5 Iconic Movie Scenes It Turns Out We Just Hallucinated

5 Morpheus Saying ‘What If I Told You?’

If you want to present some information to the public, portraying it as a stunning truth, you can stick it on a meme of Morpheus from The Matrix. “What if I told you,” says the top text, while the bottom text contains that revelation of yours. Of course, since we’re all masters of irony, your stunning truth may also be something really obvious that you’re just humorously pretending to share as something new. 

In the decade or so since that style of meme was big, people now have various other ways to smugly present their perspectives (screenshots of other characters, mostly). But the Morpheus meme remains famous, so you should keep your eyes out for the “what if I told you” line the next time you watch the movie.

But you won’t see it. That shot of Morpheus comes from the scene where he tells Neo, “I’m telling you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to” dodge bullets. He doesn’t say, “What if I told you,” and this isn’t the scene where he reveals the plot's big truths. 

An earlier version of the meme uses the scene right before he does explain the big truths, with Morpheus offering the red pill...

But that scene doesn’t have him say any variation of “what if I told you.” You might imagine he says, “What if I told you everything you believe is a lie?” or “What if I told you it wasn’t 1999 but is closer to 2199?” But he doesn’t. 

The misquote was created by a Reddit user in 2012, who made a meme to say, “What if I told you command + control + shift + 4 then space, then clicking a window, took a screenshot.” It was a tip about using Macs. 

The funny part here isn’t just that we think this was a real line from the movie. It’s that seemingly every one of Morpheus’ lines in the actual movie were designed to be a memorable quote, and yet this false one is better remembered than any of them. 

4 Dedicated to the Brave Mujahideen Fighters of Afghanistan

Rambo III comes off very differently today than it did in 1988. It ends with a screen saying the film is “dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan,” which made sense back when the United States backed the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union, but we know now that the Mujahideen would go on to form the Taliban. 

You might not watch Rambo III very often, but when this screenshot resurfaced a few years back, it became famous. Today, you can plop that message on a shot from any other movie, and you can count on people knowing its origin from Rambo III and appreciating your joke. 

Except, the movie never did end with that message. That screen is fake.

It ended with this message: “This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan.” Rambo was helping the Mujahideen in that movie, which makes it a little weird to watch today, but the message didn’t mention them by name. The general goodwill to the “gallant people of Afghanistan” works at any time, even including when America’s war in Afghanistan started 13 years after this movie. 

In 2011, an internet hoax spread, claiming that the film originally contained the Mujahideen dedication and that this was changed retroactively after September 11, 2001. They weren’t crazily saying that someone had altered the time stream — the hoax claimed that studios had edited the film, and that the original was no longer accessible. All evidence people accessed seemingly supported this claim because when they saw the movie on TV now, or when they rented it, it contained the “gallant people of Afghanistan” message, exactly like the hoax claimed it now did. 

However, people do have their own untouched copies of Rambo III from back in the 20^th century, and these contain the gallant message as well. We also have newspapers from when the movie first came out referring to the dedication, and they describe the gallant one, not the Mujahideen one.

You might fear that hoaxes like this will become all the more common, now that it’s so easy to edit pictures and video. In reality, the opposite seems to be true. In 2011, people readily accepted that fake screen because replacing the real one’s text seemed hard. Today, it would be easy (even in video form), so people would be more skeptical, erring on the side of assuming anything they see might be a joke edit. And today, internet speeds and pirate resources have advanced so much that anyone could dig out the original movie in just minutes and easily confirm the truth. 

3 Sure, Jan

It’s been so many decades since The Brady Bunch was popular that you probably don’t reference the show that many times each day. But one shot of the show seems to have survived into a meme form: Marcia condescendingly saying, “Sure, Jan.”

You don’t need to know the context of the original episode to deploy this against someone and exit the conversation. But if you are curious about the context of the original episode, you might be surprised to learn that this clip isn’t from The Brady Bunch at all. It’s from The Brady Bunch Movie, the film that came out 26 years after the show debuted. Or, rather, it was from A Very Brady Sequel, the 1996 follow-up to that movie.

To someone growing up today, perhaps the 1990s and the 1970s are approximately as old as each other, but these movies weren’t just some revival of the show. They were spoofs, starring Gary Cole and Shelley Long. A Very Brady Sequel included such elements as the family singing on a plane and the entire plane telling them to shut up, the revelation that Carol’s first husband was the professor from Gilligan’s Island and Greg and Marcia falling in love (this last idea was bafflingly absent from the original series).

The movies were not a revival of the show, but CBS had previously tried reviving the show, repeatedly. This included one sequel series called The Brady Brides and then another called The Bradys that was canceled after just six episodes. These starred the original cast, seemingly the key to capitalizing on nostalgia, so it was a surprise when they failed. It was an even bigger surprise when, just five years after The Bradys failed, A Brady Bunch Movie was a hit. 

