Welcome to our deep dive into the world of the 10 widely misinterpreted masterpieces that continue to puzzle art lovers, scholars, and casual viewers alike. From hidden erotic symbols to misunderstood myths, each piece on this list has a story that’s far richer (and often more scandalous) than its popular reputation suggests.

Why These 10 Widely Misinterpreted Works Still Spark Debate

Misinterpretations arise for many reasons: cultural shifts, lost symbolism, and the occasional modern meme. By peeling back the layers of myth, we can finally see what the original artists intended—and why later generations kept getting it wrong.

10 The Swing

Jean‑Honore Fragonard’s famous rococo scene, sometimes called The Happy Accidents of the Swing, looks at first glance like a light‑hearted garden frolic. Disney even gave it a cameo in Frozen. Yet Fragonard slipped a much more adult narrative into the composition: a playful yet explicit celebration of sexual intrigue.

The canvas captures a young lady mid‑swing, oblivious to the scheming lover who peers up her dress, while a distant husband remains clueless. Rose bushes crowd the garden—classic rococo symbols of female desire. The lover’s cap, thrust into the foliage, doubles as a tongue‑in‑cheek reference to a concealed erection, a common visual pun of the era. Even the lady’s discarded shoe hints at the long‑forgotten link between exposed ankles and erotic longing.

While the image is undeniably charming, it’s a shame that generations have missed the risqué subtext, broadcasting a sanitized version to children’s movies instead of the original, cheeky tale.

9 The Rape Of The Daughters Of Leucippus

Rubens’ dramatic tableau first resurfaced when artist Thomas Kucerovsky posted a comic titled “Wrong Century,” featuring a plus‑size woman admiring the painting’s voluptuous figures. The comic suggested the work celebrated body‑positivity, but the online backlash reminded viewers that the canvas actually depicts the mythic abduction of Phoebe and Hilaeira, daughters of Leucippus, by the twins Castor and Pollux.

In the original myth, the sisters are violently seized and forced into marriage—a stark contrast to the comic’s upbeat spin. Viewers initially assumed the title referred to modern notions of rape, yet the Latin root rapere simply means “to snatch” or “to seize,” a nuance often lost in translation.

Thus, Rubens’ work has suffered a double misreading: first, a contemporary body‑positive reinterpretation, and second, a linguistic miscue that obscures the ancient story of kidnapping rather than sexual assault.

8 Luncheon On The Grass

If you ever survived a high‑school art class, you’ve probably seen Manet’s provocative picnic. While female nudity was gaining traction in classical art, it remained largely taboo. Manet’s bold composition broke the mold by placing a naked woman—clearly a prostitute—among two well‑dressed bourgeois men, with a clothed lady in the background.

This was a radical departure from the traditional mythological nudes of Venus or Aphrodite. Manet wanted to depict a real, flesh‑and‑blood woman, highlighting the rampant prostitution problem in 19th‑century France. The painting’s realism shocked the Paris Salon jury, who responded with derision and laughter.

Rejected by the official exhibition, Manet walked away feeling his intentions had been completely misread. The poor guy—who dared to paint a prostitute as a respectable subject—was left to wonder why his work was dismissed as scandalous.

7 Olympia

Manet’s Olympia mirrors the controversy of Luncheon on the Grass, featuring another nude prostitute who gazes directly at the viewer with unapologetic confidence. Critics of the day were quick to denounce the work, overlooking the painting’s deeper social commentary.

While the focus remained on the woman’s exposed body, few noticed the dark‑skinned servant—a subtle nod to class and racial dynamics in Parisian society. Manet’s daring portrayal sparked revulsion, yet he persisted, using the canvas to critique the very norms that condemned it.

6 The Persistence Of Memory

Salvador Dali’s surreal masterpiece, popularly dubbed “Melting Clocks,” has become a cultural staple—appearing in The Simpsons and inspiring countless novelty timepieces. Yet many critics mistakenly believed the soft, drooping watches symbolized the fluidity of time and space, attributing an Einstein‑level grasp of relativity to the painter.

When asked about the odd clocks, Dali offered a surprisingly mundane answer: he was inspired by the sight of camembert cheese melting under the sun. The explanation, though far less lofty, perfectly captures Dali’s whimsical approach to art.

Thus, the painting’s iconic status rests on a humorous anecdote rather than a profound scientific statement.

5 Cafe Terrace At Night

Van Gogh’s night‑time café scene is a staple in waiting‑room décor and cheap jigsaw puzzles. Some scholars argue the composition is a covert rendition of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, reimagined in a humble Dutch setting.

The painting shows twelve figures gathered around a brightly lit café, with a central figure in white possibly representing Jesus, while a shadowy figure slipping away could be Judas. Though the theory remains unproven, it enjoys scholarly support, adding a layer of religious intrigue to an otherwise ordinary street view.

4 Portrait Of Theo Van Gogh

It’s fitting that a misunderstood genius like Vincent van Gogh appears twice on this list. For years, his small, somber portrait was thought to be a self‑portrait, with many assuming the anguished face was his own.

Later research revealed the sitter is actually Theo, Vincent’s brother, whose striking resemblance to the artist led to decades of confusion. The discovery underscores how even seasoned historians can be fooled by familial likenesses.

3 Nighthawks

Edward Hopper’s iconic diner scene captures a sense of urban isolation: a few lone patrons sit under harsh neon light, while the street outside remains empty. The composition’s lack of a visible exit intensifies the feeling of entrapment, making the viewer wonder if the figures are trapped in their loneliness.

A 2013 Tumblr post claimed that when asked about the missing door, Hopper swore profusely and responded with a string of expletives. The post, however, is completely unsourced and has been debunked as a modern internet myth.

In reality, Hopper was a meticulous professional who deliberately chose the composition for its aesthetic impact, not to provoke profanity‑filled interviews.

2 Nature Forging A Baby

The enigmatic illustration from the 13th‑century manuscript Le Roman De La Rose often appears detached from its textual context, leading viewers to assume it depicts a grim act of infanticide.

In truth, the scene portrays Mother Nature at work: a woman wielding a hammer and anvil to craft newborns, not to murder them. The apparent violence is symbolic of creation, a reminder that mythic imagery can be easily misread when stripped of its literary framework.

1 Black Iris

Georgia O’Keeffe’s towering floral canvases have long been linked to feminine anatomy, with Black Iris frequently cited as a visual metaphor for the female genitalia.

While the association feels plausible given art history’s penchant for equating women with blossoms, O’Keeffe herself repeatedly rejected the sexual reading, insisting the work was purely about form, color, and nature. Her attempts to add detail only fueled the speculation, cementing the misconception.

Alicia, a freelance writer and English tutor, contributed the original research for this piece.

10 widely admired individuals have left indelible marks on history, yet many of them harbored disturbing beliefs about eugenics. While Adolf Hitler is rightfully condemned for turning eugenics into a murderous ideology, a surprising roster of celebrated personalities also endorsed the notion of cleansing society of those they deemed “undesirable.” Most stopped short of advocating gas chambers, but their recommendations were far from humane.

1 Clarence Darrow

The eloquent defense attorney Clarence Darrow was famous for his poetic pleas for compassion, urging society to abandon hatred and cruelty. He declared, “I am pleading for the future… when all life is worth saving and mercy is the highest attribute of man.” By the early 1900s, Darrow had earned the nickname “Attorney for the Damned,” a nod to his reputation as a champion of society’s outcasts.

Darrow’s most controversial moment came during the infamous Leopold‑Loeb case. He argued that the murder of 14‑year‑old Bobby Franks was not driven by personal animus but by the defendants’ privileged upbringing, wealth, and fascination with detective novels. In a 1926 piece for The American Mercury, Darrow vehemently opposed sterilization and bans on intermarriage, insisting that “morons, idiots, and imbeciles” were essential for manual labor.

Paradoxically, Darrow also endorsed a cold mercy for disabled infants. He echoed surgeon Harry Haiselden’s sentiment, stating, “Chloroform unfit children… Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.” This contradictory stance highlights the complexity of his legacy.

2 Woodrow Wilson

For more than half a century, Woodrow Wilson has been celebrated as one of America’s top ten presidents. Franklin D. Roosevelt once praised him, saying, “All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” Wilson’s leadership during World War I earned him a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Treaty of Versailles and championing the League of Nations.

Domestically, Wilson spearheaded the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve, advanced child‑labor reforms, and supported women’s suffrage. He famously asserted, “I do not believe that any man can lead who does not act… under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads.” Yet, as governor of New Jersey in 1911, Wilson signed a sterilization bill that mandated the forced sterilization of “feeble‑minded” individuals, epileptics, rapists, certain criminals, and other “defectives,” citing heredity as the primary cause of these conditions.

Wilson’s own health declined dramatically after a massive stroke in 1919, leaving him partially paralyzed and visually impaired for 17 months. His wife and physician concealed his condition, leading some historians to refer to her as the nation’s first female president. One wonders whether Wilson himself would have been a target of the very eugenic policies he helped enact.

3 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois, a towering intellect in African‑American history, often clashed with other black leaders yet left an indelible mark on civil‑rights activism. Born in 1868, he earned the first African‑American doctorate in history from Harvard and soon after began publishing groundbreaking studies on black life in the United States.

Du Bois co‑founded the NAACP and edited its influential magazine, The Crisis. However, his vision of racial uplift diverged sharply from the NAACP’s integrationist stance. He advocated for a form of eugenics within the black community, dividing it into the “Talented Tenth” – educated leaders – and the “submerged tenth,” which he described as criminals, prostitutes, and loafers. In the Birth Control Review, he warned that “the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously,” urging the promotion of marriage and reproduction among the “Talented Tenth” while discouraging it among the “submerged tenth.”

