Has there ever been a show, movie, game or anything else which you didn't interact with for a long time, but you have an image of what it is in your head based on bits and pieces you've been told or picked up through cultural osmosis, only for that image to be just way off when you do finally interact with it for the first time? Sometimes it's something you heard about from childhood but never had a chance to experience for yourself, other times it's something that's massively popular and so is constantly referenced by people online which for one reason or another you never got around to, or wanted to engage with. From bits and pieces of context-free information and half remembered second-hand accounts you fill in the broadest of gaps and come up with something completely different, but which has existed and will continue to exist only in your head and I think that's kinda cool.
Here are some of my favs.
Better Call Saul
I didn't watch Better Call Saul until last year, but had watched Breaking Bad up to mid season 4 several years prior, and then from beginning to end not long before I watched BCS. I've also watched a lot of Mr. Show, and a few years ago for christmas my dad gave me a BCS wall calendar for some reason, I knew it was a prequel/spin-off to Breaking Bad and I knew that in the show his name starting out is Jimmy McGill. Based mainly on these sources I had some idea of what the show was in my head.
What I envisioned Better Call Saul as was an episodic sitcom where most or every episode was a self-contained plot where Jimmy gets up to scummy lawyer shenanigans. In my mind, each episode was Bob Odenkirk getting matched with a different petty crook and using his talent for bullshittery (legal or otherwise) to get them out of trouble with the law or other crims, with clever comedic writing and farcical complications along the way and then at the end of the day the case is resolved and we go back to sitcom status quo. I did not expect Breaking Bad's less desperately grim and arguably better younger brother!
Small spoilers ahead for the first 2 episodes of Better Call Saul.
The first episode of the show almost supported this conception I had. It wasn't as comedic as I expected and had some serious character moments for sure but that wasn't exactly incompatible with my expectations, there was still plenty of comedy there I thought, and the second episode went a ways to reinforcing my expectations with the scene where Jimmy manages to talk recognisable psychopath druglord Tuco Salamanca down from executing hismelf and 2 hooligans to breaking 1 leg of each of the hooligans and letting them go. Capital C Crimal lawyering, this is what I expected! It's also where the show that existed in my head died, because this is the beginning of the main plot of the show. There was still comedy, though not as much as I expected. Scummy lawyer shenanigans still took place, but were schemes which took place over an entire arc. There was surprisingly little Bob Odenkirk assisting petty crooks with their troubles and in fact it took quite a while to get to that position.
Was it what I expected? Nope. Am I disappointed? Hell no.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
I had basically no direct exposure to Jojo until 2021 when Chip and Ironicus released their first episode of a new podcast covering the show and I began watching it myself shortly after. A lot of the show's quirks and tropes were consistent with what I'd picked up through osmosis but the plot(s) were nowhere close to what I'd constructed in my mind.
What I knew about Jojo was:
- Stands are a thing, they're magic ghosts people summon to fight with really weird powers and they're named after music
- It's a generational thing, as the series progresses the torch is passed down to a new Jostar and spans across time periods
- There's a bad guy called Dio Brando, he's maybe a vampire and he says Zawarudo and teleports, or moves really fast or something
- There's a guy named Speedwagon and Bacchus from Yakuza 0 looks like him
- ゴゴゴゴ
- Problems are solved in the silliest ways with extensive internal monologues
- The appearance of Joseph and Jotaro Jostar, and Dio in Stardust Crusaders
I had this idea for some reason that the show would be about a lineage of treasure hunters and their globetrotting adventures with family and friends seeking out mystical artefacts, with shit getting silly along the way - a bizarre adventure, if you will. This Dio fellow (who may or may not be a vampire) would be a rival treasure hunter and the main recurring villain but you'd also have monster of the week kind of episodes while the crew are plundering a tomb or doing some other kind of Indiana Jones/Uncharted shit. I think this conception came entirely from having seen art of Part 3 Joseph one time, possibly using Hermit Purple as a whip/grappling hook. Needless to say I was pretty far off, but across the different parts little bits and pieces almost come close to what I expected. It comes the closest to reality in Part 3, which undoubtedly is because it's the part which gets talked about the most and which I would have been most exposed to but it's still a damn sight shy from the idea I had and other parts are nowhere near that.
The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask
When I was in kindergarten at 5 years old a kid in my class told me all about this game he had. I was vaguely aware of the character of Link from watching my brother play Super Smash Brothers once or twice. The game this other kid told me about was called Zelda: Mondronium's Mask.
In Mondronium's Mask you play as Link and you get lost in a forest where a wizard steals your horse and then turns you into a horse and your goal is to turn back into a human and get your horse back from the wizard. The moon is involved somehow and is very angry at you. The wizard lived in a big blue house that's covered in stars which you can't get into because there's a fence around it, and there's this big cannon on top of it. That's where your horse is. He didn't know how to get the horse back because he was scared of the wizard's cannon.
I didn't play Mondronium's Mask until a couple of years later. I went to a friend's house and he had a rented copy of it. This is how I learned that the name was wrong, it's Majora not Mondronium. This is also pretty much all I learned at that time because this rented copy had a 100% completed save on it so the entire game for me was just fucking about and rolling around as a goron and my friend likewise knew absolutely nothing about the game either. I found the wizard's house and true to the tales I could not get past the fence despite my efforts, but there was no sign of a horse there and I was pretty sure that's a telescope and not a cannon. It was another five or so years before I learned what the game was about, and how wrong I and this kindergartner of the past had been. I'd asked another friend, who was all about Ocarina of Time, if they'd played Majoras Mask and in the fashion of all 12 year old nerds they spent the whole day telling me everything they knew about the game and how dumb my ideas on it were, and this time the account of the game I was given actually turned out to be correct.
These conceptions all turned out to be varying levels of wrong, and the real versions no doubt work better than what I had in my head, but I haven't forgotten these imaginary ones either even when they're based on a remembered explanation of something I've never seen or heard of before by a 5 year old who barely understood what they had seen and was too scared to examine further. Every now and then I stop and think about Mondronium's Mask, the game about a horse-obsessed wizard with a cannon. It doesn't exist, but I (and possibly one other person my age) remember it nevertheless.
If you've read this far, do you have imagined versions of a piece of media which you later found out were wildly wrong for whatever reasons? Please share if you do, I'd love to hear about it. I think it's cool that you can come up with an idea of something based on a handful of scattered jigsaw pieces or a half-remembered and hopelessly butchered explanation which you've filled the gaps of, and which it's very possible only you have envisioned even if it's completely wrong, and I think that kind of thing - explaining how you were completely wrong about something - is a fun thing to share.
