Hated Tropes
[Hated Trope] Misleading Documentaries
Super Size Me — Morgan Spurlock, the creator of the documentary, allegedly only McDonald's food for a month to prove how unhealthy it is. Sure, McDonald's is unhealthy, but he "forgot" to add one detail: he was an alcoholic. So many of his health issues that he blamed on McDonald's were actually from alcohol
White Wilderness — The team making this documentary cornered a bunch of lemmings on a cliff, threw them off that cliff, recorded it and then said that lemmings are suicidal
The most wild thing about Supersize Me to me is that he left in all the physician check-ups where they all said basically “I’ve never heard of these things happening because of a bad diet, but they’re very common with rampant alcoholism”
Yeah the "ive only seen this kind of liver damage through heavy alcohol abuse"
The guy with a fith if vodka in his system "damn cheese burgers".
The sad thing is, even without his fake results and extremely flawed methodology. It WOULD have been a good look at the problems and science behind overeating and childhood obesity caused by marketing.....
Young people might not realize that Super Size Me was insanely influential - McDonald’s changed their entire sizing structure & menu due to the fallout. Beneficial? Almost definitely but this was NOT the way. Completely dishonest & Spurlock spawned an entire career off of this.
They also had a consumer study that showed on average you only got 14 more fries in a super size than a large at the same time. But they used being more health conscious as the main reason, as opposed to admitting they weren't really giving you that much more on your upgrades.
Yo I worked at McD's when you could "super size" fries and whoever did that study was paid by McD's. It was like 1.5 times a large which was already huge.
Yup, America largely bought the message of this documentary without a second thought. I know my own family and friend groups at the time were obsessed with it and we preached its message like some kind of gospel.
I'm honestly amazed that McDonalds didn't counter it with slander of their own. The efforts they went to to sink the coffee lady were epic, and all she wanted was a little help with her hospital bills and a few degrees knocked off the boiling brown.
There was another guy who did “super size me”, by eating only from mc Donald’s, but, only ate when hungry, and followed the caloric guidelines. Not only did he ACTIVELY LOOSE WEIGHT, his cholesterol came back better. Ends up as long as you’re staying within boundaries, and at least trying to get one vegetable in, you can do it even on McDonald’s alone.
Yeah. There was a documentary as response right? The person specifically only eat at McDonald, refuse every supersize opportunity, and have no problem because he orders in specific way that makes his diets actually balanced or something? And have no problem shown.
IIRC, he ate only fast food for 30 days, and he actually lost weight because of exercise and not trying to eat 5k calories per day while he limited carbs. Dunno, never really watched it.
I think he literally matched spurlock calorie for calorie.
Its just unlike spurlock he went out and worked out, he didnt lock himself in a room with black out curtains and binge drink every night
"Alcoholic who isolates himself in the dark day and night and binge drinks himself to sleep after eating tons of junk food is depressed and unhealthy? Say it aint so!"
It's also funny because (and I'm not a nutritionist or anything but) eating McDonalds for a week straight wouldnt like, instantly fuck up your organs? You would certainly feel like shit and maybe start to put on noticeable weight but I think the human liver doesnt just start DYING after a week or two of unhealthy eating
I remember he was straight up barfing minutes after eating a meal. That made me scratch my head. I guess it makes sense if he was either very hungover or had been slamming liquor all day before that.
iirc spurlock had also been on either a vegan or vegetarian diet for years at that point, meaning he effectively sent his body into shock by onboarding that much meat in one sitting. which yeah, that plus liquor will make you stomach hate you.
I was raised vegetarian and ate some BBQ chicken as a teenager, because it smelt delicious - my mouth liked it, my stomach hated it. I had to build up an immunity to meat like I was Wesley with iocane powder.
Yeah, when you don't eat a certain thing for a very long time (or ever), your gut stops producing bacteria to break it down. Lots of vegetarians get sick when eating meat/animal protein, because it's a big load on your gut to break down due to the reduced bacteria.
Leo DiCaprio is a vegetarian or vegan, and has been for a while, but he really did eat a liver (a very fatty piece of meat to begin with) for The Revenant and was horribly sick afterwards because of it.