Du Bois’s eugenic ideas were rooted in a belief that the “best” Black individuals should reproduce, thereby improving the race, while the “undesirable” should be curtailed. This stance starkly contrasted with his broader fight for equality, revealing a troubling paradox in his legacy.

4 Edward Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier rose to prominence as the pre‑eminent African‑American sociologist of the early twentieth century, eventually chairing Howard University’s sociology department. He argued that Black Americans had become culturally American, shedding their African heritage, and criticized middle‑class Black individuals for materialism and cultural elitism.

Although Frazier rejected the white‑centric Nordic eugenics model, he adopted a class‑ and geography‑based eugenic framework for Black Americans. In his work Eugenics and the Race Problem, he warned that “colored feebleminded” individuals in the South were breeding unchecked, while “colored feebleminded” in the North received less scrutiny. He contended that the “best mentally endowed Negroes” would not dilute their inheritance by intermarrying with the feebleminded, suggesting institutional controls were necessary to curb the reproduction of the latter.

Frazier’s perspective framed the North as a meritocratic environment where natural selection favored the “brightest” Black individuals, whereas the South was depicted as a breeding ground for “undesirable” traits. His rhetoric mirrors classic eugenic language, emphasizing control over reproduction to “improve” the race.

5 John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes emerged in the early 1900s as one of the world’s leading economists, reshaping macroeconomic thought with his seminal work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. His ideas championed government deficits during economic downturns to sustain employment, a radical departure from the era’s prevailing balanced‑budget orthodoxy.

Keynes’s theories guided President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, which aimed to revive the American economy during the Great Depression. While some scholars debate the efficacy of those measures, Keynes’s influence persisted in U.S. fiscal policy until the 1980s, when Reagan’s monetarist approach took hold.

Beyond economics, Keynes was an avid eugenicist. In The Essential Keynes, he argued that nations must devise policies concerning not only population size but also “innate quality.” As director of the Eugenics Society for seven years, he advocated for contraception to curb the growth of “drunken and ignorant” lower‑class populations, whom he deemed incapable of self‑regulation.

6 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for three decades, remains celebrated as one of America’s most brilliant jurists. Appointed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, he earned the moniker “The Great Dissenter” for his incisive dissenting opinions that continue to shape legal thought.

Holmes’s legacy, however, is tainted by his 1927 majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia’s forced‑sterilization law. The case involved Carrie Buck, a young woman labeled “feeble‑minded” after an unwed pregnancy. Holmes argued that sterilizing her would protect “society and her welfare,” famously declaring, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This decision provided legal cover for thousands of forced sterilizations across the United States.

Internationally, the Nazis seized upon Holmes’s language to justify their own atrocities, citing his opinion as evidence that “the world” could prevent the propagation of “degenerate” offspring. Holmes’s influence thus extended far beyond the courtroom, leaving a chilling imprint on eugenic policy worldwide.

7 Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling, a double Nobel laureate in Chemistry and Peace, is revered for his scientific brilliance and tireless advocacy against nuclear weapons testing. His discovery that sickle‑cell anemia stemmed from a single genetic mutation marked the first identification of a “molecular disease.”

Pauling soon intertwined his scientific insights with eugenic thinking. He argued that to alleviate human suffering, societies should legally mandate testing for genetic diseases such as sickle‑cell anemia, especially among African‑American populations. He proposed restricting marriage and reproduction for carriers, suggesting that the state intervene to prevent the transmission of hereditary ailments.

Later, Pauling advocated even more extreme measures: tattooing or otherwise marking carriers on their bodies—potentially on the forehead—to signal their status and discourage intermarriage. He also supported abortion for pregnancies involving two carriers, asserting that ending such lives would spare future suffering. Notably, Pauling stopped short of endorsing forced sterilization or the killing of already‑born children.

8 Sir Winston Churchill

In 2002, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of all time, celebrated for his steadfast leadership during World War II and his literary achievements, including a Nobel Prize in Literature. He famously warned that “the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble‑minded and insane classes” posed a grave national danger.

Churchill’s correspondence with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in 1910 revealed his belief that preserving a “superior” race required curbing the reproduction of “feeble‑minded” individuals. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which he supported, defined categories such as “idiots,” “imbeciles,” “feeble‑minded,” and “moral defectives,” authorizing their indefinite confinement and, in some cases, sterilization.

While Churchill never advocated the use of gas chambers, he endorsed segregation, confinement, and sterilization of those he deemed “inferior.” His eugenic stance, juxtaposed with his wartime heroics, underscores a paradoxical aspect of his legacy.

9 Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt, the beloved “trust‑buster” president, remains a towering figure in American history. He championed the Square Deal, spearheaded conservation efforts that birthed the U.S. Forest Service and the National Wildlife Refuge System, and earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.

Roosevelt also famously inspired the teddy bear after refusing to shoot a bound bear, deeming such an act unsportsmanlike. Yet, his views on eugenics were far less compassionate. In a January 3, 1913 letter to Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office, he likened human reproduction to livestock breeding, insisting that society should prevent “degenerates” from reproducing. He argued that just as farmers apply selective breeding to improve stock, citizens must leave only “good blood” behind.

Ironically, despite promoting an image of robust physical vigor, Roosevelt suffered from severe asthma, myopia, heart issues, blindness in one eye from a boxing match, and hearing loss in one ear—all ailments he nonetheless dismissed in his public persona.

10 Helen Keller

Helen Keller, famed for overcoming blindness and deafness after a childhood illness, became an iconic advocate for the blind and deaf. With the unwavering support of her teacher Anne Sullivan, Keller avoided institutionalization and went on to champion women’s rights, birth control, the NAACP, and co‑found the ACLU. Her legacy lives on through the Helen Keller Services for the Blind, which empowers individuals with disabilities to secure education and employment.

Beyond her activism, Keller harbored eugenic convictions concerning mental disabilities. In 1915, surgeon Harry Haiselden refused to operate on infant John Bollinger, labeling the child “defective” and urging the parents to let him die, claiming he would become an “idiot” and potential criminal. Keller echoed Haiselden’s stance in a letter to The New Republic, arguing that cases of severe mental deformity should be judged by a “jury of expert physicians” rather than lay juries, asserting that such individuals would never become productive members of society and posed a criminal risk.

Keller’s correspondence framed the debate as a clash between “fine humanity” represented by physicians and “cowardly sentimentalism” of the public. Her endorsement of eugenic policies illustrates a lesser‑known, unsettling facet of her remarkable life.

10 Widely Admired Figures and Their Eugenics Views

The ten individuals highlighted above demonstrate that admiration for public achievements does not preclude the endorsement of troubling ideologies. Their eugenic beliefs, ranging from support for forced sterilization to advocating selective marriage policies, reveal a complex tapestry of historical attitudes that continue to inform contemporary discussions about ethics, science, and social policy.

Every now and then a television series transcends its original format, evolving from a simple programme into a cultural juggernaut that resonates across continents. Several shows have managed to break language and border barriers, spawning national editions in countless countries. Join us as we count down the 10 most widely adapted TV shows that have left an indelible mark on the global entertainment landscape.

10 The Amazing Race

A singular reality‑competition, ‘The Amazing Race’ premiered in the United States in 2001 and quickly became a worldwide sensation. The series has logged 24 full seasons, with a 25th already underway, pitting ten to twelve two‑person teams against each other as they sprint across continents, tackling culturally specific challenges in each stop.

The format’s universal appeal is evident: it has been localized into nine distinct national versions and three continental editions. The American incarnation alone boasts 13 Emmy wins out of 65 nominations, underscoring its critical acclaim.

9 The Apprentice

‘The Apprentice’ broke new ground by giving aspiring executives a chance to earn a coveted position with a high‑profile business mogul. Sixteen contestants battle through a series of corporate‑themed tasks, hoping to impress titans such as Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, Tony Fernandes, Robert Justus and Tuncay Özilhan. Debuting in the U.S. in 2004, the series ran for 13 Trump‑led seasons and one Stewart‑hosted season, prompting adaptations in 20 nations and three pan‑regional versions.

8 Popstars

One of the earliest talent‑search formats, ‘Popstars’ first aired in New Zealand in 1999, inviting solo singers to audition for a spot in a freshly formed pop group. The concept ignited a wave of vocal‑focused reality shows worldwide.

Adapted in 38 territories, the series birthed groups such as France’s L5, Germany’s Bro’Sis, Australia’s Eye Q, and several others, cementing its legacy as a springboard for future music‑competition franchises.

7 MasterChef

‘MasterChef’ transformed home‑cooking enthusiasts into culinary contenders, offering a glamorous platform to launch professional chef careers. Originating in the United Kingdom in 1990 as a game‑show, it ran until 2001 before a 2005 revival sparked a global explosion, now airing in more than 42 countries and spawning a pan‑regional edition.

6 Fear Factor

‘Fear Factor’ thrust ordinary people into extraordinary, adrenaline‑pumping challenges designed to test the limits of human bravery. Premiering in the United States in 2001, the series quickly expanded, finding homes in over 35 national adaptations.

While each locale tweaks the format, the core premise remains: contestants tackle grotesque stunts—ranging from hanging from rooftops to crawling through swarms of insects—to win cash prizes, cementing its reputation as a daring global hit.

5 Got Talent Series

Dubbed the “mother of all talent shows,” the ‘Got Talent’ franchise opens the stage to singers, dancers, magicians, stunt performers, painters and countless other acts, all vying for a life‑changing prize. The first edition, “America’s Got Talent,” launched in the U.S. in 2006 and has since completed nine seasons.

Its universal format has been embraced by more than 51 nations, making it one of the most prolific talent‑show franchises on the planet.

4 Top Model Series

‘Top Model’ introduced audiences to the high‑pressure world of fashion modelling. Debuting in the United States as ‘America’s Next Top Model’ in 2003, the series has been localized in over 40 nations and spawned more than five regional versions.

