10 Lies About Famous Movies You Probably Believe
Your life may not be a TV show, but you're still being lied to.
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00:00 Lies about movies used to spread like wildfire, and without any official way to disprove it,
00:05 anyone from a sneaky kid on the playground to that drunk guy in a bar could spout nonsense
00:10 about your favourite films, and for all you knew, they'd be right.
00:14 Sure, there's an alternate ending to Raiders of the Last Ark where the Ark burns the US
00:18 logo off the box it's contained in.
00:20 Oh, of course, Blair Witch is based on a true story.
00:23 Now, with the internet at our fingertips, you'd think it'd be easy to verify what's
00:27 truth and what's a stinking lie.
00:29 Oh, how naive.
00:31 So, with that in mind then, I'm Ellie, with WhatCulture, here with 10 lies about famous
00:36 movies you probably believe.
00:38 Number 10.
00:39 Snow White was the first feature-length animation
00:42 Snow White is the film that started it all.
00:45 Disney had already found success with Mickey Mouse, but this was something bigger.
00:49 The studio's first full-length animation was a major step forward for the company and
00:53 the medium, grafting many of the conventions that remain in children's films to this
00:58 day.
00:59 But, the truth?
01:00 There had been plenty of animations before.
01:02 It shouldn't cheapen Snow White of its achievement in terms of the impact it had on cinema, but
01:07 it really wasn't the first.
01:09 That honour goes to Pinto Colvig, whose feature Creation was released in 1915, a whole 22
01:16 years before Snow White.
01:18 Like many smaller films from the time, it's been lost, presumably forever.
01:22 But that doesn't hide the fact it, along with the handful of silhouette or stop-motion
01:26 films that came out in the intervening years, beat Snow White to the punch.
01:31 It's unlikely there was any bitterness, though.
01:33 Colvig went on to design the Disney logo and voice Goofy, so clearly he was welcome at
01:38 the house of Mouse.
01:39 Number 9.
01:40 Man of Steel
01:41 It was out of character for Superman to kill Zod.
01:45 Man of Steel was, to put it lightly, a mess, made more disappointing because there was
01:49 clearly an interesting deconstruction of a character we all knew, hidden under the washed-out
01:54 colour palette.
01:55 It performed well, but not well enough to stop Warner Bros going all in and enlisting
02:00 Batman to save the sequel.
02:02 One of the biggest complaints from audiences was the relentless, mind-numbing action, all
02:06 of which culminated in Superman snapping General Zod's neck.
02:10 A travesty, this was one of the worst changes to the mythology Zack Snyder and co had made.
02:16 But the truth?
02:17 He's done it before.
02:18 There were a lot of changes made to the mythology of Kal-El that felt forced, just to give the
02:23 story a new feel, but killing Zod isn't one of them.
02:27 It's Batman, not Superman, who has that no-killing rule.
02:30 Go back to Superman 2.
02:32 The climax of the film has our hero depower Zod and his followers before throwing the
02:36 General down a cavern in the Fortress of Solitude.
02:39 If that is a murder, then the 80s clearly had a different moral code.
02:43 Man of Steel made a lot of mistakes in trying to update the character, but the killing of
02:47 an almost unstoppable villain who stated he'll destroy the Earth isn't one of them.
02:53 8.
02:54 Harry Potter
02:55 J.K. Rowling told Alan Rickman Snape's big twist.
02:58 The undoubted hero of the Harry Potter series is Severus Snape, the seemingly one-note potions
03:04 master who, through a series of increasing reveals such as he was a Death Eater, Harry's
03:08 dad bullied him, became the most well-rounded character in the films.
03:13 This all culminated in the final moment reveal that all along he'd been in love with Harry's
03:17 mother, turning seven books and eight movies worth of arsehole behaviour into hidden compassion.
03:24 Of course, as the legend goes, Alan Rickman knew all this already.
03:28 To convince him to take the role, series creator J.K. Rowling had told him all this way back
03:33 at the start, but the truth is, she vaguely hinted at it once.
03:37 We know Rowling does indeed plan ahead, with the first totally child-aimed book containing
03:42 plenty of hints to later developments.
03:45 Dumbledore's chocolate frog card mentions dark wizard Grindelwald, but more than that,
03:49 we know she and publisher Bloomsbury were very tight on secrecy.
