I was familiar with the popular line “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” long before I had seen the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that it purportedly came from. But when I got around to actually seeing the film, I was surprised to find that the words were not quite the same.
The bandit actually says, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”
So how did the distorted version become so widespread as to become the standard? I suspect because it was from this scene in the wildly popular parody Blazing Saddles.
There are a lot of similarly misquoted lines from films that now have become lodged in the collective memory of people.
Play it again, S(ingh)am!
Oh, but “Play it again, Sam.” is a direct quote from the movie. The movie in question, of course, being A Night in Casablanca starring the incomparable Groucho Marx.
Funny, I always thought people were quoting the Blazing Saddles line, I didn’t know they were parodying a famous line from a previous movie.
Nearly all of the misquotes on that list have commonality: they’re more succinct than the original lines, yet say essentially the same things. The shorter versions are more memorable and quotable. Saying “bumpy ride” after the word “seatbelt” makes more sense than “bumpy night”, even though it’s wrong.
It’s not just movie quotes, but quotes from literature or sayings. Gore Vidal once said or wrote, “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” I’ve heard it used in sports as, “It’s not enough that I must win, but that you must lose.”
In a reversal, some lines that are quoted verbatim are taken out of context or misused. Shakespeare’s line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” is assumed to be a poke at lawyers. In reality, the one who says it in Henry VI (and his cohorts) intend to overthrow the English government and jurisprudence in favour of a dictatorship. Shakespeare was defending a system of rights and laws.
The other popular Shakespeare quote where the assumed meaning is oppposite to the meaning in context, is the opening lines from Twelfth Might “If music be the food of love, play on..”.
The speech carries on “.. give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die.”
The Duke wants more music to destroy his love, not to encourage it.
Ah, yes. A distinct difference in meaning. TXS.
“Houston, we have a problem”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13
Actually, I watched A Night in Casablanca last night and the line is not spoken there either, which is confirmed by IMDb.