Each season follows 10‑16 aspiring models as they navigate photo shoots, runway challenges, and industry critiques, all vying for a coveted modeling contract.

3 Idol Series

Arguably the most iconic singing competition, the ‘Idol’ franchise began in the United Kingdom as ‘Pop Idol.’ The format quickly spread, finding homes in over 41 countries and spawning six multinational editions.

It has launched the careers of global superstars such as Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Abhijeet Sawant, Phillip Phillips, Guy Sebastian, Will Young, Carly Rae Jenkins, and many more, underscoring its massive cultural footprint.

2 Big Brother

A trailblazer in social‑experiment reality TV, ‘Big Brother’ first aired in the Netherlands in 1999 and now boasts 52 distinct international versions. Contestants—sometimes celebrities—are sealed inside a house equipped with a garden and pool, completely cut off from external communication.

Each week, housemates nominate peers for eviction; the public then decides who leaves, continuing until a sole survivor claims victory.

1 Who Wants To Be A Millionaire

This groundbreaking quiz show gave everyday people a shot at the ultimate dream: becoming a millionaire. Contestants answer a ladder of increasingly difficult questions for escalating cash prizes. First broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1998, the format has been adapted by more than 35 countries, inspiring countless hopefuls worldwide.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of going to a movie with their friends, only to leave the theater and debate their interpretations of the ending. Well, it turns out that there are certain movies that people get wrong all the time. Here on Listorati, we’ve gathered 10 such films to talk about how you may or may not have been getting them wrong all along.

Keep in mind, some of these reveal spoilers for the end of a film, which is why we’ve chosen titles that have been out for several years…

10. (500) Days of Summer

In 2009, the romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer premiered in theaters. Many people related to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s heartbroken character, Tom, and bashed Zooey Deschanel’s character Summer for being a villain who put him in the friend zone, despite being such a “great” guy. However, the film was meant to make the viewer examine their own behavior in past relationships, because everyone paints themselves as the victim after a breakup.

Throughout the entire movie, Summer makes it very clear to Tom that she is not looking for a romantic relationship. Despite her honesty about the emotional wall she put between them, Tom continued to believe that she was “the one,” and pushed his expectations on her. When she didn’t reciprocate those feelings, he felt betrayed. He fell in love with the idea of Summer, rather than listening and paying attention to the reality of the situation. During a 2019 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel revisited the film for its 10-year anniversary. Gordon-Levitt said, “I think a really fun thing to do is try to watch it and just put yourself in Summer’s shoes the whole time.”

9. Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane is considered one of the greatest movies of all-time. Every single film student in the world has been forced to sit through this masterpiece by Orson Welles and analyze the deeper meaning. However, if you’re watching it as a casual viewer at home, it may be easy to misinterpret what’s really going on. In the film, we watch a man named Charles Foster Kane rise from poverty to become a millionaire. His dying word was “Rosebud,” and the journalists in the film go crazy trying to figure out what “Rosebud” actually is.

Donald Trump claimed that Citizen Kane was his favorite movie, and during an interview, he was asked to analyze Rosebud. He said, “A lot of people don’t understand the significance of it. I’m not sure if anyone understands the significance. But I think it means bringing a lonely, sad figure back into his childhood.” Throughout the rest of the interview, Trump describes Kane’s misfortune as a “modest fall,” and he said that character needed to get “a different woman” if he wanted to be happy.

Well… Trump was at least halfway right. At the very end of the film, we see the camera pan over all of Kane’s treasures, and it stops on his beloved childhood sled, “Rosebud.” Earlier in the movie, we see that he was playing in the snow with this sled during his last moments of childhood innocence. Basically, he spends the rest of the movie acquiring wealth, but he will never be as happy as he was as that care-free kid sledding in the snow.

8. The Shining

The Shining is one of the most famous horror movies of all time. But the author of the book, Stephen King, is famously frustrated that the director, Stanley Kubrick, was the one to completely miss the point of his story. The plot surrounds the Torrance family, who are spending the winter in a haunted mountain resort called the Overlook Hotel. In the beginning of the movie, Jack Torrance has been sober, and the hauntings do not begin until he starts indulging at the hotel bar.

In the movie, there is a scene where Jack is reading an issue of Playgirl magazine, which is full of pictures of nude men. Internet sleuths did some digging, and realized that that specific issue had an article about incest. There are several other clues in the movie that suggest that Danny Torrance was being sexually abused by his alcoholic father, which could explain the young boy’s deteriorating mental state. Combined with Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the character, this made Jack Torrance crazy from the very start, and it’s possible to interpret the movie as being about mental illness, instead of a haunting. In the book, Jack Torrance is a good father who is struggling with his addiction, and their family tries to keep it together in the midst of a very real supernatural experience.

King notoriously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of The Shining so much that he made his own version in a TV miniseries. During an interview with The Guardian, King explains that The Shining was one of his favorite books, and the characters stuck with him for years. He decided to write a sequel called Dr. Sleep. Danny Torrance is all grown up, but he is obviously traumatized from the events of the Overlook Hotel. He inherits his father’s alcoholism, but is managing it by going to AA. We learn that he does, in fact, have psychic abilities. There will be a movie version of Dr. Sleep coming in 2019, starring Ewan McGregor as Danny Torrance.

7. American Psycho

After American Psycho premiered in theaters, it was bashed for glorifying toxic masculinity and violence. It was even protested by the National Organization of Women, who demanded a boycott. But in reality, it was directed by a woman named Mary Herron, and it was meant to do the complete opposite of what everyone assumed.

As a dark comedy, we are meant to see how Christian Bale’s character Patrick Bateman is narcissistic and uncaring about other people. He also, incidentally, is a serial killer. Bateman admits that he is a murderer multiple times throughout the movie, but everyone around him is so self-absorbed that they aren’t even listening. According to the author of the novel, Bret Easton Ellis, “It was meant to be a critique of male behavior. A lot of people don’t realize that. They haven’t read the book.”

6. Donnie Darko

After Donnie Darko premiered in 2001, plenty of people felt their jaws drop by the end of the film. Fans cannot seem to decide if the character Donnie truly did send a plane engine traveling through time to save the world, or if he was simply mentally ill. Since he admits to having “emotional problems,” has visions of a giant rabbit, and frequently goes to therapy, the audience can believe either may be true. The writer and director, Richard Kelly, was just 26-years-old when he released Donnie Darko.

In 2017, he re-released a new Director’s Cut of the film so that he could go into more detail in order to answer the questions that fans had about the movie. He said, “I wanted to provide a bunch more information than was there. It’s a very dense, layered film, and there’s a much bigger world beyond the film.” So, if you’re still confused by the plot, you may just want to watch this new cut and commentary.

5. Shutter Island

Shutter Island is about a US Marshal named Teddy Daniels, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He is investigating the Ashecliffe Mental Hospital on an island outside of Boston. But in the twist ending, he is told that he was actually a patient named Andrew Laeddis, who was serving time for killing his wife. His doctor was allowing Laeddis to live out his fantasy of being a US Marshal, hoping that bringing it to a conclusion would help snap him out of his dissociative identity disorder. By the end, he relapses, and must be lobotomized. But he says, “This place makes me wonder. Which would be worse – to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”

This had audiences losing their own minds over the ending. If you were confused as to what really happened in the movie, don’t worry — you’re not alone. Even Leonardo Dicaprio told the director, Martin Scorsese, “I have no idea where I am or what I’m doing.’”

While DiCaprio and Scorsese refuse to reveal the meaning behind the quote, most agree that Andrew Laeddis actually was cured, but he simply could not live with the guilt of his true memories.

The screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, adapted the screenplay from the novel by Dennis Lehane. The story was so complex Kalogridis had to make a 40 to 50 page outline, which took her an entire year, before she actually wrote down any of the dialogue. Every time you watch the film over again from another perspective, you will pick up clues about the truth that you never saw before.

4. Total Recall

In the 1990 movie Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man named Quaid who pays for a service called “Recall,” which promises to let anyone live through any fantasy scenario. He says that he wants to become a secret agent, but before the procedure finishes, he finds himself caught up in a series of strange events that lead him to the planet Mars.

At the end of the movie, we see him standing on Mars, looking out onto the horizon with his new lover. Fans of the film have debated over the years whether the events of the movie were actually happening, or if it was all part of the fantasy secret agent scenario he was paying for. According to the director, Paul Verhoeven, “Total Recall doesn’t say whether it’s reality or it is a dream. It’s really saying there’s this reality and there’s that reality, and both exist at the same time.” So, basically, everyone is right, and people can stop arguing over it.

3. Inception

The characters of the movie Inception enter dreams within dreams. They are on a mission to insert an idea into the subconscious of a powerful CEO. The only trouble was Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, was haunted by the memory of his wife, and she keeps trying to sabotage their mission. Each of the characters carry a totem with them to help them distinguish dreams from reality.

At the end of the movie, Cobb finds closure in his wife’s death, and he regains custody of his children. The camera focuses on Cobb’s totem, which is a spinning top. It looks as though it may topple at any second, signifying that he is in reality. But the movie ends before we learn if he is truly in a dream or not. Fans everywhere debated with one another over this scene. However, the true message behind the ending of Inception is that once Cobb has his kids, he chooses to make this his new reality. And, according to Christopher Nolan, he would rather the audience draw their own conclusions about what the ending really means.

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a very trippy sci-fi romantic comedy. A couple named Clementine and Joel break up and choose to pay for a procedure that erases the memories of their relationship. It had many fans watching over and over again to try to see any hidden messages. Some people out there have a theory that Clementine and Joel have erased the memory of their relationship multiple times, and they are doomed to repeat this process forever. Since Clementine dyes her hair a lot, they theorize that each color represents a new timeline.

