One of my earliest memories of a TV personality (on par with Mister Rogers, in my three-year-old estimation) was of a Chinese chef named Dan. He wore aprons with funny slogans on them, and his TV show was called 'Wok With Dan'. My mother once even took me to sit in the studio audience and watch his show being taped.

Years later, I saw another Chinese cooking show with a different title and a chef named Martin Yan, and I thought Martin was Dan's older brother. Fortunately it didn't take very long for me to figure out that the other show had not been called Wok With Dan, and that it was actually the same guy. (I was a little white girl from farm country in Canada, and I'd never met anyone named Yan. It was an easy mistake.)

So I'm a lifelong fan. If I'm home on a Sunday I still watch Martin Yan's Chinatowns while I eat lunch.

Brenda

You know in shows like Seinfeld, You hear people laughing in the background Well, when I was little, I thought that that was a guide that showed you when to laugh. So when the people laughed, I laughed too, even though I had no idea what the joke was. XD

Erin, 9 years old

When I was little and I watched shows like the Golden Girls or Family Matters, and the audience laughed, I used to think they were upside down in the TV or something.

Allie

By the time I was about seven, it had been explained to me that the programmes I watched on TV were just fun little stories that people pretended were really happening, and not REALLY real. I understood that, after all, my friends and I pretended to do stuff (like flying) that we couldn't really.

However, in my mind there was one exception. It was called LRTV, and I've never heard of it since, but it followed the mishaps of the crew at a TV station that was always on the edge of crisis, and their boss, Crystal Cleare. I truly believed that it was a documentary and that LRTV was a real station, even when they introduced such improbable additions as a pair of living, talking computer viruses on the station's servers.

Why? Because our teachers showed us this programme at school, for reasons I've never been able to work out. And they wouldn't show us it at SCHOOL if it wasn't 100% true, would they?

MouseTourmaline

On Blue's Clue's, whenever there was a clue, the host, Steve, never saw it at first. So some kids would have to yell "A clue! A Clue!" and yell other things throughout the show. Well, when I was a kid, I thought that yelling directly into the TV's speakers could enable kids all around the world to hear me.

Katie

When I was about 4 I was watching Sesame Street. Someone on the show found a secret passage in a normal looking wall. I looked around and saw the outlets in the wall and thought that they must be keyholes to the secret passages in my house. I stuck a key into the outlet... thankfully it wasn't the heavily charged side. No secret passageway opened, and I was so embarressed at having put a key into it that I made myself pull it out so no one would find out.

Whitney Sauve

I used to believe that a "Sitcom" was any live-action comedy show. So, like, Spongebob wouldn't be a sitcom, because it's a cartoon. I also thought that the name meant Sit-Comedy, you would SIT down and laugh and the COMEDY.

Life is not a sitcom.

There was a show called "You can't do that on Television" back in the (19)80's on Nickelodeon. Sometimes they'd ask the home audience to participate and 'vote' by pressing a Red or Green square on the screen. Although I always wondered how it worked, I really believed my vote went through by touching the TV screen. & sometimes, when I thought I was being slick, I wouldn't vote, just to see if 'they' would notice and say something to me on TV or send a letter to my mom.

saradipity17

I used to wonder how the announcer on TV nature programs managed to "direct" animals to do exactly what the announcer was talking about at any given moment.

Jon

When I was little, I didn't know the difference between "cash" and "change". So I used to wonder, when people won money on game shows, how the contestants got thousands of dollars in quarters home.

Anon

when i first saw the opening for beverly hillbillies, i thought he shot a bunny or something in the bushes and the dark liquid pouring out was actually blood
i cried and wondered why the people were so happy

reh

i thought there was a "that 80's show" and "that 90's show" too

:D

For some reason, I once thought that OJ Simpson invented the Simpsons TV show. I asked my mom about this one day, and I stood corrected. It turned out that OJ was a past-football player and Matt Groening or whoever was the guy who invented the show. Now I wonder if Homer J Simpson was named after OJ.

The Wicked Witch of the Northeast

i used to think that the seasme street characters where real. then one day i was flipping through a magazine and saw a story on the seasme street characters where on strings i quickley closed it and said that they where mean for lying. i also thought barney was real so i wanted him to come to my birthday party with min(a girl on the show)

Anon

On Blue's Clues, Steve would ask a question and you would hear a bunch of little kids answer. I thought that I could be a national superstar just by yelling answers into my TV's speakers.

Kat

I used to believe EVERYTHING I watched on Nova and In Search Of. I would try to research things and I took notes on all the shows. I knew that one day I would discover exactly how internal combustion worked and save people from burning up!

Jennifer Camille

when i was 6 i didnt know that tv shows had laugh tracks and live audiences,so i used to think the laughter during a show was actually people at home watching tv .One day i put on golden girls and yelled hi to my grandma into the tv speakers because i knew she would be watching.

josh

When I was young enough, I thought that Ed Sullivan was Aunt Sullivan, my aunt who, mysteriously, was a man and was on TV.

Bruce L.

I use to beleive that on Mr. Roger's when he refered to the neighborhood of "make-belief", he was actually saying the neighborhood of "maple-leaf". I thought that the king and all of the charecters lived in Canada

Maria