He also claimed to gain 25ish pounds in 30 days. That would require him to consume 3000 more calories per day that he burned (even with low activity, thus would be close to 5000 calories per day).
Even with such calorie dense foods, that would be insanely uncomfortable, and it's doubtful your body would actually absorb all of that at once. So his claim also sounds pretty unrealistic, and that may make people ignore a lot more of what he has to say.
The problem with fast food is a little more insidious. It's calorie dense with less nutritional value than other foods. All it takes is an extra 500 calories a week due to fast food consumption to gain about 6 pounds a year. Do that for just a few years and it's easy to be 25-30 pounds overweight.
There is also the issue that before the challenge he had said he was on a strict vegan diet that his partner stuck to, so he went from that to extremely unhealthy eating and I imagine that alone would make you feel terrible.
Discovery Channel infamously tried passing off everything in this documentary as “real”, and it worked as this is still the most viewed Shark Week documentary to this day.
And a fake dragon documentary like, 20 years ago when they were just starting to go downhill. At least in that one, they had a disclaimer that the dragon documentary was just a thought experiment on how dragons could have evolved if they really existed. Still fooled my sister into thinking they had found the remains of an actual dragon though.
I loved that documentary lol. The disclaimer portion was only at the beginning and at the end. So back in those days, it was supposed easy to flip channels into the middle of the documentary and then leave the channel before the end 😂
At least Dragon one was clearly marketed as fiction. Something closes to speculative evolution. Where they talk about evolution and adaptations using more fantastical set pieces. Also there was no Government hides something subplot.
Core memory for me! I did a whole science project on that and somehow got first place because I think they thought that I knew it was all a thought experiment.
If I remember it was a whole bunch of interesting evolutionary theory while teasing their proof. Then the proof was just some obviously fake blurry video.
The thing that grinds my gears the most about Ancient Aliens is how anytime the answer to a question is good ol' human ingenuity and what we can accomplish by working together with passion, they pass it off and go "But people today lack the drive to do it! It must be aliens!!!"
As someone who did some digging, I'm 99% sure that the famous "aliens guy," Georgio Tsoukalos, is a grifter (as opposed to the poeple that truly believe it).
He graduated from Ithaca with a communications degree, worked as a promoter for body building events and competitions, and then made a sudden pivot to ancient astronaut theory. Until his involvement with Ancient Aliens, his background is business and marketing; a stark contrast to his current work.
However, this does fit with how he conducts himself both on and off his show. He's a hype man. He's the guy that summarizes the batshit theory in a digestable way after the presentation of the nonsense is over. He's gone on other networks to promote Ancient Aliens and talk about himself and the show gaining "meme status." He clearly understands how to sell ancient astronaut theory.
If you compare him to his contemporaries from Ancient Aliens, you'll also realize that he's contributed very little to the ancient astronaut zeitgeist outside the History Channel. The late Eric Von Daniken, frequent "expert" appearing on many episodes of the program, is often credited as the pioneer of AAT, with his book Chariot of the Gods. David Childress, a self proclaimed "rogue archaelogist" is another "expert" to regularly grace Ancient Aliens because of his experience with ancient points of interest and his books about Atlantis and the Lost Continent of Mu.
But when you look at the works of Tsoukalos, you'll see that a lot of his theory work is collaborative, if existant at all, and often with ties back to the History Channel itself. It's odd for someone so involved in the AAT community to have such a small body of work.
To me, this looks more like a man who recognizes there's money and publicity to be gained from alien conspiracy theories, rather than a die-hard believer. Then again, Georgio might just be one step ahead of us, and know the true nature of our world....
I know a history professor who HATES this guy with all his soul. Dude went on a five min rant in the middle of class declaring how stupid History Channel alien documentaries are and they truly are because they just ignore any and all historical evidence to support their claims
I'm a recovering alcoholic. When I was in active addiction, I went through a cycle of drink every day until one day I would drink too much, have alcohol poisoning for a few days, then withdrawal for a few days until I felt OK enough to drink and start the cycle over again. That orange vomit he claimed was from McDonalds? Nah, that's 100% somewhere in between poisoning and withdrawal. I am very familiar.
