Myth Busters! - Lauren's Sixth Meditation
In class on Wednesday we began talking about myths. I still believe that many myths are meant to teach people things – specifically children. We talked about Greek myths, urban legends, and ‘prescriptive’ myths. It got me thinking about all the myths I heard when I was a kid. I decided to look up a few and finally put my questions to rest.I always heard that if you mixed Pop Rocks with Coke, your stomach would explode due to too much carbon dioxide. This has since then been proved untrue, and the Pop Rocks company ended up having to do serious damage control when this myth came out only four years after the company got up and running. Pop Rocks were no longer sold after about 1983, which many thought proved that they were dangerous. The truth is that Kraft bought the rights to the candy and marketing them under a different name.
I remember when the movie Dead Man on Campus came out. The movie is about a guy who hears the myth that if your roommate commits suicide, you automatically get a 4.0 for the semester. He then spends the rest of the movie trying to find a roommate who is fragile enough to kill himself, thus giving the surviving roommate a 4.0. While most colleges will take deaths or other accidents into consideration under these circumstances, there isn’t a college in the US that has the 4.0 guideline. This myth is supposedly fairly recent, is seems to have started in the mid-1970s.
I’ve also heard tons of myths about how Disney incorporates sexual messages into their films. A lot of these, when you stop and take stills of the films, are completely untrue. Some are still pretty sketchy, and others were obviously done by accident.
I think myths are a funny thing. All these things above seem so silly now that I’ve looked at the evidence, but I’ve believe much stupider things before. What about myths makes them so damn believable? I’m not sure – does anyone else have an idea?
Citation
Snopes.com. 13 October 2006. < http://www.snopes.com/>.
posted by Anonymous @ 12:12 AM
1 Comments:
Hmm, the only thing I know, is that just about every single one of the disney "myths" are true. You can see Sex spelled out in the dust in "The Lion King" it's there, freeze the frame and look. The priest in "The Little Mermaid" is truely rather excited to see , well someone. And in "Aladdin" you can hear I believe it is Alladdin that says "All good teenagers take off their clothes." So I don't know where you found that information. But they are there.
-Ann
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