[Ads-l] Bugs Bunny coins "Nimrod"?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Oct 12 00:33:03 UTC 2018


> On Oct 11, 2018, at 5:37 PM, David Wilton <dave at WILTON.NET> wrote:
> 
> I updated the wordorigins.org page on "nimrod" several months ago: http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/2195/
> 
> It wasn't Bugs who called Elmer Fudd a nimrod, it was Daffy Duck, although lots of people, including me, have memories of Bugs doing so. (There are other instances of such false memories of movies, such as Jaws's girlfriend having braces in the Bond film "Moonraker." Lots of people distinctly remember her having them; she does not.)
> 

I just had a colleague remind me of one of these false memories (or disputed ones involving different prints of the relevant movie, as the case may be) from the Wizard of Oz, and she sent along her account of the case in question along with some web exchanges about others.   At least AFAIK nobody is claiming there’s an alternate print of Casablanca in which Rick really does demand “Play it again, Sam” or one of Star Wars in which DV does stentoriously announce “Luke, I am your father”.  Or one in which the line in Treasure of the Sierra Madre really is “We don’t need no stinkin' badges”.  There’s probably a book of these movie misquotes and false memories, and if there isn’t, Fred and Garson can probably co-author one.

LH

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I have the following incredibly vivid memory - goes to black and white, she's in the bed, wakes up, it is all a dream. As it ends - oh - maybe not - because peeking out from under the bed are a pair of glowing ruby red slippers.
  We checked it out on the web and many swear this is imagination but it turns out that there are quite a number of people with exactlly this memory.  I can even draw a picture - the bed on the left of the left side of the screen, with the slippers poking out facing to the right.  To be fair, some of the memories reported on line are not exactly the same - there are variants - but many are just this (slippers poking out from under the bed) or some plausibly aa slightly misremebered variant.
  Enough people have this or some variant of the memory that it's really hard to think it all derives from our collective Jungian subconscious. But others swear that there were not two versions of the movie.  I am convinced this can't be mass hallucination.

For example, from :

https://www.moviemistakes.com/film1418/questions
Question: At the very end of the movie after Dorothy says "Oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home," normally, it fades out to the credits, but once - and only once - when I was very young, I thought I remembered seeing the camera pan away from her face and down to the foot of the bed where you see the ruby slippers tucked underneath the bed, then a fade to the credits. It is obviously a black-and-white shot, but there were the glittering shoes. Has anyone else seen this version of the ending?

Macalou
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Chosen answer: Yes. I'm sure I've seen that version. It shows that Dorothy didn't just dream about Oz and makes for a more satisfying conclusion. This version was original but edited out because it didn't follow the book's storyline for "Return to Oz" and the other long series of Oz books. The sequel pertains that she loses the slippers in transit back to her home and falls to the gnome king who destroys Oz which in turn causes Dorothy to return. So seeing the slippers at the end of the bed, while more satisfying, wouldn't really stay true to the Oz series.
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I absolutely remember that version with the shoes at her bedside, but nobody I know remembers it.
5Reply
Thank you! I remember that too but everyone I know thinks I'm nuts.
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I remember that too - and I've asked so many people and they said no, I must have dreamed it. Thank you.
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I saw that version once when I was a little kid too! I remember it vividly. Now I know I'm not crazy.
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Answer: This seems to be one of those mass examples of people remembering something that never happened. There are also other variations, like people claiming to remember the film switching to color as the shot pans down to her slipper-clad feet, or the slippers being in color against the sepia-toned B&W footage. But sadly, it seems no officially released version of the film has had such an ending. It's similar to how everyone thinks Darth Vader says "Luke, I am your father," or how everyone thinks Humphrey Bogart says "Play it again, Sam!", even though neither of those lines are real, and people are merely incorrectly remembering them. The film is so ingrained in pop-culture, that people think they know it forwards-and-back, and false memories are created.

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