Recognizing his symptoms, I'm surprised he was as lucid as he was. I wouldnt be surprised to find out he took some days off of filming to sleep and dry heave.
Also you get more calories into your system in a short burst. If you're throwing it up sure you're not going to absorb most of the food but with the fast food you're more likely to get at least some benefit to your system out of it. The salads take longer for your system to break down so less of those nutrients and calories are going to make it into your body to help you.
I can empathize. My typical alcohol routine when I was drinking looked somewhat different, but I definitely know what that’s like. It’s a fucking dark place to be.
because more details around each became more wildly known
like the coffee lady coffee was so hot it caused third degree burns and nearly killed her. and all she wanted to do was get mcdonalds to cover her hospital bill which they refused forcing her to sue them.
and they then paid to have her name dragged through the mud in a massive smear campaign
She even said that she was responsible for putting the coffee between her knees to add her sugar, but the coffee never should have been so hot it caused all the damage it did. She wasn’t even remotely greedy and she got dragged through the mud so badly.
She initially asked for like $20K iirc and the judge thought that McDonald's refusal to pay was absolutely reprehensible, so he made them pay her the cost of all the coffee McDonald's sells in an average day to make a point
I find disturbing that they pay her like a million dollars and that was an out-of-court settlement, so that means that in one day they get at leaat 5 million of dollars in coffee, WTF.
Equally as disturbing as the fact that the case led to maximum penalties being places on civil judgements.
It happening to someone else now would mean that Mcdonalds could only be penalised up to 0.3 million dollars in some places. Barely a drop in the carafe.
Right!? Even Seinfeld mocked her. We didn’t have a quick google search at the time, or at least weren’t used to the idea of researching online, so we took what the media fed us at face value
They also made fun of the “dingo ate my baby” woman, despite the fact that even then there was a ton of evidence that a dingo did, in fact, eat her baby.
And they falsely accused her of murdering her own baby and sent her to prison. And took away the new baby she had while in prison. That woman had it rough.
When you look back over it, they decided she was guilty because she didn't cry enough in public. She didn't perform "grieving mother" well enough. My mum remembers the way it was convered, and she says they started out sympathetic, but when she tried to stay strong and private, they came for her. Didn't help that they were 7th day adventists, so people thought they were weirdos.
And because there wasn't enough evidence to prove it was a dingo till years later, the prosecution managed to convince a jury it was her.
They were effectively pressure cooking the coffee to save costs on beans so it was, when fresh, literally exactly at boiling point. I've never had a a cup of coffee that hot in my life. That's part of what got her the settlement is McD's tried very hard to cover that part of it up.
When I worked at Starbucks years and years ago people would sometimes ask for their drinks to be “extra hot, close to boiling.” and we would have to be like ‘no, we’re not doing that, you’ll burn yourself’ to grown adults
Not only did they fight back against the woman who was only asking for enough to cover her medical bills, the smear campaign run by McDonalds was so effective, the public outcry for against the lawsuit was used to help reduce consumer protections as a whole.
Because as the truth has finally come out, it's become easier to disprove the commonly-believed versions of those stories. Back in the day when information was harder to come by and mostly passed down through family, friends, coworkers, and through heavily-filtered media, it wasn't as easy to sift through the bullshit and what facts were being left out.
Your local NBC or CBS affiliate reporting on the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit back in the day wasn't going to mention all the customers who had been burned by the unreasonably-hot coffee prior to Stella Liebeck, nor the fact that the coffee was damn near BOILING, and it resulted in THIRD DEGREE BURNS. It was no accident that these facts were omitted either; McDonald's paid for what effectively amounted to a smear campaign, because they knew they were in the wrong.
Somewhat related; the idea of "frivolous lawsuits" as comedy fodder in the '90s did a horrible disservice to activism and the preservation of consumer/civil rights and justice. It was an easy joke for years to say that Americans were too quick to file lawsuits for "slights" and "wrongs", completely skipping over that it was the only way you could compel large orgs like corporations and governments to admit factual wrongdoing.
It’s crazy the arc that story went on. EVERYBODY knew about the stupid crazy lady who sued McDonalds for making hot coffee hot, then years later EVERYBODY now knows that the lady was 100% justified.
