Childlore is folklore passed directly between children, without the input of adults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childlore
Stuff I can think of off the top of my head are paper fortune tellers, summoning Bloody Mary/the candyman, the cool S, parody songs like “Jingle bells Batman Smells” and “Joy to the world, the teacher’s dead” etc.
This stuff has intrigued me since, well since I was a kid. I always wondered where they came from. I never saw adults doing that stuff, so I figured another kid had to have come up with it.
Okay, so back in the 1990s Charter Medical Corporation ran a suicide prevention hotline with the number 1-800-CHARTER. They ran a massive TV ad campaign with the tagline “If you don’t get help at Charter, please, get help somewhere.” These commercials ran on daytime TV so they were a little…oblique. Euphemistic. So that children wouldn’t understand them. So we didn’t.
Around that time, it was popular slang among teh youthz to say “you need help” as a way of calling someone stupid. You can hear one of Roger’s daughters say it in the first Lethal Weapon movie in response to his attempt at rapping.
And of course, people who “need help” should call Charter. So in the 1990’s there was a fad of us school kids calling each other stupid by saying “You need to call Charter.” And I wonder how local that was, I know at least two elementary schools in my county did that. American Millennials, do you remember this?
I remember this! Then we went on a field trip or something in what the teachers called a “charter bus” (as in a bus and driver you rent for an event) and it spawned some lame jokes probably from yours truly.
This might be local but “Deem!” as the sound of magical transformation. As an adult I think some child heard/read something like “I deem you Sir Galahad, Knight of the Round Table” and mixed it up with cartoon magic sounds, but in our neighborhood any kid with a good stick could wave it and say “Deem! You’re a horse!” or “Deem! You’re a frog!” and the other kid would act the part for awhile. You could even deem yourself, like “Deem! I’m a wizard!” Which is redundant now that I think of it.
My childhood was in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, so it’s possible the cartoon’s author had a similar background and Dwayne is a humorous twist on Deem.
IDK but the Brothers Chaps are from Georgia. I was just trying to be funny.
Well you succeeded, and now I have to go learn more about them and their work! (so I can’t possibly do any of my chores rn)
oh you’re welcome. Homestar Runner was a staple of the 2000s. The original site used to be all in Flash until adobe killed it, which they comment on here. There used to be a “disturbingly comprehensive” wiki, but it seems to have been buried by bot traffic. The domain is pingable but http requests time out.
It’s gotta be The Cool S.
The version of the Little Einsteins theme song i would sing in middle school and high-school everytime we went on a field trip on a school bus
We’re going on a trip, in our favorite piece of shit! Doin’ 95, we’ll probably fucking die!
The teachers hated it but a bunch of the other kids thought it was funny and would sing along
But really though, have you ever ridden on the highway in a schoolbus during a fieldtrip? This is absolutely what it felt like, that you were going 95 mph with no seatbelts and you were gonna die
Not necessarily my favorite nor something widespread, but it was always the legend/meme that my middle/high schools had a pool on the roof (it was a one story building lmfao)
I remember kids would try to sell each other a pass to get to the second floor of one of our one-story buildings; I wonder if the pool rumor started as a similar joke/scam
The rumor that existed in every single school that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed so he could suck his own penis
That rumor came up in his autobiography and he wrote -
“If I really got my ribs removed, I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper. Plus, who really has time to be killing puppies when you can be sucking your own dick? I think I’m gonna call the surgeon in the morning.”
Side note: Marilyn Manson is a peice of shit.
He… he was on the wonder years?
No, but there was a rumour back in the day that he was the kid who played Kevin’s best friend.
I’m out of the loop on that one, why is he a piece of shit?
A bunch of women accused him of sexual violence, but nothing is showing up on his wiki.
He also seems to have been a bit of a dick to bandmates
Hold B+Down to increase your chances of catching a pokemon.
Hold your breath when you pass the graveyard, or go through a tunnel.
Lift your feet off the ground when a vehicle you’re in goes under the train tracks.
If you sharpen a pencil really sharp, you can stick it into a ceiling tile and it will stay there.
Chew up some paper and you can spit it at someone through a straw as a spitball.
How to fold a paper fortune teller, and play it. For some reason my classmates labeled it with the different kinds of sex acts we had heard of but didn’t really understand. (Kissing, sex, 69, blowjob…)
How to play MASH.
How to play tag.
Step on a crack…
So many gaming ones.
When mortal kombat was released for consoles, the kids passed the “blood code” for the genesis
When mortal kombat 2 came out, their were so many myths about super fatalities and weird stuff about how street fighter was in it.
Man oh man I could probably have a whole thread just for video game urban legends from the late 90s. That’s when some of your friends had internet, but maybe you didn’t, so there was just enough legit info to make the fake stuff seem believable (looking at you, MissingNo). Luigi in SM64, all sorts of secret Smash 64 characters, literally the entirety of Pokemon.
In my elementary school there was a rumour that kissing someone on the mouth makes a baby in the throat. I’ve heard it still being spread years later. There are also parodies of famous German poems that you have or had to memorize in school, although I some kids learnt them from their parents. I know parody versions of Die Glocke and Die Bürgschaft.
On another kid’s hand: “Circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have your cooties shot.”
That is not sufficient cootie protection. A properly trained physician will follow it up with
Circle circle, square square,
Now you have it everywhere
Blowing in the Nintendo cartridge. Miss Mary Mack.
Blowing in it did work, it was just bad long term
Miss Mary Mack.
I hear she dressed in black with silver buttons down her back.
The girl arts. Double dutch, the hand games like Miss Mary Mack and Bisquick, stuff girls seemed to spontaneously do that boys had nothing to do with. It feels like, when I was 6, the girls around me were always teaching each other stuff like that, and then by the time I was 16 it had transformed into teaching each other the cha cha slide. Done well those hand clap games and such could be impressive to watch.