03:54 Which is why it shouldn't be surprising that while Rowling knew Snape would always
03:58 be on Team Potter, Rickman certainly didn't.
04:02 Number 7.
04:03 Batman Begins
04:04 The Joker card tease is a direct foreshadowing for The Dark Knight.
04:08 With films like The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel so forward-thinking, planning ahead
04:13 at the behest of the story at hand, it feels strange for a big blockbuster to not be setting
04:18 up whatever may be down the line.
04:20 So if a slight nod to the fans is made, we immediately jump on it as some deep foreshadowing.
04:25 When Batman Begins, a film whose villains were previously untouched on the big screen
04:29 and thus new to many audiences, dropped the Joker card in the final scene, it was clear
04:35 to everyone that we were going to get someone a little more familiar the next time around.
04:40 But the truth is, it was a little wink to fans, nothing more.
04:43 Although what the card suggested would go on to be perfectly explored in The Dark Knight,
04:48 Nolan never intended it to be anything more than something to get audiences thinking.
04:53 At the point the film finishes, Batman has just established himself as the protector
04:57 of Gotham, and a good visual cue to cement this is to show that the stories we're more
05:01 familiar with from previous TV and film incarnations are just around the corner.
05:06 Nolan is notorious for only ever focusing on one film at a time, so even if the card
05:12 was intended to be something more concrete for the series, in his mind, he was definitely
05:17 going to be the guy exploring it.
05:19 6.
05:20 Avatar
05:21 James Cameron was making Avatar for a decade.
05:24 In an alternate reality of cinema, we got Avatar ten years early.
05:28 An idea he'd written a treatment for back in 1994, James Cameron's plan was to make
05:33 the film immediately following his equally massive Titanic, but the limitations of the
05:38 time meant he had to first work on getting the technology up to scratch.
05:42 When the film finally arrived in late 2009, it was reported the director had been working
05:47 on it for over ten years, making this a stupendous achievement.
05:51 But the truth is, he kept pretty busy in those intervening years.
05:55 You know this claim is greatly exaggerated when Cameron actually released a film in the
06:00 interim, Ghosts of the Abyss, a documentary about the wreck of the Titanic.
06:05 In fact, it was only after Abyss in 2003 that he began pushing on Avatar, and even then
06:10 he was looking at other projects.
06:13 The film wasn't greenlit and thus provided with money to properly push forward on the
06:17 tech until late 2005, so in reality, he was making the film for four years.
06:23 5.
06:24 Psycho
06:25 The shower scene contains no actual nudity or violence.
06:28 Psycho was such a progressive film that you could make a movie just about its clashes
06:32 with the censors, and it'd be a damn sight better than the muddled Hitchcock.
06:37 The first film to show a toilet flushing and also dealing with a psychological subject
06:41 that could easily be sexually misconstrued - oh, spoiler, the killer's a guy dressing
06:45 up as his dead mother.
06:47 The biggest point of contention was the shower scene.
06:50 A series of rapid cuts depicting the stabbing of Marion Crane, the sequence is a masterclass
06:55 of suggestion.
06:57 Despite what you may think, you never see any nudity or actual stabbing.
07:01 But the truth is, there's one shot that shows the stabbing.
07:05 The claim, which was mainly made to get the film past the censors, that the shower scene
07:09 is gore-free, is easy to state when proving otherwise requires re-watching the whole film,
07:15 which was difficult pre-home video.
07:17 Nowadays, we can go through the Blu-ray frame by frame and see that actually there's one
07:22 split-second shot of the knife penetrating Marion's skin.
07:26 Every slight and devoid of gore, it's subconsciously a key contributor to the scene's shock factor.
07:32 Number 4.
07:33 The Truman Show
07:34 There's an official psychological condition named after the Truman Show.
07:39 The Truman Show is about a guy whose entire life is in fact a TV show.
07:44 His hometown is contained in a massive dome, his friends and family are actors, and the
07:48 town's obsession with branded items is product placement.
07:52 Everything that happens is overseen by a control booth in the sky, and it's all built so he'll
07:57 never find out the truth.
07:59 If that gets you questioning your own reality, then you'll not be surprised to hear there's
08:02 an official name for that - the Truman Show Delusion.