In reality, Clementine truly does change her hair color through the course of just one relationship. Each color represents the “season” of their love story — from green in the “spring” of new love, to blue of the icy cold “winter” of a breakup. The first time they got together, Joel was depressed, and expected Clementine to be his “manic pixie dream girl” who was going to solve all of his problems and make him a happier person. When she failed to live up to that expectation, things fell apart. In the end, Joel and Clementine find one another again, and choose to give their relationship a second chance. They no longer go into the relationship expecting perfection, which will ultimately be healthier for them.

1. Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club… Unless we’re talking about the 1999 movie, of course. After the film premiered, young men everywhere began idolizing Tyler Durden, and real-life fight clubs sprang up across the world. However, for those that walked away from the movie feeling compelled to punch somebody in the face and burn their house down, they completely missed the point.

The audience can relate on some level to Durden’s rejection of consumerism, and “working jobs we hate so we can buy (bleep) we don’t need.” But his all-out rejection of society is incredibly dangerous. It is meant to show how easy it is for desperate men to rally behind radical ideologies. In the final scene, Project Mayhem blows up the entire city. We are meant to recognize that he is crazy, and not someone to be idolized. During an interview, the author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, said: “Ideally, each person would leave Fight Club and go on to live whatever their dream was—that they would have a sense of potential and ability they could carry into whatever it was they wanted to achieve in the world. It wasn’t about perpetuating Fight Club itself.”

It’s often been said that songs are largely driven by emotion rather than meaning or complexity of the music. This certainly would explain why a scant three chords and a groovy haircut goes a long way and can help to sell a ton of records. Conversely, sometimes the lyrics can evoke equally powerful feelings — even when a song’s meaning is completely misunderstood.

From The Clash to The Kingsmen, here’s just a fraction of classic tunes that people continue to love, despite completely missing the point of what the songwriters were trying to say.

This is an encore presentation of this list, as presented by our YouTube host Simon Whistler. You can read the full list here!

It is surprisingly easy for historical myths to become historical facts because oftentimes people will prefer the version of a story that is the most entertaining or the easiest to remember rather than the one that is the most accurate. Sometimes, all it takes is for just one person to come up with a good lie, and, just like that, hundreds of years later it is still presented as fact.

Today we examine 10 of these myths, all about famous historical people who aren’t around anymore to clear the air themselves.

10. Lady Godiva and the Naked Ride

The story of Lady Godiva’s naked ride has been around for over 700 years. As the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, she pleaded with her husband to lower taxes, which he said he would do if she would ride around town naked in the middle of the day. Godiva agreed to do this and, out of respect for her, all the peasants averted their gaze during her naked ride, except for one perv named Thomas who became known as Peeping Tom.

That’s the story. The existence of Lady Godiva (or Godifu, as was her real name) is well-attested. She lived during the mid-11th century and was married to Leofric, one of the richest men in Anglo-Saxon England. Everything else, however, seems to be fiction which was steadily added to the legend over the centuries. The first to mention it was the chronicler, Roger of Wendover, 200 years later, but he only made reference to Leofric’s challenge. He never said that Godiva actually went through with it. The “Peeping Tom” bit wasn’t even added until the 17th century, so there is no historical evidence that the naked ride ever took place.

9. Walter Raleigh and the Tobacco Craze

Staying in England, we take a look at one of the country’s leading adventurers – Sir Walter Raleigh. He explored and colonized the New World, fought the Spanish Armada, and even led an expedition to search for the fabled El Dorado. He is also credited with introducing tobacco to England. In fact, according to legend, the concept of smoking was so alien to Englishmen that when Raleigh’s servant first saw him smoke, he threw a bucket of water on him, thinking that his master was on fire.

So is any of this true? The story about the servant is obviously fiction, but Raleigh does deserve some partial credit because he played a role in popularizing tobacco, especially after supposedly convincing Queen Elizabeth I to try it. Everyone else copied the queen, so smoking became the new hip thing to do.

But Raleigh definitely did not introduce it because the Spanish had brought tobacco to Europe decades earlier. John Frampton had already published an English translation of the book “Of the Tabaco and of His Greate Vertues” by Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes, promoting the plant’s many medicinal qualities. So the English were aware of tobacco, they just weren’t interested in smoking it.

8. Guillotin and the Guillotine

You can probably guess by his name what Joseph-Ignace Guillotin is famous for but, contrary to myth, he did not invent the guillotine, arguably the most notorious execution method in history. In fact, the 18th-century French physician was a staunch abolitionist who did not believe in the death penalty at all. However, since getting rid of it completely was unrealistic, he advocated for a more humane method of execution, one which was quick, painless, and didn’t involve torture.

Ultimately, he got his wish, but he had no hand in the design or manufacture of the killing device. Several people were involved in its development, but the actual construction was done by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt. 

The name “guillotine” stuck mainly due to a song published in a popular French journal, mocking the physician. Guillotin “bitterly regretted to the latest moment of his existence” this connection. There is another myth involving him that says that he died by guillotine which, again, is not true. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin died of old age at 75 years old. Afterward, his family petitioned the French government to change the name of the killing device, but it refused so the family changed their name instead.

7. Mussolini and His Trains

“Say what you want about Mussolini, but at least he made the trains run on time.” Or, at least, that’s what people bring up whenever they try to promote the virtues of an autocratic regime, or when they try to see the positives even in a worst-case scenario. Regardless of the motivation behind it, they should probably stop saying it simply because it is not true.

The whole “trains running on time” idea was propaganda used by Mussolini to advance the notion of fascist efficiency. Pretty much every biography on Mussolini comes with testimonies from people who lived or visited Italy during his reign and knew firsthand that the legendary precision and punctuality of Italian trains was more myth than reality. Not to mention the fact that many repairs and improvements on Italy’s railway system were done in the early 1920s before Mussolini even came to power, and he simply took the credit for them.

6. George Washington and the Cherry Tree

One day in 1738, Augustine Washington Sr. was walking around his plantation when he noticed that someone had cut down his favorite cherry tree. He suspected his young son, George, who had just received a hatchet for his sixth birthday. When Augustine confronted his son, George Washington admitted to the deed, saying that he “can not tell a lie.” Impressed with his bravery and honesty, Augustine Washington immediately forgave and embraced his son. 

It is a nice story that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it was completely made up by a man named Mason Locke Weems. After George Washington’s death, Weems became one of the first people to write a biography about the Founding Father. Titled simply The Life of Washington, it was published in 1800 and became a bestseller. 

It contained a lot of fictional stories, especially from Washington’s early years, since Weems’s main interest (besides making money, of course) was to turn Washington into a beloved role model for Americans rather than any kind of historical accuracy. The “cherry tree” story became the most popular myth associated with Washington, even though it didn’t actually appear until the book’s fifth edition in 1806.

5. Napoleon and the Sphinx’s Nose

The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the most famous landmarks in the world. It is instantly recognizable and, strangely enough, one of its most defining features is something that is missing – the nose. Today, we probably couldn’t even picture the Sphinx with a nose but, obviously, it did have one at some point so… that begs the question: what happened to it?

Weirdly enough, the person who often gets the blame for the missing nose is Napoleon. In 1798, he led a campaign into Egypt and Syria, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and the story goes that an errant cannonball hit the Sphinx’s nose and smashed it to bits.

We can safely let Napoleon off the hook for this act of vandalism since there is pretty strong evidence that the Sphinx had already lost its nose before his time. Sketches by Danish explorer Frederic Louis Norden dated to 1737, decades before the French ruler was even born, show the Sphinx as we know it today. Going even further back, 15th-century historian Al-Maqrizi not only documented the loss of the nose but also blamed it on a man named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, who intentionally defaced the Sphinx as an act of iconoclasm.

4. Ben Franklin and His Turkeys

We’ve already covered one Founding Father, so let’s mention another one: Benjamin Franklin and his staunch admiration for turkeys, which supposedly prompted him to propose the turkey as America’s national symbol instead of the bald eagle.

There are a few kernels of truth in there, which is probably why this myth is so enduring. It is true that Franklin was part of the committee to select the national seal of America, alongside John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, so he would have had the opportunity to advocate for the turkey if he so desired but he did not do it. Instead, Franklin suggested a biblical scene showing Moses parting the Red Sea.

It is also true that Franklin preferred the turkey over the bald eagle. He thought the eagle was a lazy animal of “bad moral character” who lived by stealing food from other birds, whereas the turkey was more respectable and a “true original native of America.” However, he only shared these opinions in a private letter to his daughter. He never publicized them and he wasn’t even talking about the eagle from the Great Seal, but rather the eagle used by a club called the Society of Cincinnati, which some people thought looked more like a turkey than an eagle. The whole thing was just a joke that people didn’t get and that’s how the myth was born.

3. Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

Juan Ponce de Leon was a 16th-century Spanish explorer and conquistador who led the first European expedition to Florida and served as the first Governor of Puerto Rico. However, the main thing he is remembered for today is his search for the mythical Fountain of Youth, a legendary spring capable of de-aging anyone who swam in its waters. 

Here’s the thing, though. Ponce de Leon never did that. The Fountain of Youth is not mentioned once in any of his letters or documents. His goal was something far more common and mundane – money. Specifically, he was searching for another island like Puerto Rico where he could enjoy another profitable governorship. 

The connection with the Fountain of Youth appeared after the explorer’s death and it was actually an attempt by a writer named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés to discredit him. Oviedo disliked Ponce de Leon, so he wrote how the conquistador was tricked by the Native Americans to set off in pursuit of the Fountain of Youth. It was meant to make Ponce de Leon look like a gullible fool and the rest of the world bought it hook, line and sinker.

2. William Howard Taft and the Big Bathtub

William Howard Taft served as the 27th President of the United States, but people mainly remember him today for being so fat that he once got stuck in the White House bathtub and that it took six strong men to get him out.

