Wait, that's not real?

[Quimby]

@Miller

I was shocked a few years back to learn that the Stay Puft Marshmellow man was purely an invention of the movie Ghostbusters. I’d have sworn it was a real mascot.

What?! Now I just learned that.

[Biggirl]

I remember getting into a heated argument in grade school with another girl who insisted spaghetti grew on trees. I knew she was wrong because, at the end of the commercial, they say it doesn’t really grow on trees.

[Biggirl]

I found the YouTube of the commercial! - YouTube

[Leaffan]

@RandMcnally

And 2ge+her.

[Maserschmidt]

@Miller

I was shocked a few years back to learn that the Stay Puft Marshmellow man was purely an invention of the movie Ghostbusters. I’d have sworn it was a real mascot.

Okay, I not only thought that was a real brand, but had even vaguely wondered how much they paid for product placement.

Are you sure?

[Mahaloth]

I also thought the Princess Bride was a real abridgement/translation.

[Johnny_L.A]

@Lamia

Not me, but a friend of a friend had believed for 20+ years that there was a B-list metal act called Spinal Tap that had a documentary made about them in the early '80s. I did meet this woman and confirmed that she had not known that the documentary (which she’d never seen) was fictional or that Spinal Tap was created as a parody of heavy metal bands of the time. She was a teenager in the '80s and had heard of but never seen This is Spinal Tap, as she thought it was a serious behind the scenes look at some second-rate band that she didn’t care about.

Actually, the band Spinal Tap was based on the English band Bad News. They made of documentary of them.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Biggirl

I remember getting into a heated argument in grade school with another girl who insisted spaghetti grew on trees. I knew she was wrong because, at the end of the commercial, they say it doesn’t really grow on trees.

1957: BBC fools the nation:

The BBC has received a mixed reaction to a spoof documentary broadcast this evening about spaghetti crops in Switzerland.

The hoax Panorama programme, narrated by distinguished broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, featured a family from Ticino in Switzerland carrying out their annual spaghetti harvest.

It showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry.

But some viewers failed to see the funny side of the broadcast and criticised the BBC for airing the item on what is supposed to be a serious factual programme.

Others, however, were so intrigued they wanted to find out where they could purchase their very own spaghetti bush.

April 1, 1957, of course.

The Monkees were a real band from day 1. They were in the studio before the show ever ran. The Masked Maurauders were fictional. Everything said about them was exactly what everybody at the time expected and fervently hoped would happen. But this was long before the Internet, when the only source of news about rock was Rolling Stone. They got everybody good.

[Miss_Violaceous]

In the Star Trek: TNG episode “The Measure of a Man,” Picard acts as counsel for Data at a trial to determine the extent of his rights as an individual. It’s a nice episode with lots of quotable bits, but there’s one really good part where Picard says…

“Your Honor, a courtroom is a crucible; in it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product; the truth, for all time.”

The way he says it, I was sure it was a quote from something, so I set out to find the source for future use. Turns out, it’s original to the episode.

Also, I was an internet-savvy tween when Blair Witch came out, and it totally had me going.

[Inner_Stickler]

@Leaffan

Fake band that was an MTV show in the 90s.

[Simplicio]

I was disappointed to learn the bad-ass Bible verse that Samuael L. Jackson quotes in Pulp Fiction wasn’t actually in the Bible.

[VOW]

The only “real” musician of the Monkees was Michael Nesmith. Peter Tork was a sporadic guitar player. Davy Jones only jingled a tamborine. And Mickey Dolenz was faking the drums in the beginning until he got some basic lessons. Mickey had a phenomenal singing voice, though.

Michael Nesmith was a professional musician, and a helluva business man. He’s the one who created MTV.
~VOW

[Inner_Stickler]

Davey Jones was always crap but Peter Tork is a very talented musician.

[An_Gadai]

When I was a young teen I thought that Go Ask Alice was real, when I read it again in my later teens I realised it was probably a load of bollocks. I believe I googled it again some years later just to confirm.

[Shmendrik]

@Lasciel

On a related note, I was in college, and had watched the film innumerable times over, before I realised that The Princess Bride film was a comedy/parody. I mean, I realised that it had humor in it, but I didn’t know that most of it was actually tongue-in-cheek lampshading of overdramatic fantasy and overblown historical romance.

I thought it was sweet and funny and like Labyrinth or Legend, and instead it really is more in the vein of Robin Hood: Men In Tights. (Which I also like, but isn’t the same thing at all.)

Wait, what? It’s much more like Labyrinth with comedic elements and meta-jokes than like Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

[kaylasdad99]

@RandMcnally

And 2ge+her.

@Leaffan

Obviously, it’s the word “together,” referring to the bands Spinal Tap and The Monkees. Except it’s presented in some bastardized form of leet speak.

I share your curiosity regarding RandMcnally’s choice to do that, though.

[Nobody]

One time I was watching the TV show “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”. One episode he’s at Mount Rushmore. He’s at a visitor center, or something like that, and it’s claimed that nobody knows how Mount Rushmore was made. I went for years believing that. :smack: :o

Edit: In my defense, I was a little kid when I saw it.

[RandMcnally]

@kaylasdad99

Obviously, it’s the word “together,” referring to the bands Spinal Tap and The Monkees. Except it’s presented in some bastardized form of leet speak.

I share your curiosity regarding RandMcnally’s choice to do that, though.

2ge+her (2gether) was a fake boy band that MTV put together (HA!) in the late 1990s, early 2000s in order to make fun of the boyband phenomenon that was going on at the time.

They had members such as The Heartthrob, the shy one, the cute one, the bad boy, and the older brother (Chris Farley’s younger brother irl).

It was originally planned that they’d just do the movie but it became a hit and the soundtrack with the fake band sold well, so they put out a real cd with gems such as “U+U+Me,” which is a song about trying to get a three-way, and “The Hardest Part of Breaking Up is Getting Back Your Stuff,” which is a song about how the hardest part of breaking up is getting back your stuff.

The show was doing well when in the second season when “the cute one” died from cancer complications

The series ended with the band being threatened by another band, 4ever.

In the series 4ever was a fake band that MTV made up and ended up becoming big.

Whoa. Meta.

[Spud]

@kaylasdad99

Obviously, it’s the word “together,” referring to the bands Spinal Tap and The Monkees. Except it’s presented in some bastardized form of leet speak.

I share your curiosity regarding RandMcnally’s choice to do that, though.

See post 50…

from Wiki

2gether (usually stylized as 2ge+her, 2Ge+Her or 2GE+HER; pronounced “Together”) was an American fictional boy band whose composition, songs, and formation story is a satirical approach to the boy bands of the 1990s, such as New Kids on the Block, 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys.[1] They were part of a self-titled MTV TV movie and spin-off television series.

[voguevixen]

@RandMcnally

2ge+her (2gether) was a fake boy band that MTV put together (HA!) in the late 1990s, early 2000s in order to make fun of the boyband phenomenon that was going on at the time…

I absolutely have to see this.