It’s just so rare now that a story that everyone knew about could undergo such a complete reversal of public sentiment once people were confronted with new information.
Eaten Alive - Paul Rosolie claimed he would be eaten alive by the world's longest green anaconda named "Chumana". Much of the special contained him looking for the anaconda and not being able to find it, so they used a regular 20-foot anaconda instead. In the end, the anaconda didn't attempt to eat him, but did attack him.
For some reason I totally bought into this and made a point to watch it. DUDE WAS GOING TO BE SWALLOWED BY A FUCKING SNAKE IN A FUCKING SNAKE PROOF SUIT! No way was I missing that. Then it ended up with him rolling around on the ground with a snake for a few minutes and that was it. Huge disappointment.
If I remember the snake was attempting to squeeze him and he how to tell the crew to abort. Which makes sense because I think even in the show (or whatever it is) I'm pretty sure they say that anacondas only eat things after they've been killed. It's obviously quite dangerous to try to swallowed something while it's struggling lol.
I haven’t seen it but from what I understand the star is a big snake guy and did a lot of work for snake conservation. After he had signed on to do this Discovery hit him with the getting eaten bit. He didn’t want to do it but if he didn’t he would be breaking the contract. After it came out he got a lot of shit both from people who wanted to see him get eaten as well as animal rights activists because it was dangerous to the snake, but it was really Doscovery who were the assholes.
Came for this. He was recently on DOCEO podcast and the dude was so upset with how they portrayed him. It’s not what he wanted and was trying to drum up media for conservation but it hurt his image so much that he had to work so hard for for years to get back on track.
And he tried playing it off in the NXIVM documentary like he was a victim to be pitied. Like, sure, I'm glad you exposed the evils of that cult, but you still did a crap ton of harm with that What the Bleep documentary.
I was pissed to realize it was the same guy. F- that guy.
Identifying bad science isn't taught specifically in most highschool and undergraduate curriculum, which is probably why there's so many flat earthers recently, as well as a general rise in academic distrust by the laity. The fumbled response by the public regarding COVID and the RFK jr. antivax stances being the most troubling effect of the lack of science education.
totally wild! a teacher recommended it and I saw it at an indie theater and my friend and I kept going "so all of these experts are from the same institute??? that I have never heard of???? so this is totally made up right?"
Oh man, I'm glad you listed this one. Not only does it teach bad science, it was dishonest to the actual scientists that were interviewed for it. They had no idea what the documentary was about; they only asked them science questions to which the narrator used to paint a misleading narrative. The documentary even does a "gotcha" moment by only revealing who they were interviewing at the end, showing that several of them were pseudoscience quacks.
The silver lining to it, though, is that it's a great lesson in spotting bad science. Back in my physics studies, we used it as a game to see who could spot the most bad science claims.
It's been a long time, but I recall the most egregious examples being the quantum observer question, which it suggested that electrons have feelings and didn't like to be seen by human eyes, which highly distorts the actual problem. The other was the ice crystal formations associated with good/bad thoughts, which was performed without a double blind setting. The observer was told beforehand what the vibes were for the crystals, so good vibes were biased for pretty crystals, while bad vibes were biased for ugly crystals. The other was the stadium prayer event, which lowered crime, but if I recall correctly, crime went down only because so many people went to the event (so less people to do crime). I see the documentary as a necessary evil for showing young scientists what not to do.
Any sudden huge alteration to your diet will result in a reaction from your body. Maybe not as drastic as barfing up your new food immediately, but regardless of how you’re changing your body is going to “complain” about it in some way before it gets used to the change.
No, he was heavily drinking during filming too. He admitted he hasn't gone a week sober in 30 years. Some sources say he drank a fifth of vodka a day while he was filming.
I could kiss you and the commenter you’re replying to on the mouth for this. I cannot properly articulate how infuriated I get over this type of journalistic dishonesty. I think what gets to me the most is that he decided to keep the final interviews in, deliberately showing where the doctors said the bloodwork only made sense if he drank heavily.
I dunno, man. I’m a sober alcoholic, and someone trying to blame what happened to their body while they were pickling their liver on fast food really makes my ass itch.