The lesson from this should be to stop reviving old shows and instead let people unconnected to the show mock them. Sadly, studios are ignoring that lesson and are even discussing yet another Brady revival starring the original cast, but if we stay strong, maybe the temptation can be overcome. 

2 Thanos Punching Captain Marvel

It can be a little hard to keep track of all the action during the final act of Avengers: Endgame. Hey, did you catch how Shuri, Pepper and the Wasp are able to easily send Thanos flying, raising several questions about just how strong everyone in this movie is? And did you catch how a hundred-foot Ant-Man is fighting in the background at the same time as a human-size Ant-Man is hotwiring a truck?

But some parts are more memorable than others. For example, you surely remember how Thanos punches Captain Marvel, and she doesn’t even flinch. So, he has to grab one specific magic stone with his free hand for a power boost, which now lets him knock her right off the screen, but in that earlier moment, she was able to shrug off the sort of punch that winded Hulk.

Except, no. He doesn’t punch her, that first time. Watch the scene again, and you’ll notice they never show the fist hitting her, as though they’re holding back on the action to keep this PG-13. Then watch it yet again, and you’ll see he doesn’t even try to hit her. Instead, that shot of her standing her ground is merely her holding the guy’s right hand open, as he tries and fails to move forward. 

You’d think he’d now try swinging at her with his left hand. Fifteen seconds earlier, the two of them were throwing and dodging blows repeatedly, without him having yet put on that magic gauntlet, and he came out on top in that bout, successfully tossing her away. 

The real takeaway here is that analyzing this sort of movie frame-by-frame might not the best way to enjoy it. 

1 Kimba, the Inspiration for Simba

Disney’s The Lion King ripped off a Japanese movie called Kimba the White Lion, according to one widely repeated bit of common knowledge. This accusation is famous enough that in 1995, when The Lion King was just a year old, The Simpsons could have Mufasa say, “You must avenge my death Kimba, I mean Simba,” and count on some portion of the audience understanding the reference. 

Out of the many people who know about this plagiarism accusation, not many of them have ever seen the original that Disney allegedly copied. If they did, they’d know that there was no “Japanese movie called Kimba the White Lion” before The Lion King came out. Kimba the White Lion was a manga (a comic) that ran for several years in the 1950s, which was adapted to a TV series that ran for several years in the 1960s, followed by a sequel series. There was a Kimba movie, called Jungle Emperor Leo, but it came out in 1997, after The Lion King did.

When The Lion King was made, some people saw similarities between it and the Kimba show (starting with how “Simba” rhymes with “Kimba”). But if you’ve seen stuff on the internet showing the two side-by-side to argue what a rip-off The Lion King is, those Kimba shots didn’t come from the TV series. They came from Jungle Emperor Leo, and if they’re similar enough to qualify as plagiarism, that would be a case of Japanese company Tezuka Productions plagiarizing Disney. 

“Simba” is Swahili for “lion.” Many stories about lions have used that name, so The Lion King didn’t copy Kimba by naming their lead Simba. As for all the other similarities people genuinely saw between The Lion King and the Kimba show, that’s largely a consequence of Kimba running for some hundred episodes over the course of multiple series, to the point where most imagery you can think of featuring animals set in the African savannah probably appeared in that show in some form. 

For example, if Disney is going to make a cartoon, they’re going to have at least one funny character. If the cartoon is set in Africa, one funny character might well be a warthog. If Kimba ran for a hundred episodes, they’d surely have one with a warthog. Both stories having warthogs is not plagiarism, and the similarity means nothing. We don’t have enough time here to go through every such supposed similarity, but one YouTube video did. It spans two hours, because that’s how long it takes to debunk every claim. 

The Lion King makes for a funny target for all this, because with the exception of actual adaptations, few movies are so open about where their inspirations came from. The Lion King is Hamlet. It’s Hamlet, mixed with Disney’s own Bambi. Or rather, it’s Amleth, the Scandinavian legend that inspired Hamlet, and which Robert Eggers recently adapted into the film The Northman. In Hamlet, young Hamlet doesn’t flee his kingdom letting everyone think he’s dead and only later returns to slay his uncle like Simba does, but young Amleth does. 

Other stories are also adaptations of the Amleth legend. Even Africa has its own version of this, the story of Sechele. Sechele was the son of a Botswanan chief, and when he was ten, the chief was murdered, and Sechele’s uncle usurped control. Sechele fled into the wilderness and returned years later as an adult and killed the uncle. 

Oh wait — that wasn’t a legend. That really happened. 

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