PS Contest: Schoolyard BS Rumours
It’s contest time again and instead of trivia, I thought it’d be more fun to share personal stories, namely “What’s the worst BS rumour you heard on the playground as a kid?” I’ll share a couple:
In 78, I was that unfortunate kid who didn’t see Star Wars when it came out, my pal Gerry claimed to have seen it. Gerry regailed me about the scene in which Obi Wan plays the Star Wars theme on the organ in the Millenium Falcon or the ending in which Luke, fresh from killing Darth Vader, deposits his light saber in R2 D2, who promptly blows up.
In ’79, I finally caught Star Wars and can remember sitting in the dark thinking “Hey Gerry is filthy liar!” When confronted, he simply denied saying any of it, I was crazy you see….
In fifth grade, I sat next to a kid named Geoff, one of the cooler kids in school who told me he had seen an episode of “Battle of the Planets” that revealed Zoltar’s identity to be none other than “a scientist at Center Neptune”. It was a shocking series ender that other deskmate Dean confirmed as seeing. Must be a rare, lost episode…. Tell me yours, either in the comments section here or at the Museum Forum, Myspace or Facebook pages, I’ll check them all and send the top three Fabulous Prizes! The winners will be poster here next Friday.
BS Rumour Entry:
I was a tad too young to see Halloween in the theater when it came out, but some other less discerning parents took my classmates to see it.
Their account of this movie was so over the top it terrified me to the point of never wanting to see it, ever.
When I finally saw it much later on HBO, I was completely and totally disappointed by the lack of (what I imagined to be) mind blowing violence. I'll get into some details momentarily..
You would think the story is over, but no. When I confronted the guys who played it up, they basically said that the theatrical version was too violent, even for HBO, and the version shown was dumbed down as not to drive viewers insane.
So, for some considerable time, I believed there was a "long lost" theatrical version of Halloween out there somewhere.
One of the scenes that never was: When Michael stabs the nurse in the backs and picks her up, he supposedly pinned her to the wall and sliced her down the back, nearly vertically bisecting her. Yeah, right.
In the hight of Transformers-manis, I remember a classmate telling me he had seen toys of the female Autobots at K-Mart. I remember begging my mom to take me to K-Mart to buy one. We couldn't find the girl-bots from the cartoon but I did score "Hot Rod". This was well before any advertising for the movie, so I thought Hot Rod was a girl for a couple of months.
Ah, Prime saving his girlfriend Hot Rod from Megatron, just sounds weird…
A classic: one of the kids in my 4th grade class told a crowd of us at lunch time, that his older brother had seen Kiss in concert, and that he was sure that Gene Simmons did in fact have a cow's tongue sewn onto the end of his own tongue to make it longer.
In Fall 1980 after I was stung by a bee during swimming in Summer Day Camp some of my classmates came to me and asked me "What do bees make?" I replied "Honey." Then I got a slap in the face as each classmate replied "FRESH!"
not exactly schoolyard, but keeping with the b.s. movie theme:
in the early 70s they came out with a TV Series of the movie 'Paper Moon' with Jodi Foster in the Tatum O'Neil role. my bedtime came halfway through the episode (i was around 7 yrs old). my brother was allowed to stay up later than me, so the next day i asked him what happened in the rest of the show. he said "the dad built a rocket, and they flew to the moon, but it was made of paper, so it ripped and they fell to their deaths."
perfectly logical ending to a show about depression era hucksters. but i believed it for years.
In third grade two of my sort-of-friends had me going for an entire year. They convinced me of a fantastic Saturday morning kid's show called "Zap-a-Doodle". They never said what happened on the show only that it was awesome. It was, of course, entirely made up.
It stuck in my head so much that, when I met one of the perpetrators at my 20th HS reunion, I mentioned it. Of course, he had no memory of that.
@JFStan: so, you were pre-imagining the current "gore-nography" genre of horror films (Hostel, Saw, etc.)?
Well, I can't think of any right yet. But I have two opposite BS rumors. I wanted them to be BS, but they were true! The first is when my dad took me to see the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve. I was five. When I discovered that Superman was in fact Kal-El, an alien. I freaked out. Right during the movie I turned toward my dad and said," You never told me Superman was from outer space!" He still laughs to this day when reminded about it.
The other moment was my own Luke Skywalker say it isn't true moment. While playing in the park at my babysitters, some girl was telling me she had seen Return of the Jedi. As she is swinging away on the swings she promptly tells me that Luke and Leia are brother and sister. Needless to say I was P.O.'d! I thought, No way, they kissed! UGH!