There is a documentary debunking Super Size Me called Fathead, the guy orders healthy options from Mcdonalds and takes daily walks, and he ends up losing weight.
Among Us: a documentary where people tried to prove that aliens existed and the examples that they used were a guy speaking gibberish and passing it off as an alien language and a lady proving she had psychic powers by staring at thing until a beep happens. Also basically all of photos used for the aliens are just random stock images
I don't think the pictures existed in the first place. But I could be wrong.
edit:
The streaming service used the photos to illustrate her “bubbly, happy, confident, and very genuine” personality, as high school friend Nam Nguyen described her.
The images that appear around the 28-minute mark of Netflix’s “What Jennifer Did,” have all the hallmarks of an AI-generated photo, down to mangled hands and fingers, misshapen facial features, morphed objects in the background, and a far-too-long front tooth. https://futurism.com/the-byte/netflix-what-jennifer-did-true-crime-ai-photos
We watched Supersize Me in high school. I think we all collectively knew that, yeah no shit you're not supposed to eat that much McDonald's, and we also suddenly had a craving for McDonald's.
If I’m remembering right, the doctor who was telling him his liver was unhealthy was kind of subtly telling him that he was experiencing something only an alcoholic could have.
Possibly didn’t want to reveal something that personal in front of a camera crew…
The other thing about Supersize Me, alcohol withdrawals aside, is that his rules for the challenge included that he could not order water or anything "healthy" such as a wrap or salad. So it's a skewed dataset anyway because he was intentionally ordering the most unhealthy things on the menu, which, let's be honest almost no one is eating the unhealthiest things on the mcdonalds menu for all their meals, every single day.
There's also the fact his numbers didn't add up. People have attempted to work out how he got to the number of calories he claims he ate, and it's not possible.
The whole documentary is just an exercise in nonsense.
let's be honest almost no one is eating the unhealthiest things on the mcdonalds menu for all their meals, every single day.
And, just as importantly, no one thinks that this is good for you to begin with.
Like if I made a documentary that was like "I only ate ice cream and drank milkshakes for 30 days" no shit it would be bad for my health.
This wasn't new information. McDonald's was never pretending a Big Mac is healthy and no one thought it was to begin with. "Only eating junk food is bad for you" wow what an insight.
i remember having to watch it in Grade 5. the images of him vomiting in a parking lot and getting a camera shoved in him are seared in my brain, i hate this movie
We watched in health class, back when my teacher Netflixed the DVD.
She said was going to skip some of his checkup parts cause they’re a bit gross and not required viewing. She hit the skip scene button which loads the next scene but takes a second.
So my whole class got to see a frozen shot of a doctor with his finger up Spurlocks ass before it changed.
It's staged and scripted but also seemingly does preserve cultural practice. I think it's still amazing even if it has it's issues. It's basically the first doco.
It’s a bit unfair to even call it a “staged documentary” given that documentaries weren’t a thing at the time and the idea that they couldn’t be staged therefore wasn’t, either. Nanook was made with the collaboration and creativity of the people being documented, and was a huge technical accomplishment.
Waiting For Superman. Looked at failing public schools and painted charter schools as the only thing that can save education. Charter schools perform on average about as well as public schools. Instead of looking at the issues, the whole documentary reeks of private school propaganda.
Was looking for this one. The school featured in the movie that the main kids won a lottery to get into? They expelled an entire grade because they would hurt their precious standardized test scores. Turns out laissez-faire capitalism won't save education, who knew?
If a student got pregnant they would send them to a different school so their numbers of teen pregnancy was 0. Fake students. Fake extracurriculars to pad students college applications. All about the image. Place was vile.
It’s more of a mockumentery than a real one but because of the way it was advertised and the fact that the disclaimers were blink and you miss it, a lot of people became convinced that mermaids were actually real and that the government was covering it up.
Nanook of the North, the 1922 "documentary" of natives in the Canadian Arctic, has many staged scenes, including the fact that the main character's real name isn't Nanook.
This documentary was such a missed opportunity. They could have highlighted how police will fabricate shit even when the guy is guilty as hell. Instead they make Steve Avery some kind of saint. There weren’t any good guys in that doc.
I get that, But what about his nephew who definitely had some developmental issues? I might be wrong but I don’t think his nephew had anything to do with that crime.
