/songwriter Mark Foster was originally called Foster & the People but was misheard and repeated so often they went with the current version.
Buddy Holly. His family spelled it Holley, but Decca Records misspelled it in his contract.
Rik Emmett of the band Triumph actually spells his name “Rick”, but the “Rik” was a typo that he decided to keep as his stage name. We have a poster named “Mister Rik” who does something similar.
It’s unknown whether it was a weird pun courtesy of Jesus, or if it was a typo, but in any case it’s the bit where he talks about it being easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get a rich man into the kingdom of God… In the language of the oldest copies of this passage, the word “camel” is only one written letter different from the word “rope”, which makes a Heaven of a lot more sense. 
“Krakatoa” is a typo that took hold when the volcano erupted and was reported. The actual name is “Krakatau.”
I was confused when I moved to Indonesia and everyone referred to “Krakatau.” I thought they were wrong, but actually, I was.
(Also, Krakatau is WEST of Java, not east. But that’s a different mistake.)
TIL: that line in Seinfeld is a reference to a terrible disaster movie from the 1960s. And if Jerry was aware of the film, then why would he mistakenly contribute to a fake charity supposedly benefiting the victims? My head is starting to spin…
Thin Lizzy were supposed to be called Tin Lizzy, a nickname of the Ford model T. But someone misheard when making the posters for their first gig.
Filk Music - Folk music as sung at SF cons
Rammstein.
The town’s name has a single m. People came up with all kinds of fansplaining for why the music group has two m’s: per Till Lindemann, it’s “because we’re bad spellers. By the time someone actually pointed out the mistake to us, it was too late to correct it.”
Isn’t the group’s explanation that they wanted their name to mean “Battering Stone”?
The story is that President Lyndon Johnson called it the SR-71 when he first announced its existence, and no one had the suicidal instincts to correct him.
Yes, that’s the story I’ve heard, but I’ve read that it was Curtis LeMay who changed it for the speech, as he preferred SR-71 to RS-71.
Here’s the explanation from Wikipedia, citing Peter W. Merlin’s From Archangel to Senior Crown: Design and Development of the Blackbird.
Well, it didn’t become official, because it wasn’t really a word at all, but for years “Dord” was included in Webster’s New International Dictionary
I wrote up a follow-up piece in a magazine about whether this could still happen today. Not with the cross-checking they do at the dictionaries these days, but the potential for concatenating false words from abbreviations is still there.
I was actually just thinking about this example this morning: Dord. It was a typo that was made official, then un-officialized.
Not exactly a typo, but the comic book character The Phantom, who for some reason became particularly popular in Scandinavia, has a blue suit in the Scandinavian countries, varying colours in other countries, but originally purple in the US. Apparently the syndicate didn’t care all that much about the exact color when exporting the mainly black and white strip and the local publishers muddled along and us Scandinavians got used to blue.
In Norway a bigger mistake was made when the translator got the pirate queen Sala in one sequence of newspaper strips confused with the Phantom’s fiancée in the next sequence. Meaning the current Phantom (who should really have been killed off by now) is married to Sala Palmer-Walker in Norway, and Diana everywhere else.
a local group were going to have an album called Your place or mine but it was misheard as Your Face or Mine and that was the final name.