Right after DeLaurentis' King Kong came out, a nefarious playground liar informed me that he had the latest in chic fashion: King Kong jeans! Yep, Dino had apparently cut off all the fur from the giant robot Kong used in the film and attached a snatch of it on the back pocket of these authentic Kong Jeans. I kept asking this liar to wear them into school, but of course he "wasn't allowed."
These are so great! I love the Kong jeans story. I would've fallen for that one and been the first in line to buy them!
The only BS moment I can think of was in kindergarten. Just as I stuck the straw in my milk carton, an evil boy told me that milk is cow piss.
Oh, and in the 7th grade a boy told me that George Carlin was his uncle and would be at his house that weekend and if I went to 2nd base with him (the boy, not Carlin) that I could meet Uncle George and even have dinner with him!! Yep, I was a slut, and George Carlin was not his uncle. Damn, I'm still sore about that one.
Beth…
If you let me go to third base with you, I'll show you my rare King Kong jeans…
I'll show you my Donkey Kong underwear….
My story was too long for a comment and I needed to include a photo of the Charlie's Angels Trading Card I was talking about, so I posted it on my own blog:
http://laura.moncur.org/archives/2009/07/06/best-boss-an-angel-ever-had/
I feel a little guilty for being the BS perpetrator on this one, but it was worth it.
@ Laura
Seriously… you let a kid with the last name of "Buttars" hassle you? There's no way Chris Butt-tard would have had a chance in my 4th grade class.
My friend said he saw Bossk & Boba Fett fly by in a twin-pod Cloud Car during the Cloud City scenes in "The Empire Strikes Back". When no-one else said they saw the same scene he said it was because he saw another version (pre-Director's cut??)
On a gorier note:
Before I saw "Empire" myself, a kid on the playground told me Luke had his whole arm cut off. I sneaked a peak in the Marvel comics adaptation, so I knew it was just his hand, but the kid said the comic couldn't show the whole arm getting lopped off.
The same kid also claimed he saw an episode of Wonder Woman (of course it was the night before & I missed it) guest-starring Batman & Superman. Wonder Woman died in a truly horrible way – something about a wood chipper – so Superman & Batman prayed (?!?) and brought her back to life.
I think that kid walks the streets, a free man, to this day.
Oh, and my brother went into great detail about the German mechanic guy & the airplane propeller from "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
the West Mountain in Hamilton circa late 70's/early 80's was a weird, weird place…..
Good Story Laura! You got the little jerk good.
I'm going to tell on myself.
1983, Return of the Jedi just came out. Being a Star Wars fanatic, I was there opening day. My next door neighbor, however, wasn't allowed to see movies unless they were rated G, so he was SOL. Me, being a mean little bastard, decided to mess with this unfortunate kid's head by regaling him with the plot of ROTJ, albeit with some major plot revisions.
By the time I was finished with my "directors cut" of the film's plot, I had the kid convinced that Chewbacca joined the dark side and became Darth's apprentice, Han Solo was defrosted only to die a slow death from freezer burns, Leia and Luke discoved that they were sibblings yet decided to hook up and have some inbred chilluns, Boba Fett was unmasked and revealed to be Han Solo's long lost brother, Lando Calrussian along with the Millenium Falcon got destroyed by the Death Star, and Obi-Wan Kenobi was ressurected from the dead so he could have a final light saber battle with Darth Vader, mainly so Luke and Leia could be safe to produce one-eyed babies.
The kid ended up sharing what he "knew" about the movie at school, to everyone's ridicule. When he confronted me in front of several of the kids, I denied everything.
My best friend at the time (They never lie) got the chance to see E.T. before me in the theaters. When I asked him about it the next day he told me that at the end E.T. eats the little boy!
In first grade we used to participate in Show and Tell that for some reason, our teacher called "Sharing". Well let me tell you – Chris Rucker and Barrett Reaves shared the most amazing stories about an abandoned haunted house in our sleepy little town.
Their stories were so fanciful and magnificent that they HAD TO BE TRUE. I seem to recall one story about how they were being chased in the house (by ghosts) and jumped out the second story window to escape. I remember asking them how they didn't hurt themselves from the fall and they explained that they landed in the bushes (all safe and sound).
It was almost if they pulled the story from the previous episode of Scooby Doo and ran with it – because no matter what we brought up – they had a quick explanation. The stories got more ridiculous as the months went by.
What surprises me the most is that these were moderated by the teacher. I guess she just got a good laugh at watching the looks on our faces.
I'll see Chris in October at our 20th class reunion.
And I'm asking him if those stories were really true…