It’s true that Taft was a large man. He stood almost six feet tall and weighed almost 350 pounds by the end of his presidency. He wasn’t called “Big Bill” for nothing, but even he wasn’t big enough to get stuck in the bathtub that had been installed in the White House especially for him. Yes, Taft had the forethought to order a custom-made tub that was seven feet long, three-and-a-half feet wide, and could easily accommodate four regular men. Weighing over a ton, it was at the time the largest bathtub built for one individual, so there was no way for Big Bill to get stuck inside it.

To top it all off, this story was never reported in the papers during Taft’s presidency. The first mention of it seems to appear in the memoir of an usher named Ike Hoover who worked in the White House for 42 years and published a book with all kinds of quirky and seedy stories from his time spent there.

1. Magellan and His Circumnavigation

Being the first to do something is almost a sure-fire way to make it into the history books. Some people even get lucky enough to become remembered for something they never actually did. Take, for example, 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. If there is one thing that most people know about Magellan, it is that he was the first person to circumnavigate the globe in 1519.

Some places are more careful with their wording and say that Magellan led or “masterminded” the expedition that completed the first circumnavigation. This is more accurate, but still omits the fact that Magellan himself never finished the voyage. He was killed in the Philippines in 1521, and Juan Sebastian Elcano became the new captain, who saw the voyage to its completion.

Curiously, historians think that the person who probably deserves this accolade the most was a Malaysian slave named Enrique. Ten years earlier, Magellan picked him up in Malacca to serve as his interpreter. Enrique then traveled west with Magellan from Asia to Europe. Then, he set off in 1519 on Magellan’s fatal expedition, going from Europe to Asia. However, he left the ship after Magellan’s death in the Philippines, just a few hundred miles short of his point of origin in Malacca. We don’t know what happened to Enrique after that but, assuming he made it home, he would have completed the circumnavigation he had unwittingly started a decade earlier.

Literary critics have invented a host of phrases and concepts to separate artists from their art. By far the best known is “death of the author,” which comes from a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes. Essentially, the notion is to imagine that the author cannot be asked for their intent, or how their own life experiences shaped their writing, so the theorist’s interpretation is at least as valid as the author’s intention–provided said interpretation is reasonably derived from the text.  

While that’s a worthwhile literary exercise, there can be a problem that comes from many people knowing pieces of writing through cultural osmosis instead of actually reading the text. Indeed, sometimes there are aspects of the text that simply aren’t as haunting as the passages in stories that become touchstones. So interpretations of stories can be demonstrably incorrect. As is the case with…

10. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

When the 1995 Disney adaption of this movie came out, many critics and audience members were united in decrying the supposed borderline desecration of the original story. They pointed to the 1939 or 1920 versions of the story as proper adaptations, which properly portrayed the unsavory nature of Quasimodo, the tragic fate of the gypsy Esmeralda, clergyman Claude Frollo, and so on… and all in the shadow of one of the most celebrated buildings in French history.

It was a criticism completely undermined by how Victor Hugo wrote the original 1831 version of the story. As Lindsay Ellis explains in her highly recommended video essay, in the original novel, Quasimodo is a mere bit part and certainly not a sympathetic figure. There’s no tragic romance with the gypsy Esmeralda, who it turns out was actually a caucasian abandoned as a child. In brief, Hugo didn’t write his novel as a tragedy, so much as a tribute to the cathedral itself, which at the time of writing was less a French institution than a wreck that had been vandalized numerous times over the centuries and neglected.

That Hugo’s sympathies were with the building over the people who lived in and around it is much less surprising to anyone who knows that the original title was “Notre-Dame de Paris” and that he did not approve of the English title change. Perhaps that theme would resonate with misanthropic architecture students, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the crowd pleaser many subsequent adaptations have been  

9. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving’s 1820 story, set in a Dutch community in 1790s New York (loosely based on real events), as we all know is about a schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, who gets chased by a headless horseman across a bridge. When the horseman can’t catch him, he throws a pumpkin at Crane. Those who read an abridged version in class might remember that it was heavily implied that Brom Bones was pretending to be the Headless Hessian Horseman to scare off Crane so that he could marry Katrina Van Tassel without any competition from superstitious schoolteachers. Considering Ichabod disappears and Bones gets what he wants through pretty underhanded and aggressive means, it seems like this slice of Americana should be a pretty dark, spooky tale where the villain wins in the end, be he ghost or local tough guy in disguise.

Readers have that impression because many of them lost track of how odious a person Irving wrote Ichabod Crane to be. Like many schoolteachers of the time, Crane is described as having romantic interest purely for financial reasons (Irving explicitly describes him as looking at her father’s fortune with “green eyes”). He’s also explicitly a mooch and a glutton, only getting away with it because he knows a lot of local ghost lore. The story also ends with a postscript noting there was talk in Sleepy Hollow that Crane was seen again later, having moved to another community and becoming a judge. However, the locals rejected that because his supposed disappearance made for a better story. If anything, Irving went overboard in assuring audiences not to worry about ol’ Ichabod.  

8. Jabberwocky

Lewis Caroll’s titular monster, which was first introduced to readers in Alice Through the Looking Glass, has been portrayed as a serious beast in such adaptations as the 1985 movie. Even those who know better than to portray such serious versions of the monsters from the poem assume that “slivey toves” and “more raths” from the opening verse mean “unidentifiable beasts,” such as in the version done for The Muppet Show.

Jabberwocky’s origin was in 1855, in a magazine called Misch-Masch, which had a circulation of Lewis Carroll’s immediate family. It was not only meant as a parody of folk poems, but he actually handily explained what all the words meant, so those terms aren’t so much nonsense as coded. For example, “slivy toves” are actually cheese-eating badgers. “Mome Raths” are turtles. Bryllyg is said to be the early afternoon, as it refers to the time of broiling dinner. All things considered, the opening verse is much closer to a slightly offbeat version of Wind in the Willows than it is a surreal menagerie of cryptids.

7. Harrison Bergeron

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story, equality is perverted so that every exceptional person is limited to be no better than the worst performing person, either by restraints that weigh them down or by zapping them if they think too much. This idea has been embraced by right wing publications like National Review. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited it in a ruling requiring tournament golfers to walk between shots.

What they don’t seem to notice is the portrayal of the eponymous character. As critics have more recently pointed out, Bergeron is a ridiculously overpowered human being who not only stands 7-feet tall at age 14, he is also literally capable of flying as he dances (once he removes his restraints that weigh hundreds of pounds). More revealingly, he proclaims himself “emperor,” which probably isn’t something Vonnegut would have a “heroic” character do.

He also makes this declaration and displays his powers on live television, which of course means that the Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers would have no trouble hunting him down and shooting him, as she does seemingly effortlessly in the story. Clearly, Bergeron is a parody of the Howard Roark and John Gault-type supermen that are so perfect and so, so underappreciated in Ayn Rand’s novels. Considering Vonnegut’s left-wing views throughout his writing career, it’s objectivism that’s in his sights at least as much as socialism.

6. The Satanic Verses

When it was published in 1988, author Salman Rushdie struck free publicity gold when his book was interpreted as blasphemous and banned in India while the Ayatollah demanded his head. He surely didn’t celebrate this, as he had to go into hiding from very real threats. Several translators of the book were attacked—one fatally. Considering that the book is a formidable 600 pages long, it’s not so surprising that many people didn’t read the entire story and were content to go off a vague sense of what the novel was about, or a heavily abridged version.

The Satanic Verses tells the intertwined stories of two Southeast Asian Muslims, one born wealthy and the other poor. The pair both survive a plane crash, and the rich one becomes cursed (one way is he smells bad) while the other becomes angelic. Still, the rich one survives the novel while the other commits suicide while wanted for murder (he is unambiguously responsible for several deaths). The offending portions of the book are a secondary narrative of a few dozen pages about the rise of the prophet Mahound, written in an approximation of Koranic verse.

The “Satanic Verses” of the title are an allusion to a claim by the prophet that, for some contradictory statements he made, it must have been Satan pretending to be Allah. In a manner that paralleled a scene that offended many in The Last Temptation of Christ, Rushdie styled his parody of the prophet as a very elaborate dream sequence to give him plausible deniability that he was portraying an in-universe, fictional version. The version many Muslims were given, however, only showed the dream sequence without the larger context, and so inevitably it misled many on the intent of the book.     

5. Valley of the Dolls

These days, this 1966 novel is better known for selling forty million copies than it is for its contents. Its story of three women who try to enter show business but run into such pitfalls as creative compromise, sexual exploitation, and drug addiction (the “dolls” of the title are upper/downer pills) was so salacious for its time that it couldn’t help but become one of, literally, the bestselling books of all-time. No wonder it got a couple film adaptations: a much derided smash hit in 1968, and a TV movie in 1981.

An aspect of the literary juggernaut that, for decades, was held up as the impetus for its success was the titillation of guessing which characters were modeled on which specific real people. For example, was the character that had a pill addiction Judy Garland? Was the over-the-hill singer who stands in the protagonist’s way based on Ethel Merman? According to Jacqueline Susann, the answer to all these guesses was “no” and that all of the characters were invented to fit a theme instead of to reveal the truth behind a real entertainer’s persona. She eventually said of the misconception, “Let them think that, it sells more of my books.”  

4. Dracula

Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic isn’t just one of the two most influential horror novels of the 19th century (alongside Frankenstein). For many outside Central or Eastern Europe, it was the popularity of Dracula that led them to learn of 15th century Romanian ruler Vladislav III, better known as Vlad the Impaler. Deposed early in life, Vlad fought against both the Ottoman Empire and fellow Romanians and eventually died in battle, but not before leaving behind battlefields laden with impaled prisoners of war as an attempt to demoralize his enemies. Such a person seems tailor-made to inspire a monster in human shape.  

