Urban Legends Teen Week 10/14

Key Elements:

• FEAR: The logic behind each story is our fear of the unknown.
• Story Telling: How the story is conveyed from person to person.

General Objectives:

• Identify the Urban Legend Genre
• Identify Urban Legend structural elements.

"Myths are things that never happened but always are."

--Sallustius, 4th century CE

Quoted in Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden

25 Most Popular

Urban Legends Still Being Told

Legends spread from person to person

• Urban legends are a type of folklore.
• They are different from other narrative forms by how they originate and grow. Novels and short stories are produced by individual authors and formally published. Urban legends emerge spontaneously, spread "virally" from person to person, and are rarely traceable to a single point of origin.
• Urban legends tend to change over time with repetition and embellishment.

Urban Legend characteristics

• It's story.

• It's alleged to be true.

• It's just plausible enough to be believed.

• It’s truthfulness is unproven.

• It's of spontaneous or uncertain origin.

• It's likely to take the form of a cautionary tale.

• It varies in the telling.

• It circulates by being passed from individual to individual, either orally or in written form (e.g., via text, photocopy or email).

• It's attributed to secondhand sources (e.g., "a friend of a friend," "my sister's friend etc.).

Examples:

Classic Urban Legends:

• • Teeth Dissolving in Coca-Cola
• • Walt Disney is Cryogenically Frozen
• • The Lighthouse vs. the Battleship
• • Sewer Gators
• • The Jedi Religion Form
• • The Good Samaritan

The phrase "urban legend" became popular in the early 1980s with the publication of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand's first book on the subject, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (W.W. Norton, 1981).

Urban Legend

Definition:

spider eggs in Bubble Yum?

• a secondhand story, alleged to be true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific, embarrassing, ironic, or strange series of events that supposedly happened to a real person.

"Urban" means relating to a city, but urban legends do not have to take place in a city. They can happen anywhere. The word "urban" is used because it suggests they are tales that could happen today. "Urban" in this case means modern.

Be Smart!

• Don't be fooled by urban legends.
• Get the facts at http://www.snopes.com
• Speak out against false rumors and hoaxes.
• Ask people to cite their source.
• Do not tell, forward email or post stories as true without citing a reliable source.

Play the Game

A few urban legends have turned out to be true, or based on a true event.

See if you can tell the true from the false.

After hearing each story, mark the dry erase paddle either T or F.

In the year 2000, reports showed up about President Saddam Hussein stockpiling PlayStation 2 consoles for their CPU chips. It was said he was stringing them all together to create missile guidance system.

Saddam Hussein created missile guidance system out of PS2 CPUs.

True or False?

Pokemon Red and Green was first released in Japan in 1996. Supposedly, Japanese children ranging in age from 7 to 12 said they began having headaches and nausea after reaching Lavender Town level. They said it was because of the piercing music tones.

The above clip is taken from the original Japanese version of the game.

The legendary ape-creature Bigfoot is claimed to have been spotted in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The rumors started sometime after the game release. The brochure that came with the game did mention the artist Bigfoot.

Is Bigfoot an Easter Egg, a game hiding within the game?

True or False?

The music caused illness in children.

T or F?

The RPG Fallout 3 is said to predict the future, using Morse code and hidden messages. People claim to hear such cryptic phrases as, “The Queen has died today” and “I can’t believe Britney’s actually won an Oscar!” These phrases are followed by a series of numbers in Morse Code some believe are dates.

Some players in Minecraft say they found weird buildings popping up on their maps. Others even claim to have seen the source of the structures, a mysterious, white-eyed version of the game’s protagonist. His name is Herobrine and he's said to be the ghost of the game creator’s deceased brother.

Fallout 3 has predicted the future, T or F?

Minecraft created Herobrine, T or F?

Berzerk is considered to be one of the greatest games of the arcade-era. It is the first video game linked to the death of a person.

18 year old Peter Bukowski was playing Berzerk in Illinois. Right after he entered his initials for a high score, he suddenly collapsed dead. The cause of death was ruled a heart attack.

T or F?

The legend of Polybius is a weird story. A new, unheard of game suddenly showed up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon in 1981. Players claimed to experience amnesia, blackouts, seizures, headaches, nausea, and night terrors. Even scarier, people swore they saw mysterious men in black collecting data from the machine. Then the game just up and vanished.

The Elder Scrolls 3: Marrowind Legend claims there is a creepy, illegal mod for the game. It must be run on DOSbox software or else it becomes a virus and corrupts all the game files. If players stay in one spot for too long they die and find a new character, the assassin. He appears to be a man except his legs and arms are long and bent like a spider.

The famous Donkey Kong was meant to be called Monkey Kong. This is not a scary legend, but an interesting one. It is said that Donkey Kong got his name when a mistranslation of the word "monkey" turned into "donkey".

T or F?

There is another popular legend about the board game Monopoly. The legend alleges that Parker Brothers lost their trademark for Monopoly after a game called Anti-Monopoly came out on the market.

Is this story T or F?

The Marrowind creepy mod is real, T or F?

Polybius is a black ops game that causes illness.

T or F?

References

http://www.wow-dude.com/news_page/38/The-Creepiest-Urban-Legends-In-The-History-of-Gaming.html

http://www.oddee.com/item_99029.aspx

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adamellis/spookiest-video-game-urban-legends#36mrsjo

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/roundup.asp

URBAN LEGENDS

Turn Dreams into Reality!

Did you hear the one about . . .