Oh, a much funnier one: I read a lot of Daniel Pinkwater as a kid, and one of my favorite stories features a guy driving around in a Wartburg car. I assumed this was made up, of course. I did some traveling in Northern Europe in my junior year and was taken on a day trip to Czechoslovakia (it was about 1990–just about the time that East and West Germany were about to reunify but hadn’t quite done it yet). I nearly fell over when I saw a real live Wartburg car! I sure wish I’d taken a picture.
Daniel Pinkwater books have quite a few things like that, though I’m not sure there is really a Genghis Khan high school anywhere in New Jersey.
I was stunned to learn that Jack and Jill (with Adam Sandler playing both the fraternal-twin title roles) was a real movie and not just something Parker and Stone had made up for an episode of South Park about (among other things) the dumbing-down of the culture.
Oh thank you. I’m the only one in my family who doesn’t listen to country, and I had multiple family members make comments about the fact that I was drinking from a red Solo cup while I was home for Christmas. I had no idea why until now.
Today’s younger fans of the movie *300 *are going to have some brain-splitting “woah!” moments when they enter college and learn some ancient Greek history.
People watching Seinfeld on reruns or DVD’s might also get the mistaken idea that they made up the idea of Kenny Rodgers having a chain of chicken restaurants, not realizing it was a real chain when the show was made.
Novelist Tim Powers has written a number of fantasy/horror books with well-researched historic settings, but when I read his book Last Call (set in modern times) I assumed most of the details about Las Vegas casinos and gangsters were totally fictional. Turns out a lot of it was based on fact. For instance, The Flamingo plays a significant role in the story, but I didn’t realize at the time that it was a real place.
Well, I’m learning quite a few things here (as usual) but one that sticks out in my mind was something that happened to a couple of other people…
My husband and I were watching the Jim Jarmusch movie Coffee and Cigarettes and are of course sitting behind the most insufferable couple of biddies loudly jabbering through the whole thing.
At one point in the film Jack and Meg White (of the band “The White Stripes”) discuss Jack’s Tesla coil. One of the women in front of us went “snort Tesla Coil!” A few minutes into the on-screen conversation the woman turns to her friend and says: “Wait, that’s an actual thing?!”
For years I thought “Poindexter” was a made up name to indicate someone was a nerd.
I was mentioning the cast of some movie and mentioned Keith Carradine. A co-worker laughed and said “You mean David.”
“Do I? I get them confu…Uhm, you do know there’s also a Keith, right?”
“Seriously?”
Apparently he’d always thought people were screwing up the name of the guy from Kung Fu. No one’s going to know every actor but this guy was a huge Dexter fan and never noticed who was being credited as Langley.
John Barth’s great novel The Sot-Weed Factor is about Ebeneezer Cooke, who wrote the poem that gives the book its title. Turns out there really was an Ebeneezer Cooke, who did write the poem.
The big McGuffin of the novel is the “Mystery of the Sacred Eggplant,” a method of improving male sexual prowess. Though the method seems absurd, it turns out to have been suggested in at least one sex guide of the 17th century.
For the bragging rights?