Which completely misunderstands Stoker’s real writing process. It’s not so much that he didn’t carefully study Vlad Tepisch’s life for inspiration for his iconic character, as there’s no evidence that he even knew the bygone monarch had existed. In 1890 (the year he began working on it) he noted that he read a book on Westphalia and came across the word Dracula, but he misinterpreted it as being the local word for “evil.” While Vlad is from approximately the same area of Europe as Dracula, Vlad was certainly not much associated with Transylvania, which would have been a key connection to invoking the memory of the historical figure. In short, Stoker seemed to have more lucked into the historical echoes than anything else.  

3. The Great Gatsby

Nearly 80 years after its initial disappointing release in 1925, F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age triumph sells roughly 500,000 copies a year. It’s resonated with readers enough to make its way to the silver screen in 1926, 1949, 1976, and 2013. Each release was greeted with a critical thrashing and to very mixed results at the box office.  

But that’s not to say readers, who generally regard themselves as more astute than movie fans, don’t mistake Fitzgerald’s intention with Gatsby. As explained by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian, most people misinterpret Gatsby as being a suave charmer. There are a few telling descriptions that undermine this: His pink suits (tacky even in the Roaring ’20s) and his bewilderment in the face of the high society that narrator Nick Carraway takes for granted. That’s why he overcompensates for his parties, doing such things as hire entire orchestras. Gatsby is a dreamer, pining for the fantasy version from his youth of his neighbor Daisy Buchanan, not a man with his feet on the ground in the present. Not that this dissonance is anything new: Fitzgerald wrote back in the day that, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one has the slightest idea what the book was about.”

2. Don Quixote

It’s been just over 400 years since Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece was first published in English. Since then, the image of a nobleman putting a washing basin on his head, taking a nag for a noble steed and his trusty assistant Sancho Panza on a number of delusional, pointless quests in an attempt to restore chivalry to the land has only become more poignant. Don Quixote is both absurd and loveable, and many readers have mixed feelings about the ending where he regains his sanity enough to dictate in his will that his niece be disinherited if she marries a man who reads books of chivalry.  

As recounted in the New York Times, the title character actually comes across as much less sympathetic when you really look at the text. While Quixote means well, Cervantes does not skimp on the details of the pain he causes. Not just to his assistant Sancho Panza (who gets beat up because Quixote doesn’t pay a hotel bill), but even mules that can’t drink from their water trough because Quixote insists the water is holy. It’s an aspect of the story that is understandably omitted from adaptations such as Man of La Mancha, which contributed to those interpretations being dismissed as “kitsch.”

1. Slaughterhouse Five

Well, when an author writes as many famous satirical, morally complex, and whimsical stories as Kurt Vonnegut did, it’s not surprising that he’d have multiple works end up on lists like this. So it is with his 1969 anti-war classic (that he self-deprecatingly called his “famous Dresden novel”) about a WWII veteran named Billy Pilgrim, whose subjective experience of his life jumps back and forward through time. Within the intro of the book, Vonnegut quotes an associate who asked authors writing anti-war books why they didn’t instead write an “anti-glacier book.” Meaning, of course, that the human tendency towards war is as implacable as glaciers.

A similar sentiment is expressed by the alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who consider their own atrocities and eventual destruction of the universe as utterly inevitable, because they can see the entirety of all the time they live, all at once. Hence many have viewed it as a pro-fatalism book as they wonder whether the events of the book are real or not.

The text makes explicit that the aliens don’t exist. Within the book, the aliens Billy Pilgrim meets, and the environment they place him in (specifically a zoo), are described as something he read in a novel by hack sci-fi author Kilgore Trout. Further, Pilgrim does not express anything to anyone else about the aliens until after a plane crash that leaves him unconscious (i.e., likely with brain damage and trauma). As Michael Carson of Wrath-BearingTree.com points out, when Pilgrim first discusses the lessons he supposedly learned about the inevitability of war and the atrocities that come from it, it’s with a war hawk named Rumfoord, who Vonnegut mocks. Pilgrim merely echoes Rumfoord and then says he learned all of what Rumfoord told him on Tralfamadore.

On the other hand, Vonnegut also makes it explicit that the Tralfamadorians believe they will eventually destroy the universe. Vonnegut’s message isn’t that war and atrocities are inevitable, but that to follow this fatalist philosophy (that could come from absurd aliens that are the result of head trauma) makes its adherents into puppets, and leads to disaster for everyone.     

Adam & Dustin Koski also wrote the occult horror novel Not Meant to Know. Feel free to read and misinterpret it.

It’s often been said that songs are largely driven by emotion rather than meaning or complexity of the music. This certainly would explain why a scant three chords and a groovy haircut goes a long way and can help to sell a ton of records. Conversely, sometimes the lyrics can evoke equally powerful feelings — even when a song’s meaning is completely misunderstood.

From The Clash to The Kingsmen, here’s just a fraction of classic tunes that people continue to love, despite completely missing the point of what the songwriters were trying to say.

10. “Train In Vain” (The Clash)

Ever since its release from the seminal London Calling double album, “Train In Vain” arrived at the station shrouded in mystery — largely in part to the track not being listed on the sleeve or back cover. The song name would also become muddled after fans began calling it by its chorus, “Stand By Me,” as well as the actual title never being mentioned in the lyrics; furthermore, the toe-tapping tune has absolutely nothing to do with transportation or working out. Now 40 years later, the heart of the controversy lies in a simple printing snafu and a stubborn girlfriend.  

Written by Mick Jones, “Train In Vain” was originally intended to be used as a flexi-disk promotion for the British music magazine, NME. But when the deal fell through at the last minute, the band decided to tack it onto the master of their recently completed album. This, however, resulted in one small problem: the artwork, lyrics, liner notes, etc. had already gone to the printer. As a result, it landed on Side Four as Track 5 with the title crudely scratched on the original vinyl in the needle run-off area. Subsequent pressings would later include the proper title on the album — although in the U.S., it contained the variation, “Train In Vain (Stand By Me).”

The story behind the meaning is rooted in Jones’ ex-girlfriend, Slits guitarist Viv Albertine. Although Jones has remained somewhat tight-lipped about the doomed relationship, the feminist rock icon has been more candid: “I’m really proud to have inspired that but often he won’t admit to it. He used to get the train to my place in Shepherds Bush and I would not let him in. He was bleating on the doorstep. That was cruel.”  

The all-female Slits supported The Clash on their White Riot tour — and the alluring Albertine enjoyed a well-earned reputation of breaking many punk hearts, including Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders, and Joe Strummer.

9. “There She Goes” (The La’s)

An undeniably catchy, jangly ballad, “There She Goes” appears to be a simple tale of unrequited love. However, the lyrics ”Racing through my brain… pulsing through my vein” reveal a not-so-innocent side. Additionally, frontman Lee Mavers’ eccentric and reclusive behavior only furthered drug-fueled speculation that the popular track drew inspiration from poppies. Yep, it’s about heroin.

Released as a single in 1988, the track earned the proto Britpop band from Liverpool earned critical praise before typical band infighting and chaos ensued. Although the song would be re-released two years later on their debut album under the Go! Disc label, The La’s had already been relegated to one-hit wonder status.

Later, the alt Christian-rock outfit Sixpence None The Richer covered the tune and enjoyed a major hit stateside — proving Jesus has a place in his heart for all saints and sinners.  

8. “Fire and Rain” (James Taylor)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOIo4lEpsPY

This one’s also about smack. Sorry. Taylor wrote “Fire and Rain” as a deeply personal reflection of life’s bumpy road, capturing all of its twists and turns and pains and joys. A remarkable feat considering he was only 20 years old at the time. From his second album, Sweet Baby James, the song’s structure unfolds like a three-act play with a beginning, middle, and end. Taylor explains in a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone:

“‘Fire and Rain’ has three verses. The first verse is about my reactions to the death of a friend. The second verse is about my arrival in this country with a monkey on my back, and there Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through the time when my body was aching and the time was at hand when I had to do it… And the third verse of that song refers to my recuperation in Austin Riggs (psychiatric facility) which lasted about five months.”

The end result earned the young singer/songwriter a multi-platinum record and a career that remains strong today over five decades later. But the “monkey on his back” would become a recurring affliction. Taylor first began using heroin after arriving in New York City in 1966 — a habit that escalated in London while briefly signed to The Beatles’ Apple Records label. Despite his personal and professional setbacks, Taylor has sold over 100 million records, and in 2000 became enshrined in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

7. “Dancing With Myself” (Billy Idol)

In his tell-all memoir, Dancing With Myself, the title is both metaphor and the name of one of his biggest hits. It’s also a cheeky double entendre for spanking the monkey. You know, the five knuckle shuffle. Jackin’ the beanstalk. Badgering the witness. Jerkin’ the gherkin. Okay, enough already — it’s about masturbation.

The song was first recorded in 1979 by Idol’s previous band, Gen X, and then re-released as a single in 1981 for the singer’s solo launch. Written by Idol and Gen X bassist, Tony James, the song was inspired in part during a Gen X tour of Japan in 1979. According to Idol, he and James visited a Tokyo disco, where they were surprised to find most of the crowd there dancing alone in front of a wall of mirrors instead of with each other.

However, when pressed on the subject, Idol later conceded there’s more than one layer: “There’s a masturbatory element to it, too. There’s a masturbatory element in those kids dancing with their own reflections. It’s not too much further to sexual masturbation. The song really is about these people being in a disenfranchised world where they’re left bereft dancing with their own reflections.”

