When I was a kid in the early 1960s I got a Superman costume which had a warning printed right on the fabric: “This costume will not make you fly. Only Superman can fly.” I always liked the addition of the second sentence, which I guess was intended to make children take the warning more seriously.
My sister jumped out of a second-story window when she was six. She didn’t necessarily think she could fly; she just did it for funsies.
(A few scrapes and bruises, from landing on a dirt driveway, but she was otherwise fine.)
My friends and I at that age used to tie towels around our necks (or safety pin them to our tee shirts, if there was an obliging parent at hand) and play superhero, but none of us ever thought we could really fly; we just stretched out our arms and pretended we could.
It sounds like the legend that they didn’t include the Human Torch in the Fantastic 4 cartoon out of fear that kids would set themselves on fire.
There used to be a singer back in the seventies that claimed, or was alleged, to be Elvis after his fake death. He looked vaguely like Elvis but he wore a masquerade mask and went by the name “Orion”. He finally removed the mask in 1983, killing his career.
Wasn’t he also about a foot taller than the actual Elvis?
Probably. He resembled Elvis as much as Ed Wood’s chiropractor resembled Bela Lugosi. I remember this guy when I was a kid then he disappeared. Apparently was killed by a robber in his store.
Jim Givens, in his book Film Flubs, addressed this UL, but pointed out that Leonard Nimoy had directed the movie, and if it had been true, “he would have told us. Vulcans can’t lie.”
Have we talked about Andy Kaufman yet? It’s not just that a 35-year old man would fake his own death so thoroughly that he could supposedly produce a death certificate from a well-known hospital and have it filed with the coroner’s office, but the following conspiracy industry that included Bob Zmuda, who doesn’t look at all like Kaufman, could keep the story alive by masquerading as Kaufman’s alter ego, Tony Clifton, after Kaufman’s death.
He was so good at performance art, I used to believe this!
The theory that due to weird contract shenanigans they made an entire TV season of Blazing Saddles (not just a pilot) because one of Mel Brooks demands to making a Blazing Saddles 2 was that the movie studio had to make constant use of the IP to retain the rights otherwise within six months it would revert back to Brooks. So to get around this the studio made an entire season of the TV show but then never released it since they were planning on releasing an episode every six months to hold onto the IP as long as possible. This all came to naught when the actual Blazing Saddles 2 negotiations broke down and the rest of the episodes were never released.
Not entirely loony. AFAIK, a similar ‘make a movie or give back the IP’ led to Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four and Hellraiser- Revelations.