Movie, TV and Video Game Fan Theories That Make Way Too Much Sense

I’m not really a forum sort of person, but every once in a while I stumble across a thread that I just can’t shake. I discovered this on reddit a few weeks back, and it warped my mind to such a degree, that I deemed it worthy to be shared with you.

Fans have been coming with all sorts of theories for what their favorite movies, games, shows and books REALLY mean, but often they’re a bit kooky or a reach. Sometimes? They just might make a bit of sense. The ones below are either the smartest or funniest ones I could find, and they should make you think about your favorite pieces of pop culture in different ways.

It’s a rather long read, but I promise you’ll be addicted after the first few. Feel free to add in your own in the comments.

The story of Aladdin is made up by the salesman at the beginning to persuade you to buy the lamp.

The original Scooby Doo series is set after a horrible economic depression. Everything is abandoned and falling apart, and all of the villains are people who would normally be really respected (professors, museum curators, celebrities) who have fallen into hard times just like everyone else. How many times have the gang helped someone NOT go out of business?

At the end of ‘The Thing’ (1982) when Kurt Russell offers Keith David the bottle and he drinks out of it, the bottle is filled with gasoline, one from the Molotovs he was throwing earlier. Since the creature wouldn’t understand what gasoline tastes like, it wouldn’t spit it out.

Sean Connery’s character in The Rock (John Patrick Mason) is actually James Bond. He got caught spying on America and was hidden away in various prisons. “This man does not exist not in the United States or Great Britain” says FBI Director Womack. This ties in with the theory of James Bond being a code name for different agents.

My favorite Star Wars conspiracy is that the Emperor wasn’t spending all those resources creating crazy superweapons like the Death Star and the Sun Crusher and putting together gigantic fleets of Star Destroyers wasn’t to stop the Rebel Alliance, but rather in preparation of the Yuuzhan Vong Invasion that would happen about a quarter century after RoTJ ended.

Now the Emperor is a pretty smart guy. I mean, he got himself elected to Chancellor of the Republic, started a war, earned himself absolute control on both sides of the war, then managed to turn the galaxy against the guys who for a millennium had served as icons of peacekeeping, justice, and democracy. And that takes some serious strategizing! But here’s the thing:

At this point, the Republic was falling apart, with or without a Sith-led Separatist movement to nudge them in the wrong direction. The senate was a clusterfuck where nothing ever got done. Corruption reigned supreme. Even the Jedi Council wasn’t doing it’s job properly. Ideally, Jedi are supposed to act as bastions of compassion and moderation. The way the Jedi would be tasked to deal with a situation is as a balancing influence between, say, two conflicting nation-states, or a particularly quarrelsome trade agreement. Everyone respected and would listen to a Jedi, and even without acting on behalf of the Republic, they should be able to arrive on a scene and be able to allow discussion and bureaucracy to flourish. Instead, the Jedi Council of the waning days of the Republic had grown inward and conservative, spending all their time meditating on the state of the galaxy and not enough time heading out there and fixing shit. This held throughout the war, when Jedi were surprisingly quick to jump to open combat as opposed to discussion.

In short, the Republic was completely and utterly unprepared for a real invasion, from a force that wasn’t being controlled by a puppetmaster who was preventing either side from gaining an advantage until the moment was right. The kinds of fleets that were commonplace in the Empire would have been impossible for the Republic to even agree to create, let alone have the wherewithal to actually build. What Palpatine did was take a failing system and tear it out by the roots, replacing it with a brutally efficient, military-industrial focused society – one that could adequately prepare for an invasion of the scale of the Yuuzhan Vong were already beginning.

