media: tv

I used to think that all tv shows and movies were live. I thought there were secret video cameras set up and i thought the actors and actresses were normal people who didn't know they were being taped. It never occurred to me they were actors being filmed and edited and then put on tv. one time I saw a rerun of some show and asked my sister why the people were doing the same exact thing they've done before. she was so confused.

When I was a little child, I used to think that the way the little people living inside the TV made their living was that my parents had to pay them according to the amount of time we watched TV. My mother was talking about having to go back to work, so I started watching TV less so my parents wouldn't have to pay the little people a lot of money. I'm embarrassed to say that I also used to talk to the little people inside the TV when it was off. I especially liked to talk to Uncle Al and Lucille Ball. They never answered back, thank goodness. I didn't think my parents had to pay them when I talked to them and the TV was off. They were my friends, and salary didn't cover what you did in your leisure time. My grandma caught me talking to the TV and thought I was barmy. She advised my mom to have another child instead of going back to work because I was obviously lonely.

i used to think that when you turned off the television is paused like a tape. so everyday i would come home from school at 3 and watch ghostbusters. my mom would make me a sammitch or something and i would come back and be very discontented at the fact that someone had turned the tv back on.

One time I was in bed with my parents watching "Star Wars." It got to the best part and then the tv turned off. I got really mad about this and asked my parents about it...they said that the tv's bedtime is 9:00 and it turned off to go to sleep. For years I would turn off the tv right before 9:00 so that the tv could get some rest. It took me forever to realize my parents had just used the remote...duh!

I used to believe that there was a town named "Woodbie" because of watching the news and hearing about the "woodbie burglar," "woodbie car thief." Took me a few years to figure out it was "would be" - I was relieved, because I thought that Woodbie place had a lot of crime!

My dad used to always tell me i sat too close to the T.V. and that i watched it too much. He said that he was only telling me for my own sake so that i don't end up like the other 10% of children whose bodies rotted and turned inside-out from doing so.

I used to believe the laugh track on sitcoms were other people watching the shows in their houses and laughing at the jokes. I would laugh really loudly so they could hear me too.

Early 1990s, around age 5, I assumed TV shows were created by the TV itself and were unique to each TV. I was blown away the first time I heard another kid talking about a cartoon I thought only I could watch.

when i was a kid i saw in a magazine a picture of some people on a ski lift. for quite a long time after that i thought that power/telephone lines were in fact chair lift lines which enabled actors who had been shrunk to get into the back of the tv set. and perform live.

when i was younger my dad told me that if i waited patiently by the TV then i would get to see all the people leaving at the end of the night. I waited for them to come out!!

I used to believe that when the t.v would say please stand by because of technical difficulties that if I stood next to the television set then I would help fix it.

This isn't me, it's something my younger brother thought:
A couple years ago, my brother said that he liked our grandma's TV, because it had a bigger screen than our one. Why was that so good? He thought that smaller-screened TVs didn't show all the picture, some of it got chopped off. He had lived about 7 years in a house that has a few various-sized TVs and never noticed that the picture got smaller on smaller TVs.

When I was a small girl the old "batman" series was on TV.there was one episode in which one of the villans abducted Batman ib order to remove his "cowl" (the part of his costume that covered his face) and I thought they said his "cow" and I thought that was another word for face.The next day my dad scratched his cheek so I asked him if he had hurt his cow, thinking how sophisticated I sounded.He gave me a blank look and after many questions he figured out what was going on and "cow" for face becane a running joke in my family all thanks to me.

When I was a kid, my mom was the first to tell me about the "ball drop" in New York on New Year's Eve. I'd never seen the ball drop before, so I assumed it meant that someone standing on the roof of a building in Times Square would throw the ball into the crowd below! I was watching TV before the ball drop started and they mentioned that the ball weighed over 10,000 pounds. I was alarmed, because throwing something that size into a crowd would kill people! Luckily, my preconceptions were wrong. There is no throwing, and the "drop" is actually a controlled descent.

When I was a kid, I used to believe that the actors on tv would run from one channel to the next as you changed the channel. I guess I figured they were really little people running around inside my tv set.

I used to believe that all the actors I saw on t.v got phone calls one day telling them they have to act. I was a shy kid and did not want to be an actress so I dreaded the day someone would call my house to tell me I need to act on a t.v show.

When i was little the OJ Simpson trial was all they talked about on the news. I used to think OJ Simpson was somehow involved in the orange juice industry and when my parents would pour a glass of OJ I thought they were buying his juice and the news only talked about him so much because they wanted people to buy his juice and his juice company was having trouble.