About ten years ago I saw an anonymous Wikipedia user who had edited dozens of articles about Mario, Sonic and Putt-Putt, rotating their names so that the articles about Mario were now about Sonic, the articles about Sonic were now about Putt-Putt, etc. I'm sure those changes were noticed and reverted almost immediately.
Looking deeper into this user's edit history, I found a series of edits to articles about films, changing their running times by adding or subtracting a few minutes. I have no idea whether these changes were ever noticed, but Wikipedia absolutely depends on the kind of person who'll obsessively go through their VHS collection and check each movie's Wikipedia sidebar against the info on the back of the box.
It's impossible to fact-check everything we read, and it's impossible to be aware of every kind of scam, so we rely on heuristics to guess whether to trust any given source. One of the heuristics I've found most useful is to consider what the author has to gain by lying, but sometimes I think about the guy randomly adjusting movie running times and I just have to lie down.
I have my own version of this, in a sense.
November, 2003. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has just come out. I mean it's days old. Maybe even hours old. My friends and I are all congregated on IRC and talking about the game, and one of them laments that its too new for anyone to have properly done a soundtrack rip, because they want an MP3 of the battle theme.
I'm savvy enough that I know how to record the song from an emulator, but just calling it "Battle Theme" sounds so... dry. There's no official title, either. So, when I tagged the song, I just made one up:
- Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga - "Let's Go!" (Battle Theme)
I didn't think anything of it.
Well, this friend had connections to a lot of game music community type people. The folks who study game music, care about game music, and remix game music for places like OC Remix. And he must have spread my MP3 around, because I have constantly run across people claiming that the Superstar Saga battle theme is called "Let's Go!"
To be clear, there has never been an official soundtrack release for Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. At best, we've had a "Sound Selection" CD, which collects a handful of songs from all three games, but none of them are the battle theme from Superstar Saga.
So, for example, if you check VGmusic.com, all of the submitted MIDIs for the battle theme are titled "Let's Go!" If you search it on Youtube, you have people to this day treating it as the defacto official title for the song. As of this writing, this upload is only seven months old:
And it was me. I'm the one you can blame for this. The song has no official title and the one I gave it stuck, and it stuck hard.
(A different version of this post I made on tumblr years ago had me saying my made-up-title was "Here We Go!", but given all the MIDIs on VGmusic.com are titled "Let's Go!", I'm pretty sure that had to be the title I made up. Especially given one of the MIDIs is by the person I originally gave my MP3 to nearly 20 years ago, correlated with the fact the song has never been given an official title that I am aware of.)
I am now wondering if the history of the pissy shitty I posted to a SA-offshoot forum a couple years ago ever fully broke containment and has led people to believe that they are in fact a real thing
I realize that I should probably post the history of the pissy shitty here for people's edification. I really enjoyed making the post and I think a few people enjoyed reading it, so it's definitely worth sharing. Obviously I didn't invent the pissy shitty, but merely attempted to compile the history in which it would have developed. Plenty of people will give you very obviously fake histories of the pissy shitty; for example, urban dictionary claims it was invented in the 1890s by someone named MM O'Shaugnessy, which makes no sense as cinemas as we know them didn't exist until several years later. Real evidence that you should never believe everything you read online without citations!
With that said, here is the compiled history of the pissy shitty:
Ah! The pissy shitty. One of my favorite theater concessions -- if not to eat than to admire the history of. It's such a wild story!
You might be familiar with the lawsuit United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. from 1948. This was the one that basically destroyed the studio system of the first half of the 1900s, breaking the ties between theater ownership and the studios producing films. This was on the long term a good thing, because it meant that your nearest theater wasn't stuck only showing the films of the studio that owned it, and thus leading to a greater share of art. However, because theaters were no longer backed by the huge budgets of the studio system, a lot of them were finding it hard to stay profitable in the new reality they found themselves in. The "movie palaces" that were the sign of the times were almost immediately on their way out. There were a few ways they stayed in business -- for example, focus on pornographic and exploitation cinema -- but one of the most obvious ones is concessions. Concessions were introduced as a way to keep theaters afloat during the depression era, and to this day they're one of the main ways that cinemas turn a profit since the margins on the films themselves are so thin. Soda and popcorn are cheap in comparison, so selling them at a high markup is almost pure profit.
There was, of course, another thing that came about in the 1940s -- the Hartman brothers of Knoxville introduced the initial formula of Mountain Dew to the world. In fact the drink was trademarked that very same year as the Paramount lawsuit. Needing a way to innovate on the concessions experience, theater owners very quickly made sure to get stock on hand so that they could sell it to customers. And because of the cloyingly sweet flavor of mountain dew -- literally designed to be the inventor's preferred mixer with alcohol -- the theater owners who could get a hold of bottles were also trying to find ways to cut its flavor. The savory popcorn they were cooking up, lightly salted, was just the perfect thing. (Frankly, given the popularity of the snack, I'm astounded that dew-flavored Doritos corn chips are such a modern invention). Despite the fact that the modern pissy shitty is usually done with Pepsi (and as people have noted, rarely Coke, due to the higher sweetness in Pepsi's flavor), the original one was actually with Mountain Dew.
Of course the first theater to try selling it didn't call it that, not officially. There's a lot of disagreement among nutritional anthropologists / historians about who the first one was, but most people suspect it was theater owner Emmet Hogarth, of Knoxville, whose love of wilderness and exploring the Appalachians in his youth inspired him to call the treat "Mountain Ears" (like, ears of corn? get it? ...OK, you can see why the name never caught on). The treat was quite popular, and word didn't take too long to spread, but ironically outpacing the distribution of mountain dew as a brand, which was struggling due to the sweetness of the initial formulation really requiring some kind of substance to cut it with, and theaters weren't enough to make the soda profitable for it to be the mass-market beverage we know it as. So theaters experimented with whatever sodas they had on hand, with Pepsi being one of the easier choices (and, as noted, its sweetness complementing the popcorn nicely). Mountain Dew was reformulated to have a stronger citrus tang before it went national in the 50s, and at that point the public had latched onto other sodas for their pissy shitties, and found that the new Dew flavor just wasn't well-suited to the food any more.
It was the greaser subculture that was rising in the 50s that gave the concession its popular name. Tennessee greasers referred to it as such first -- partly because the brown corn kernels in the bright yellow dew reminded them of the excretions it was named from, and also because coming from poverty a lot of them found it an appropriate way to scorn the consumerist excesses the food item was starting to represent during the post-war boom. (It was also something that had a reputation for going through their systems fairly quickly.) However, for the greasers it wasn't a cinema treat so much as it was just something that had a lot of the basic ingredients of fat, salt, and sugar that made it a simple and inexpensive thing they could make without a high cost -- not something that they actually consumed in the theaters. It was this association with the subculture that actually led to its nearly-as-rapid decline from movie theater concession menus, as people started to find the association crass and uncomfortable, but you could still, then as now, ask politely and be provided with one. They did, after all, have all the ingredients to make one.
Nowadays the pissy shitty has a reputation as a "hidden menu" item only available to savvy theatergoers, producing a subculture of its own similar to discussion of the In-n-Out menu. Despite being a cult classic concession, most of the pissy shitty afficionados feel joy in being part of a secret group, one that touches a lot of important mid-century American history. But who knows, in the current age of would-be theatergoers made to stay home due to virus restrictions, maybe the near future will see concession stands proudly advertising the pissy shitty again to bring audiences back.
