Nearly everything a person does has an intention behind it. Your words and your actions are done towards a goal. Sometimes it’s clumsy and awkward and you miss your mark, sometimes you nail it and succeed perfectly. It’s not just people, either. Businesses work the same way, stories, ideas, you name it. They all have a plan at the beginning, and sometimes it gets tossed aside.
In the world of pop culture, there are all kinds of things that were supposed to work one way but didn’t. For whatever reason, be it fate or ignorance, a creative insight, or a misspoken word, mistakes happen that were never intended and, for better or worse, we’re stuck with them.
10. Slip ‘N Slides Are Not Meant to Be Used by Anyone Over 12
In the heat of summer, few things are as exciting to a child as a Slip ‘N Slide. This simple invention, little more than a strip of plastic onto which you spray water, is nothing short of DaVinci-level brilliance to a kid on a hot day. What could be better than running than jumping on your own backyard water slide?
The Slip ‘N Slide was invented back in the early 1960s. A man named Robert Carrier had watched his own kids sliding across slick, painted concrete in the driveway and having the time of their lives. He figured he could make it slightly safer and took some Naugahyde from the company where he worked to create the first Slip n Slide prototype in his yard. The neighborhood fell in love with it.
Like all great inventions, it was patented and spread like wildfire. Everyone had to have one. They remain popular to this day, in fact. However, as popular as they are, the fact that adults and even teenagers are not meant to use them is not as well known.
The company that makes the Slip n Slide sets the age limit for use at 12. Many adults and teens suffered neck injuries from using the slides because no one actually reads the directions on these things.
Slip n Slides only work if a person is light enough to both slip and slide. The weight limit is about 125 pounds. Any heavier and you risk getting stuck on the surface of the slide, causing your body to lurch forward and take the force of your abrupt stop right on your neck.
Years later, Kransco, the company that produced the two, faced lawsuits due to injuries sustained by users. A partially paralyzed man sued the company and won $12.3 million, though the settlement was less. There have been thousands of reported injuries from using Slip n Slides over the years.
9. The Hulk Was Never Meant to Be Green
The Hulk currently holds an unusual position in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While all the other characters get to have solo movies, the Hulk is left out. That’s because another studio, Universal, still holds distribution rights to the Hulk. The big, green machine is stuck as a sidekick for now.
The idea of the Hulk as a big, green monster was not always in the cards. When he was created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the Hulk was not green but gray. Inspired by Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, the Hulk was originally drawn as gray because Lee thought it would be scary but came out green due to a printing error.
The printing press that Marvel Comics was using at the time was not able to match the color of the original artwork. Some pages went too heavy on cyan, and some too heavy on magenta. From panel to panel, the Hulk’s color changed from gray to green and various shades in between. In the end, Stan Lee thought the green worked best, and had future issues stick with that one color.
8. Biz Markie Was Never Supposed to Sing the Chorus to “Just a Friend”
Rapper Biz Markie did a lot of things in his day but he’s most famous for his 1989 single “Just a Friend.“ The song itself is probably best known for Markie’s atonal and awkward chorus which is a strange mixture of grating and charming.
Biz was not in the dark about the way the chorus sounded. He didn’t even want to sing it. He wasn’t even supposed to sing it. But the man himself explained that he invited others to come and do that part and no one showed up on the day it was to be recorded. Since no one else was there, he just powered through it himself and made a hit.
Even though Biz Markie was known for his sense of humor, the song itself was never supposed to be funny. He explained once that it was based on a true story and he meant it to be something serious. However, when no one arrived to sing the chorus, he leaned into the off-key delivery and the music video amps up the humor as well.
7. Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” was Never Supposed to Be On An Album
Shaggy has had several hit singles over the years and “It Wasn’t Me” may be his most well-known. The song, which at first sounds like an anthem about gaslighting your girlfriend after she catches you cheating on her, but ends with a bit more of a positive message about honesty, was huge when it was released in the year 2000. The thing is, it was never supposed to be.
Shaggy’s album Hotshot featured the track but the record label wanted a different song released as the first single. This was a struggle as the label didn’t like anything on the album at all. “It Wasn’t Me” wasn’t even supposed to have been recorded because Shaggy’s manager hated it. It was only by chance that Shaggy, working with Sting, had received some positive feedback and finished the track to include it. The vocals in the finished album were just demo vocals.
However, this was at the height of Napster as a file-sharing service and a DJ in Hawaii had downloaded the album and liked the song “It Wasn’t Me.” He started playing it on the radio and it became popular. The label saw the success and decided to make it a single instead.
6. The Swiss Family Robinson Were Never Meant to be Named Robinson
Johann David Wyss wrote Swiss Family Robinson in 1812. The adventure story, about a shipwrecked family, has been adapted into numerous TV shows and movies. Lost in Space, both the early show, the movie, and the later Netflix series, are sci-fi retellings of the tale and are arguably the most well-known adaptations. They all follow the adventures of the Robinson family in space.
