After pentomino

[mmcirvin]

There also ought to be a word for the situation in which an item in the common culture (such as a tune, title or character name) sounds slightly odd to you for years, because you were first exposed to a parody or pastiche of it in children's TV programming and took that as the original.

I'm sure either Rich Hall or Terry Jones could assign an arbitrary name for this, though it would not be terribly useful.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Lots of things on "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company", particularly Muppet names and parody tunes by Joe Raposo. There was a Lone Ranger-like Muppet on "Sesame Street" in the early Seventies whose name I forget, who had theme music that was sort of an inverted and scrambled "William Tell Overture". There was a Sherlock Hemlock and a Roosevelt Franklin.

The makers of the "Star Trek" animated series never got the rights to the Alexander Courage theme, so they made their own, recognizable-but-modified-enough-for-copyright version. I became familiar with that first, and found the original series theme strangely off.

I just found out that an episode of "Speed Buggy", one of Hanna-Barbera's million cookie-cutter knockoffs of "Scooby-Doo", had a guest monster named "Kingzilla". Since I'm pretty sure I watched the whole run of "Speed Buggy" as a kid, it's possible that this is why the name "Godzilla" always sounded slightly wrong to me early on. Also, I was more familiar with Speed Buggy's Tinker (Shaggy with a wrench and a Southern accent) than with Scooby-Doo's Shaggy.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, and: Whenever I hear "Anchors Aweigh" or a reference to the Navy's Officer Candidate School, I think of an episode of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" in which X the Owl wants to build a xylophone so he can play the alma-mater anthem of "Owl Correspondence School", which has the tune of "Anchors Aweigh": "OWL CorresPONdence School, dear OCS"...

I suspect that this was a clever reference to the Navy background of somebody associated with the show, and I wonder if it's responsible for the "Mister Rogers was a Navy sniper in Vietnam" legend.