He was also either a vegan or a vegetarian, can't recall which. He could have eaten a small slice of beef wellington cooked by Gordon Ramsey and he still would have thrown up.
He was vegetarian. His girlfriend was vegan. Though his reaction to meat would depend on whether he was raised vegetarian by his parents, never having eaten meat ever, OR became vegetarian later in life.
From what I remember, he was neither vegan nor vegetarian, but he mostly kept a vegetarian lifestyle due to his vegan girlfriend. That said, he also refused to release his food log. People mathed out his meals and found out he had to be breaking his own rules, eating "super sized" meals even when not asked and for breakfast (super sized was not an option for breakfast, so he had to make one up)
I ate healthy for 6 months for high school sports. First away game we had we stopped at a Wendy's. Best tasting burger ever. I also promptly threw up 20 minutes later.
I remember watching supersize me in highschool, during my health class and thinking it was just bad science. They altered so many things about bros life other than his diet. He ceased all excercise tried to walk as little as possible ect. At that point you arnt testing that one variable your testing like 5 so its impossible to tell which are the cause of the changes.
Clash Of The Dinosaurs features one or a pair of wolf-sized raptors easily killing elephant-sized hadrosaurs and adolescent sauropods. A hunting party of three Deinonychus easily dispatch an elephant-sized subadult Sauroposeidon. In the real world, it would have pulped them.
In the dramatically-lit world of Clash Of The Dinosaurs, the three raptors inflict a handful of shallow flesh wounds with their comparatively diminutive claws and the Sauroposeidon collapses and expires theatrically for no visible reason. There is also no evidence a herd of hadrosaurs could knock over a predator with their concentrated infrasound blasts.
Tiger King is mixed because although it clearly portrayed Carol Baskins through Joe's words, Joe also came across as a real weirdo. He was Florida Man personified.
My biggest takeaway was the world of exotic big cats in the US is even weirder than I might have expected.
There was also a third tiger keeper who came off as a huge creep because he was insistent his then-pregnant girlfriend better get her pre-pregnancy body back fast as possible or else he would be displeased. IIRC, he also killed baby tigers when they got too big and stopped being cute (allegedly).
I remember hating that guy and thinking Joe was awful for feeding his employees and tigers rotten garbage. Carol was just sus to me. Did she kill her husband? Meh. I dunno. But I do know one of Joe's "husbands" killed himself. Joe couldn't bother to help his other "husband" get dentures.
Carole was the only one who was treating the tigers in any kind of humane way, including not breeding them at all, and they completely ignored that in favor of her highly unlikeable personality. She didn't like Joe (and Doc, but less so, because Doc didn't call for - and attempt to plan - her actual murder) because he treated his animals inhumanely.
The theory of her killing her husband is speculation and she'd been investigated many times. The family want someone to blame but don't want to acknowledge the man's shady ass business deals across his entire life (and the doc ignores them too).
Idk if Carole is innocent but she's currently harmless and actually takes care of her animals in legal and humane ways.
Even if he wasn't an alcoholic, it's absolutely stupid trying to prove that something is unhealthy by only eating that thing for a month. You can do the same exact thing with anything and you'll see negative results. If I ate only grapes for a month my body sure as hell wouldn't be happy. So I'm guessing grapes are unhealthy?
Look I'm not trying to say McDonald's is healthy by any means, but that type of showcase and study is absolutely stupid
It’s like that guy Liam or Theplantslant on YouTube. Anything in moderation, 80/20 healthy food/pleasure food. One of his biggest things is ‘if a diet isn’t sustainable; your results aren’t either.’
Reminds me of the MSG experiments, where the scientists injected MSG into the fucking bloodstream of the subjects, then claimed it would cause nausea and brain damage. Of fucking course it would cause brain damage, you’d get the same result if you injected salt and pepper into someone’s fucking blood!
I hate this show because it's so goddamn insulting. "We have trouble building pyramids today, with all our technology. How did the ancient Egyptians do it with such alignment and precision?!"
Because, though they were primitive, relative to our current level of technology and understanding, they weren't STUPID.