Second of all, if you think about it, creating a weapon that can destroy planets doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you’re fighting a war against a well funded, but decentralized and scattered rebellion. The Rebel Alliance wasn’t fighting a war of planets or borders or resources, they were fighting a war of attrition. What good is the ability to destroy a planet when your enemy doesn’t even officially control any? The destruction of Alderaan, the only notable use of the Death Star, was a move made by Grand Moff Tarkin, whose Tarkin Doctrine, though it heavily influenced the way the Empire kept a tight grip on even the furthest systems, was not the ultimate purpose of the “ultimate weapon”. Tarkin was convinced that the Death Star was his tool, one of intimidation and despotism, that he could use it to keep the Alliance, the biggest threat to his power, at bay. And we all know how that venture turned out.

No, the real purpose of the Death Star was to be able to fight a force that could completely terraform an entire planet into a gigantic, organic shipyard in a matter of months, and was backed by dozens of 100+ Kilometer across worldships. In fact, without the timely arrival of the seed of the original Yuuzhan Vong homeworld, Zonama Sekot, and a Jedi-influenced heretic cult that spurred a slave uprising, it’s very unlikely that the denizens of the galaxy could have survived the war at all under the leadership of the New Republic. In fact, it’s not really even fair to say that they “won” the war in any sense, with a sizable portion of the population of the galaxy eradicated, Coruscant, the former shining jewel at the heart of every major government for millennia, captured and terraformed beyond recognition, and the New Republic forced to reconstruct itself as the Galactic Alliance. Undoubtedly, for all it’s flaws, the Empire could have hammered out a far less Pyrrhic victory over the Vong. And if Palpatine hadn’t underestimated the abilities of both the rebellion he never considered a comparable threat, and one young Jedi, perhaps the galaxy could have avoided the deaths of uncountable sentients during the Yuuzhan Vong war years later.

In the beginning of 2001: A Spacy Odyssey a black screen is displayed while music plays for a few minutes before the film starts. Its believed that this is the monolith tilted 90 degrees and taking up the entire screen, as if the entire film is a technological and evolutionary advancement that Kubrick is bestowing us.

Ridley Scott finally closed the debate a few years ago as to whether or not Deckard was actually a replicant in Blade Runner (he totally was), but to take this one step further, he was a replicant implanted with the memories of Gaff (Edward James Olmos’ character). Gaff was actually the top Blade Runner, but was sidelined due to some injury or illness (hence the cane), and so Deckard was created and implanted with Gaff’s memories to continue the search for Roy Batty and friends. This explains why Gaff never really does anything aside from drive Deckard around and why he treats him with such contempt. Gaff’s origami also hint at Deckard’s true nature, as they seem to demonstrate an insight into what Deckard is feeling; a chicken when he is feeling scared, a stick man with a boner when he is about to meet the smoking hot Rachael, and the unicorn from Deckard’s recurring dream. It also helps explain the compliment Gaff pays Deckard at the end of the film, after he apparently hovered above the building and watched Batty nearly kill Deckard without intervening, he lands and says, “you’ve done a man’s job,” which is the highest praise you could give to a replicant.

Willy Wonka knew those children would die in his factory. After Augustus gets sucked up the shoot, they all hop on board the boat through the tunnel of doom. The boat doesn’t have two extra vacant seats though. It was designed with prior knowledge that they would lose two participants before that point. Later they drive a cream spewing car with only four seats. Did they have another car waiting in the garage in case the others made it? Of course not. Willy Wonka uses children to make candy.

The existence of Spongebob and his strange friends is the result of radiation from nuclear arms testing that was performed on the Bikini Atoll in the late 40’s and early 50’s. Since they live under the atoll, the town is known as ‘Bikini Bottom’.

The Jetsons and the Flintstones are two portions of the same society. The people living in Bedrock are actually members of a far future (one may say post-human) society that have rejected the day to day electronic assistance to live like their long-dead ancestors did (or at least what they think they lived like; history has lost a bit in translation). This explains the talking animals: They’re just synthetic creations. It’s been so long since any actual animal lived that didn’t have human communication bred/written into it that the “ferals” don’t realize how silly it is to be talking with creatures that didn’t even exist alongside early humans.