It’s with some small degree of irony that the most popular adaptation of Swiss Family Robinson got the family’s name wrong. In the original story, they are not the Robinson family at all. The name of the family is never mentioned. Robinson comes from Robinson Crusoe, which is what inspired Wyss to write the story.
Any subsequent retelling of the story in which they use Robinson as the name is simply a mistake. It’s also a well-spread mistake as most people assume the family’s name was Robinson, even though that’s not a Swiss name, and the story never says as much.
5. Gandalf’s Famous “You Shall Not Pass” Was a Mistake by Ian McKellan.
Ian McKellan’s performance as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is extremely well-known, and he has many memorable lines. You could argue that the most famous line he utters is “You shall not pass” when squaring off with the Balrog in Moria, giving the rest of the fellowship a chance to escape.
McKellan admitted in interviews after the fact that, despite the popularity of the line, he messed it up. Tolkien didn’t write “You shall not pass” and the script didn’t ask him to say it. The line was “You cannot pass” and he simply misspoke. But the performance was so good and the meaning essentially the same that it stayed in the film.
4. You’re Not Supposed to Understand 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick’s filmography is a standout in the industry and he’s remembered as an intense filmmaker with bold vision. His sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey is considered by many to be one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. Sight and Sound magazine had it as their greatest movie of all time in a 2022 director’s poll.
It’s somewhat ironic, given the movie’s popularity, that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Many people have struggled to understand the meaning of the film. Rock Hudson walked out of the movie and asked what the hell it was supposed to be about. Many fans have written blogs and essays to try to explain it to those who don’t understand. But are they right?
Arthur C. Clarke, famed sci-fi scribe and the writer of the story that inspired the movie once said, “If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered.” So if you are one of the people who didn’t understand the film, don’t worry. You were never supposed to understand it.
The ambiguity was a point of pride for Clarke who once said an immigration officer refused him entry into the US until he could explain the end of the film.
3. Spock Was Supposed to be Martian
One of the most well-known and beloved characters in all of pop culture, most of us recognize Star Trek’s Spock as a Vulcan, a fictional species from a fictional planet. That was not always the destiny of Leonard Nimoy’s character, however. He was not supposed to be Vulcan originally, but rather a Martian.
With a red tint to his skin, Spock’s origin in the early days of Gene Rodenberry’s vision was as a Martian. However, Roddenberry had a change of heart when he decided that it was likely man would reach Mars in the near future. He didn’t want to have a Martian on his show if people were going to be alive to see the real Mars and realize his creation wasn’t authentic, so he swapped Mars for a fictional world. That way the audience could never be disappointed.
There is a second reason that has been given for Spock’s change of origin and that is more practical. Spock’s would-be red skin didn’t look good on TV. Since many TVs were black and white when Trek first aired, the makeup made Nimoy look like he was in blackface. They opted for a yellowish-green tint instead.
2. Aslan Is Not Meant to Be an Allegory for Christ
It’s no secret that The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis are meant to be read allegorically. Lewis was a Christian and included a lot of Christian allegory in his works. That has led many to view the character of Aslan the lion as an allegory for Jesus Christ, which can be found in criticisms and study guides all over the internet.
In a fun twist, Aslan is not meant to be an allegory for Jesus. Now, if you’re thinking, “How could that be? He’s clearly a Christ figure in the story,” you’re not wrong. It’s just that he’s not supposed to be an allegorical figure. Lewis meant for him to literally be Jesus.
For Lewis, it works like this: In our world, Jesus was a man, the son of God. In Narnia, because the place is full of mythical beasts and magical animals, he imagined that God would send his son, not as a man, but as something else that fit into that world. in this case, a talking lion. He said as much in a letter he wrote to Anne Jenkins, a girl who wrote to the author to ask him to explain what the story meant.
1. The Blair Witch Was Supposed to Be Seen in the Movie
The Blair Witch Project is one of the most successful movies of all time based on box office returns. With a limited budget and a mostly improvised script, the rough and real feel of the film hit audiences in a way they never experienced before. It became a phenomenon that kicked off the found footage subgenre like nothing before it.
With all of its success, it’s also impressive to note that the title character never makes an appearance on film. The audience never gets to see who or what the Blair Witch really is. This wasn’t always the intent, however.
There is a scene in the movie in which we’re supposed to get a glimpse of the Blair witch. The problem was that the person holding the camera, in this case, the character of Josh in the movie, just forgot to pan left to get the Blair Witch in the frame when it was out in the woods. The character of Heather asks what something is but we, the audience, don’t see. In reality, it was art director Ricardo Moreno dressed all in white running alongside them.