Umm, sure, Billy, whatever you say. The song’s music video (which saw heavy rotation in MTV’s halcyon days) features a half-naked Idol thrusting and grinding with post-apocalyptic zombies. Oddly, there’s no mention of social anxiety, disillusionment or the despair of ennui. But then what do you expect from someone who kicks off his autobiography prologue with sordid tales of “never-ending booze, broads, and bikes, plus a steady diet of pot, cocaine, ecstasy, smack, opium, quaaludes, and reds.”

Long live rock & roll!

6. “Imagine” (John Lennon)

On the surface, this simple piano-driven ballad is a dreamy elixir for the soul, calling for an end to war, borders, religion, greed and hunger. The song would not only become a modern hymn of sorts for world peace and unity, but also helped solidify Lennon’s enduring legacy as a stand-alone rock and roll deity. But the ex-Beatle, who clearly understood the power of celebrity, was also a bit cryptic with the hidden message — one which he later characterized as his way of delivering a “sugarcoated” communist manifesto.

Masterfully arranged and co-produced by pre-felon, Phil Spector, in 1971, “Imagine” remains as relevant today as ever and ranks #3 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All-Time. But the main takeaway that’s often overlooked isn’t just some hippie ode to all love one another — but rather encourages people to use revolutionary methods and ideas to make the world a better place. Does this mean John Lennon spent his free time puffing on cigars with Fidel Castro in Havana or riding on the back of Che Guevara’s motorcycle through Bolivian jungles? Hardly.

Lennon much preferred the company of his wife and co-collaborator, Yoko Ono, at their spectacular estate in Ascot (and location for the song’s music video). Furthermore, Lennon set the record straight regarding party affiliations, stating “I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement.”

5. “Poker Face” (Lady Gaga)

Anyone who saw Gaga on Season 5 of American Horror Story knows this lady can get down. In fact, her convincing performance even won her a Golden Globe — which shouldn’t have been terribly surprising given her impressive real-life talent for switch-hitting. And no, we’re not talking baseball. As for that little ditty that launched Gaga’s career into another galaxy, “Poker Face” has little to do with playing cards. It’s all about bi-sexuality.

Co-written by Gaga with her longtime collaborator, Red One, the track is said to be a tribute to past conquests in Gaga’s wild ride to fame and fortune. It was first released in 2008 off her debut album (and prophetically named), Fame, and went on to become one of the best selling singles of all time. Featuring more hooks than a Bass Pro Shop, the song also benefits from that over-the-top accompanying music video, a wildly sexy romp that has since been viewed more times than every Kardashian sex tape combined. Well, maybe.

Unlike other songs on this list, the lyrics are fairly transparent and only get lost in the blinding glare cast by the singer’s hyper-radiant star. Nonetheless, it’s doesn’t take much imagination to decipher what she means when she playfully teases, “I’m just bluffin’ with my muffin.” Got it, Gaga. Message received, no distortion.

4. “Every Breath You Take” (The Police)

Ironically, the cops should’ve locked up these guys a long time ago for allowing this unofficial Stalker Anthem to become such a massive hit. Actually, it’s not their fault — but you’d think that someone as smart as Sting (only his name is stupid) would have anticipated that his lyrics would become so widely misinterpreted as both a sappy love song and a license to creep. Unfortunately, the subtext about a possessive lover with an Orwellian zeal for spying never quite registered with fans. Perhaps the band should’ve named the album something other than Synchronicity.

Sting wrote “Every Breath You Take” during a critical juncture in his life — both personally and professionally. Although The Police had enjoyed a mercurial run with sold-out arenas and multiple-platinum records, Sting felt cornered and wanted out. He had also become embroiled in an affair with his future wife,Trudie Styler, while inconveniently still married to her best friend, Frances Tomelty. Awkward. So, like any rock star with lots of money and access to private jets, he took off for the Caribbean, where he found refuge on Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate. There, he penned the song that became the band’s biggest hit and won the 1983 Grammy for Song Of The Year.

In a 1993 interview, Sting explains the inspiration: “I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano and had written it in half an hour. The tune itself is generic an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realize at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.”

3. “Death Or Glory” (The Clash)

The London-based rockers return with another entry on the list, which shouldn’t be a surprise from the group simply known as “the only band that matters.” Also from their London Calling album, “Death or Glory” is a parody about those who talk a big game but fail to back it up or wind up selling out to the man.

An upbeat tempo and satisfying melody accompanies possibly the greatest lyric in rock & roll history: “He who f**** nuns, will later join the church.” The amusing metaphor hammers home the point that those who fight hardest against conformity will eventually become what they vowed to avoid. It was apparently one of the band’s favorite songs on the album, recorded at Wessex Studios in Highbury, London for CBS records. According to legend, their eccentric producer, Guy Stevens, ran around the studio like a madman, throwing chairs and ladders during the session and even dumped a bottle of wine on Joe Strummer’s piano.

Interestingly, the song also reflects the band’s acceptance of change in terms of dealing with their own success while trying to stay loyal to their working class roots. Sadly, Strummer passed away in 2002, but unlike previous generations of rockers who pledged to die before they got old, this frontman actually did it.

2. “Born In The U.S.A.” (Bruce Springsteen)

Although many still believe this 1984 mega-hit reflects America’s ass-kicking greatness, the true meaning tells a much different story. But the confusion is understandable. The easy-to-remember chorus coupled with Springsteen’s trademark gravelly, blue-collar vocals practically screams baseball, hot dogs and apple pie. The Boss, however, wrote it as a scathing indictment of the U.S. military-industrial complex and the debacle of the Vietnam War.

Nonetheless, beginning with Ronald Reagan, politicians continue to misuse the song as a propaganda tool on the campaign trail. Perhaps taking time to actually listen to the lyrics, or better yet, having the words explained to them by the man himself would help to clarify the matter: “when you think about all the young men and women that died in Vietnam, and how many died since they’ve been back — surviving the war and coming back and not surviving — you have to think that, at the time, the country took advantage of their selflessness. There was a moment when they were just really generous with their lives.”

In “Born in the USA,” Springsteen pays a specific homage to the Hell experienced at Khe Sanh, where in 1968, a U.S. Marine garrison bravely withstood 77 days of relentless bombing in one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war.

Fittingly for our purpose, Springsteen once called “Born in the USA” the “most misunderstood song since ‘Louie, Louie.’”

1. “Louie Louie” (The Kingsmen)

No list about misunderstood songs would be complete without including that 1963 golden oldie, “Louie Louie” by The Kingsmen. Featuring mostly indecipherable lyrics, it would eventually become the most recorded song in history with well over 1,000 versions, ranging from Barry White to Motorhead. But the bizarre, serpentine path that led to the rock n roll pantheon is as murky as the garbled vocals laid down in one take by an obscure, teen-aged garage band from Portland, Oregon.

In an equally strange, ironic twist, golden-voiced Harry Belafonte deserves some credit for the song’s wild odyssey. After all, his 1956 chart-topping album “Calypso” would inspire a doo-wop singer in L.A. named Richard Berry to hastily write down the original “Louie Louie” lyrics on a roll of toilet paper (yes, really) in hopes of cashing in on the popular island sound craze. In 1957, Berry and his band, The Pharaohs, recorded the track about a Jamaican sailor yearning for a girl as he laments to a bartender named Louie.  

Although the song enjoyed decent regional airplay, Berry sold the rights a few years later for $750 to help pay for his wedding (he would be justly compensated years later). Then in 1961, a singer in the Pacific Northwest named Rockin’ Robin Roberts covered the tune with his band, The Wailers — and that’s when The Kingsmen finally enter the picture.

Childhood school friends and bandmates Lynn Easton and Jack Fry had heard Roberts’ version playing on local jukeboxes around town and decided to try a recording of their own. And so on April 6, 1963, after coughing up 50 bucks to pay for a quickie studio session, the boys walked into Northwest Inc. Recording and a date with infamy.

The small studio had been set up for an instrumental arrangement only, forcing Ely to get up on his toes to be heard on a microphone dangling from the ceiling. Adding to the difficulty, he also wore braces at the time, producing his soon-to-be-legendary mumbled words. By October that year, the single had raced up the charts, fueled largely by the raw sound and its perceived obscene message.

The single was banned by several radio stations and declared indecent by the Governor of Indiana — and later investigated by the FBI. Eventually, the boys from Bridgetown would only be found guilty of poor enunciation (as well as Fry botching the third verse two bars too soon) but no charges were ever filed. It should be noted, however, Easton can be heard yelling “f***” at the fifty-four second mark after dropping his drumstick.

It is time, once again, to take 10 well-known persons from the past and explore the things that everyone thinks they did, that they didn’t actually do. In other words, 10 more myths about historical figures.

10. Ben Franklin and Daylight Saving Time

Undoubtedly, Benjamin Franklin was a pretty smart guy. In fact, there is a long list of useful things that he either invented or helped improve, but because he was such a prolific inventor, he is often also credited with things he had no business with. One such example is daylight saving time, the practice of setting the clocks forward by one hour during spring to make full use of the sunshine and then setting them back during the fall.

The notion that this idea came from the Founding Father dates back to 1784. At that time, the 78-year-old Franklin was living in Paris, where he was serving as an American envoy. He published an essay in the April 26 edition of the Journal de Paris where he wrote that Parisians would save a fortune on candles if they got up with the sunrise.

Here’s the thing, though. Franklin’s essay was clearly satire. He wrote how he was the first person in Paris to discover that the sun rises so early after being mistakenly woken up at six in the morning by a random noise and finding his room bathed in sunlight. He also wrote how he told his friends and they refused to believe that such a thing was possible.

Furthermore, Franklin made no mention of setting the clocks forward. Instead, the solutions he proposed (again, as satire) were to tax windows that had shutters and kept out the light, to limit the sale of candles to one pound per week per family, to ring the church bells every morning at six, and last, but not least, to fire cannons in the street to wake everyone up.