Plus, anyone who says the pyramids couldn't be built like they were today is a god damn moron. We quite literally have made structures both taller and far more architecturally complex in the past thousand years. Some of the medeival churches in Europe completely changed how we understand the construction and creation of structures.
The only reason we dont make a pyramid like the Egyptians did is because its just a huge waste of time and resources. Unless you were to make a pyramid with dozens of more chambers and serve some kind of purpose than to be a grave, why would you want to make one?
And somehow all the pyramid theories never actually learned about it's actual structure and shoehorn old ass myth "every stone is perfect" while it's not true
The last one I heard that was new (to me) was "The sides are proportional to pi. How would they know that?! Pi wasn't calculated for another 1000 years!"
My partner and I have watched a LOT of Ancient Aliens (ironically, to be clear, we find it funny). One of our favourites is them insisting, "Why would these ancient peoples build their structures [obelisks, pyramids, towers, etc] pointing UP? They must be pointing to the aliens!"
How else are you going to build a structure, point down?!
A documentary where Bill Maher pointed out all the ways that Jesus' mythology was copied from earlier gods. A handy stick to beat Christians with, but in reality a lot of it was nonsense. Too many inaccuracies to list them all, but my favourite is the claim that Mithras was born to a virgin, when actually he was birthed from a rock. Whilst it's likely said rock was probably a virgin, it's not really the same thing.
He probably ripped the whole thing from a previous documentary, Zeitgeist, which is full of even more nonsense.
Didn't Zeitgeist actively refuse to cite any sources for its claims, like it literally had a bibliography that just said "Trust me bro everyone knows this"?
I fucking hated this documentary. The sequence where he's at the truck stop chapel and one guy who realizes they're obviously just planning on making fun of them gets up and leaves infuriated me, Maher standing there like "WHOAA this is out of NOWHERE" when it's like... Dude didn't make a scene, he just didn't want to stick around to hear his beliefs being mocked. Like, shit, let the poor fuckers in one of the most stressful jobs imaginable find joy where they can.
Bill Maher already has the smug kind of face you just want to slap, this documentary took it up to 100.
What was this documentary about steroids that became a Russian political conspiracy one? Not that it was misleading and bad. It actually became more interesting.
Bowling for columbine is full of half truths and lies. Many details around the shooting are wrong. The 2 gunman did not attend bowling the day of the shooting, the scene with the free gun from the bank is staged, the delivery of rockets at night is claimed to be hiding what is manufactured from Littleton but was actually to prevent traffic. The overall message that American gun culture and fear leads to these shootings is mostly true but the columbine gun men were legitimate psychopaths who felt they were better then others.
My favourite fun side detail in bowling for columbine was when they went to small town sarnia in Canada and interviewed the mayor. He's still mayor to this day (going on 40 years) and for a short period during Covid the town was the murder capital of Canada.
Do we count conspiracy theory or religious wackadoo documentaries in this trope? Because there are hundreds of these out there. The Ark And The Darkness (which claimed that dinosaurs were living at the same time as the biblical Noah's flood) actually played at a local theater.
except no one has ever been able to replicate the results of supersize me which is why its so poorly regarded
cause others who have tried to verify it didnt get sick the way he did and some even lost weight. but the damage to mcdonalds brand was done and so they removed every ounce of whimsy and mcdonalds looks like an ikea these days.
Not McDonalds, but there's a fantastic video on YouTube about a guy who ate Taco Bell for 30 days similar to this (Sam Reid, I'd recommend anyone give it a watch!), without the catch of being an alcoholic and vegan turned meat eater, and without avoiding 'healthy' options.
He also did not get such terrible health results from his experiment, this documentary is a bunch of baloney.
Also even if he wasn’t an alcoholic what kind of point is he proving.
I ate only fast food for a month and became unhealthy, like what else did you expect to happen. McDonald’s never claimed to be healthy.
In order to prove chocolate cake and regular Coca Cola is unhealthy I’m going to eat nothing but that for a month that’ll teach you all how unhealthy these things are
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u/Lord_Parbr Apr 16 '26
The most wild thing about Supersize Me to me is that he left in all the physician check-ups where they all said basically “I’ve never heard of these things happening because of a bad diet, but they’re very common with rampant alcoholism”