08:06 But the truth is, it's a colloquialism.
08:09 The word "official" may be a bit misleading.
08:11 The Truman Show Delusion is simply the name attributed to an existing condition.
08:16 It doesn't actually appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
08:21 It's the equivalent of calling philocyte the Star Wars condition.
08:24 The notion of a person's life being part of a fabricated reality is an old one, and the
08:29 TV show's specific subgroup formed part of a Twilight Zone episode, as well as sharing
08:35 many elements in sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick's time out of joint.
08:40 People believing it is just an extension of the typical delusions of grandeur.
08:44 Number 3.
08:45 Planet of the Apes
08:46 Planet of the Apes is Earth.
08:48 The ending of Planet of the Apes is so iconic that giving it away barely constitutes a spoiler.
08:54 The film's final image is even on the cover of the DVD.
08:58 But the truth is, it was planned to be a different planet.
09:01 It may seem like an attempt to replicate the original's shock value, but the twist at
09:06 the end of Tim Burton's remake - Mark Wahlberg returns from a non-Earth planet dominated
09:11 by apes to discover the same thing has happened to our home - is actually much more in keeping
09:16 with the original concept.
09:17 Pierre Ball's novel, off which the whole series is based, has Earth and the titular
09:22 planet be two very distinct worlds, both on which the apes rise.
09:27 It was only in early drafts of the film, written by Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, that the
09:31 twist worked its way into the story, changing the scope of the franchise forever.
09:37 Number 2.
09:38 Titanic
09:39 Titanic is an inaccurate account of events.
09:42 The main criticism, exacerbated by the centenary of the ship's famous sinking a couple of
09:47 years back, tends to be aimed at Rose and Jack.
09:51 Not their dialogue - in the broad scope of the film it works - but the fact that they
09:54 didn't exist, taking focus from the real tragic events.
09:58 Couple that with claims that the steerage passengers were never locked down below decks
10:02 and it all looks like one big expensive fabrication.
10:07 But the truth is, outside of character-specific events, the sinking is spot on.
10:11 Yes, those points are solid examples of James Cameron adding drama to already dramatic events,
10:17 but for the most part, his take on the sinking is, for the time, pretty exact.
10:22 The one big mistake the film makes is that it's now been determined the ship never
10:26 stood vertical in the water.
10:29 But as that was only figured out by a team containing Cameron, no less, after the movie's
10:33 release, we'll let them off.
10:35 Number 1.
10:36 Blade Runner
10:37 Blade Runner has lots of very different versions.
10:40 Is Deckard a replicant?
10:41 It's one of the biggest unanswered sci-fi movie questions.
10:45 Depending on which version of Blade Runner you watch, you get a different answer.
10:49 Confusing audiences and critics alike upon initial release, the film has since become
10:54 regarded as a classic, noteworthy not only for its visual style, which is still imitated
11:00 to this day, but the fact that there's so many different cuts of the film out there
11:04 for fans to pore over for clues.
11:07 But the truth is, it's all clever marketing.
11:09 Do you know what other film has countless cuts?
11:12 Every freaking film ever made.
11:14 Few films, however, have the same studio interference as Blade Runner that allow for such a big
11:19 marketing trick.
11:21 Aside from two different director's cuts, one from 1992 and one from 2007, all the other
11:27 versions are basically the same.
11:29 They're either from different stages of production or feature slight cuts for international
11:34 TV release.
11:35 Ultimately, it boils down to three key differences.
11:38 Whether there's a voiceover, original release only.
11:41 Whether there's a happy ending, all pre-1992 releases, and whether there's the bit with
11:46 the unicorn, the two director's cuts.
11:50 Everything else is minor, and while interesting from a behind-the-scenes perspective, they
11:54 don't deserve the mystique they've been given over the years.
11:57 And yes, for our money, he really is a replicant.
12:00 And that concludes our list.
12:02 If you can think of any more that we missed, then do let us know in the comments below.
12:06 And while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe and tap that notification
12:09 bell.
12:10 Head over to Twitter and follow us there, and I can be found across various social medias
12:13 just by searching Ellie Littlechild.
12:16 I've been Ellie with What Culture, I hope you have a magical day, and I'll see you real