9. Fidel Castro and Baseball

Fidel Castro wore many hats in his lifetime: activist, revolutionary, political radical, guerrilla leader, ruthless dictator… And according to one enduring myth, he almost donned another hat – that of a New York Yankee.

There is no denying that Fidel Castro was a big fan of baseball. He was also decent at it, having played the sport during his college years in Havana. However, there’s a very big gap between “decent” and becoming a Yankee. At no point was Castro good enough to turn pro, but the popular story claims that he was once a prospect with the Yankees during the 1950s, occasionally changed to the Washington Senators. 

As with many good myths, this one might’ve had a seed of truth that helped it take form. It is possible, although by no means certain, that Castro could have taken part in a mass tryout staged in Cuba by Joe Cambria, a famed baseball scout who was responsible for bringing scores of Cuban players to America. Even if this happened, Castro would have never been seriously considered, but he liked the story and he certainly never made any efforts to discourage it.

8. Charles Lindbergh and the Transatlantic Flight

Charles Lindbergh might be the most famous aviator in history, but if you were to ask people what made him so famous, a lot of them would probably give you the wrong answer. They might say that Lindbergh performed the first transatlantic flight, back in May 1927, when he boarded the Spirit of St. Louis and flew from New York to Paris.

There is no denying that Lindbergh’s flight was a landmark moment in aviation history and even human history, for that matter, but it came with two important caveats that people tend to leave out – it was the first solo and nonstop transatlantic flight. That meant that Lindbergh flew straight from point A to point B without any stops along the way and he did it all alone. It’s still a remarkable feat, but it detracts from the fact that dozens of other people flew across the Atlantic before him.

If we are looking for the first nonstop transatlantic flight, then that honor belongs to John Alcock and Arthur Brown, who successfully finished their journey in June 1919, eight years before Lindbergh. And if we are looking for the first transatlantic flight ever, we only have to go back a few weeks earlier, to May 1919, when the crew of the Curtiss NC-4 flying boat commanded by Rear Admiral Albert Cushing Read did the flight in 19 days, after making multiple stops for repairs.

7. Cass Elliot and the Ham Sandwich

As grim as it may be, celebrity deaths are always a rich source of myths and urban legends. For example, did you know that Cass Elliot, better known as Mama Cass from her time with the Mamas & the Papas choked to death on a ham sandwich? Well, it’s not true, but the story appeared soon after her untimely death in London on July 29, 1974, and has stuck around ever since.

Who exactly was responsible for this idea is still uncertain. Some point the finger at a careless Met officer who opened his mouth to the press. Others say the first physician on site was to blame, as he, too, spoke to the media when he shouldn’t have, and mentioned that a half-eaten ham sandwich was present next to the body and could have been relevant to the cause of death. Since Cass Elliot’s weight had long been the subject of jokes in the media, this was all that some unscrupulous journalists needed in order to fashion a cruel but compelling demise for the singer.

A third alternative source for the rumor was Elliot’s manager, Allan Carr, who intentionally planted the story, although he had nobler intentions in mind. Besides her weight, Cass Elliot also had a pretty serious drug habit, so as soon as Carr heard that she had died suddenly, he assumed it was an overdose and thought that the ham sandwich story was a less shameful way to go. 

Eventually, British pathologist Keith Simpson performed the autopsy and found that the cause of death was a heart attack. No drugs or ham sandwiches were presented in Elliot’s system, but by then, the rumor had already become fact.

6. Ronald Reagan and Casablanca

Most people know that Ronald Reagan was an actor before turning to politics and, eventually, becoming President of the United States, but did you also know that, during his film career, Reagan almost played the lead in Casablanca?

This little piece of movie trivia is often presented as a fun “what if” of Hollywood history. What if Humphrey Bogart missed out on his most iconic role? Would Casablanca still have become a hit without him? Would the success of the movie deter Ronald Reagan from entering politics?

Just like before, the story of Reagan and Casablanca simply isn’t true, but on this occasion, we actually know exactly how the myth got started. It was the result of a press release put out by the Warner Bros. publicity office in early 1942, which stated that the movie would feature Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan. But this was so early in pre-production that work on the screenplay hadn’t even started yet and no casting decisions had been made. These kinds of press releases that didn’t convey any concrete information were relatively common back then, and they were simply intended to garner some extra publicity for the studio’s stars. 

The man who had the final say on the casting, producer Hal Wallis, later stated that he never seriously considered anyone other than Bogie for the role, although it is true that he initially wanted Ann Sheridan instead of Ingrid Bergman.

5. Albert Einstein and School Math

The name “Einstein” has become synonymous with “genius,” and given his larger-than-life presence, it is no wonder that multiple myths have spawned regarding him. The most famous one of all was, of course, that Einstein failed math in grade school. It’s a popular story because it makes us all feel better about our own mistakes and failures, and gives us hope that one day we can turn it all around.

While that last part is certainly possible, the bit about Einstein isn’t, although there is a kernel of truth in there. Albert Einstein was gifted in geometry, physics, and algebra from a young age, and by the time he was 11, he was already studying them at a college level. It is true that he failed an exam, although it wasn’t in grade school, it was the entrance exam to the Zurich Polytechnic. Einstein first took it when he was only 16, and he failed because the tests were in French, and that was a subject that young Albert did struggle with. He still nailed all the maths questions, though.

Another possible source of the myth was a reversal in the grading system of his school. Anyone going through Einstein’s academic record would notice that, at one point, he started getting loads of 6s, which should have been the lowest mark whereas 1 was the highest. However, Einstein didn’t suddenly get dumb. The school simply reversed the order of the grades, making 6 the highest. So sorry, but any way you slice it, Einstein has always been a child prodigy.

4. Gene Simmons and the Cow Tongue

The band KISS is known for several things: rock and rolling all night, partying every day, and staging outrageous and theatrical live performances. There are rockets, pyrotechnics, smoking guitars, fire-breathing, and, of course, makeup. On top of all that, bassist Gene Simmons became well-known for his prodigious tongue, which he proudly showed off at every opportunity. In fact, his tongue became so famous that people started having doubts that it was completely genuine. The rumor soon appeared that Simmons had enhanced his look by surgically replacing his own appendage with a cow tongue.

This is absurd, of course, for multiple reasons. Besides the fact that tongue transplants were medically impossible back when KISS first made it big in the early 70s, a cow’s tongue is almost 20 times larger than that of a human’s, so the difference would have been quite noticeable. Furthermore, although Simmons’ tongue is large, it’s not like it’s the largest ever or anything like that. It is simply larger than normal.

Lastly, the myth was debunked by the man himself. He referred to this story as his “favorite KISS rumor,” but confirmed that his tongue was 100 percent Gene Simmons.

3. George Washington Carver and Peanut Butter

George Washington Carver was a scientist whose efforts were integral to the agricultural economics of the United States, particularly the South which was entirely too reliant on cotton crops. And yet, he is mainly remembered as the “peanut butter guy,” which not only belittles his accomplishments, but it’s not even true.

Born into slavery, Carver wanted to help black sharecroppers who were perpetually indebted to white plantation owners by making their farms more productive. Cotton was, by far, America’s most profitable crop, but it was also very demanding on the soil. Since most black farmers barely scraped by on paper-thin profit margins, they had no choice but to plant the most valuable crop. But growing cotton season after season depleted the soil of nutrients, which was why Carver wanted them to practice crop rotation and alternate between crops to give the soil time to heal. But farmers were only willing to do this if they could actually profit off those other crops, which was why Carver started coming up with hundreds and hundreds of uses for soybeans, sweet potatoes, and, of course, peanuts.

Carver came up with over 300 uses for peanuts alone, ranging from shaving cream to glue to shampoo to all sorts of foodstuffs. And yet, peanut butter was not one of them because it already existed. The Aztecs and the Incas both made a paste out of roasted peanuts centuries earlier, and in modern times, several people applied for patents related to peanut butter, including Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

2. George Crum and the Potato Chip

The story of how one of the world’s most popular snacks came to be is one of spite and happenstance. One day in 1853, a man visited Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, and ordered fried potatoes. When his food arrived, the man promptly sent it back, complaining that the fries were too thick and not salty or crispy enough. 

The chef at the restaurant was a man of Native and African American descent named George Crum aka George Speck and he didn’t take kindly to fussy eaters. His potatoes were too thick? Fine, he sliced them as thinly as possible. They weren’t crispy or salty enough? Fine, he cooked them until they became crunchy and bathed them in salt. To his surprise, the patron loved them, and that’s how potato chips, or Saratoga chips, as Crum called them, were born.

To make the story even more fantastical, some versions claim that the patron was none other than railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to suggest that any part of the story is true. Crum was considered one of America’s master chefs of his day, and yet nobody hailed him as the inventor of the potato chip in his lifetime, not even Crum himself. This was a story that spread after his death, and the true inventor remains up for debate.

1. Walt Disney and the Frozen Head

Cryonics is the practice of freezing a human body soon after death, in the belief that future medical advances would allow us to bring it back to life. Sometimes, the entire body isn’t even needed; just the head. Surely, by the time medical science has advanced enough that resurrections have become possible, we would have overcome our need for a body and would be able to stick our brain into a computer, an android, a smart toaster, or something like that. There are plenty of people who have placed their hopes for a long-lasting life in cryonics including, if the myth is to be believed, its most famous patron, Walt Disney.

According to a popular urban legend, the head of the Head of the Disney Company is currently on ice, waiting for science to bypass the whole “death” thing. Some even say that it is stored in a freezer underneath Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride.

There is no evidence to suggest that Walt Disney had any interest in cryonics, let alone that he froze himself. His own daughter debunked the myth, and records show that Disney had his body cremated after death. Some say that the rumor was started by a few rascally Disney employees, while others pin the blame on a reporter for an old tabloid called The National Spotlite.