Talk:Moon landing conspiracy theories in popular culture

Film
the film "top of the heap" includes a fantasy sequence in which the lead character imagines he is an "astronaut" participating in the hoaxing of a moon landing in a film studio........... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.233.206.70 (talk) 21:16, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Move
Would this article be better at

Apollo hoax theories in popular culture

Considering it comes from the Apollo hoax theories article. Metty 17:24, 19 September 2009 (UTC)


 * This should be named Moon landing conspiracy theories in popular culture 99.146.122.70 (talk) 03:52, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Very Poor
This is a very poor article. It is a long list of disjointed entries, very few of which have any cited sources. Many of these are extremely trivial with absolutely no notability, and some have only a passing relevance to "Apollo Hoax", in a connection that is only the opinion of the contributing author. In all seriousness, I can't imaging anyone attempting to read the this article, or gathering any knowledge from it. What it needs is cut down to a least a quarter of its size, proper citing and some sort of indication of the place "Apollo Hoax" has in popular culture. -- Escape Orbit (Talk) 10:53, 8 September 2011 (UTC)


 * PER WP:BOLD I'm removing some of the completely un-noteworthy trivia and will post it below. I can understand the arguments at the AfD as to why this may be an important topic, but really could do without pointless trivia.Polyamorph (talk) 20:10, 23 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I think a lot of the trivia mentioned below is relevant to this article. Not sure why it needs to be removed. I think references in "popular media" can be mentioned in this article. Marty2Hotty (talk) 07:41, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Removed trivia from article - please do not re-add without providing a valid reason

Film

 * In the 1992 movie Sneakers, the Mother character, played by Dan Aykroyd, mentions "It's the same technology that NASA used to fake the Apollo Moon landings, so it shouldn't give us any trouble."
 * In the movie Looney Tunes: Back In Action, as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are in Area 52 they browse the videotape shelf, one of the videotapes searched read "Moon LANDING DRESS REHEARSAL."
 * In the movie RV, singer JoJo's character commented that the RV camp they were staying overnight was "where NASA faked the Moon landings."''
 * In the outtakes/end credits for the film Daddy Day Care, the cameraman is struggling to focus the camera. Eddie Murphy then says, "This is why I know we didn't land on the moon."
 * In the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the answer to the Apollo hoax was supposed to have been inside the book of secrets.
 * In a World of Warcraft commercial Mr. T makes a comment about others believing his Night Elf Mohawk character is a hoax like the moon landing.
 * In the movie Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder, when Fry reads Richard Nixon's mind, he hears the president thinking that he really did stage the moon landing, but it took place on Venus.
 * In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, while the moon landing did occur, the true reason for launching it (to investigate the wreckage of a crashed Autobot spacecraft known as The Ark) was kept top secret from the public.
 * In an episode of Stargate SG-1, Jack O'Neill meets a conspiracy theorist who among other things claims to know the truth about the moon landings. When asked if he means that the landings were faked, he replies that the moon landing hoax itself was the coverup, and implied that it was made to hide something discovered during the Apollo missions from the general public.
 * The 2011 film Apollo 18 displayed in a found-footage style documents the events of the supposedly cancelled Apollo 18 mission, whose astronauts discovered parasitic lifeforms on the Moon. The movie states the extraterrestrial life found there is the reason NASA has never authorized any other missions to the Moon.

On television

 * In an episode of Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen, dressed in character as Ali G, interviews Buzz Aldrin and asks him "Is it true that the moon doesn't really exist?"
 * A television drama called The News-Benders, the key plot device of which stipulated that all major technological advances since 1945 had been faked in some way, aired in January 1968; it postulated a "Moon landing" falsified with models. It was written by British writer Desmond Lowden.
 * In an episode of Fox TV's Family Guy, a flashback shows the ending of filming the hoax, with Neil Armstrong walking out of the studio and a pedestrian seeing him. When the pedestrian asks why he is not in space, Neil Armstrong stutters a feeble excuse about "solar winds" and "time delays" before killing the man. In the episode "If I'm Dyin', I'm Lyin'," Peter said that his "healing powers" were a fake, "like the Moon landings".
 * In the ITV sitcom Believe Nothing an Illuminati type council kills one of their members after stating "we faked the moon landing" but their caterers can't supply "a decent prune Danish"
 * In an episode of Friends, Joey asks Phoebe for a good lie, and she responds, "Okay, how about the whole 'man-landing-on-the-Moon' thing? I mean, you can see the strings, people!!"
 * In an episode of Newsradio, Jimmy James pretends to fly a hot air balloon around the world, but this is actually a hoax being filmed in a television studio. When Lisa finds out about this and criticizes him, he says, "It's not like I was faking the Apollo Moon landings, now that was a big deal." Lisa says, "What?" Jimmy gets nervous and says, "Nothing, I gotta go."
 * On the May 11, 1998 edition of the Late Show With David Letterman, actress Gillian Anderson read a Top Ten List entitled "Top Ten Things The Government Doesn't Want You To Know." Number three on the list was, "Due to a navigational error, Neil Armstrong actually landed in Wilmington, Delaware."
 * In "Roswell That Ends Well", an episode of Futurama, when the crew is flung back in time to 1947, President Harry S. Truman requests that the remains of Bender's (Futurama's robot) body, be taken to Area 51 for study. When informed that Area 51 is the location for the faked Moon landing, he replies, "Then we'll have to really land on the Moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies!"
 * In an episode of The PJs, Thurgood said that if people can fake a Moon landing, anything's possible.
 * In an episode of King of the Hill, conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble suggests that the Super Bowl is pre-selected and is filmed in an unidentifiable location where they filmed the fake Moon landing, months before the game ever began. On another episode, Dale discovers that the government report on the Kennedy assassination made sense and said, "If the government was right about this then maybe we really did go to the moon."
 * On The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert has made a running joke about how his character doesn't believe in the Moon landing:
 * On the June 7, 2006 edition, Colbert said "Tonight's guest is a pioneer in Mars exploration. Hopefully tonight he'll explain how they faked a space landing there too."
 * On the July 27, 2006 episode, Colbert said "And here's the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum, where you can see the original rocks from the soundstage where they faked the Moon landing. It's a part of Hollywood history."
 * On the August 1, 2007 edition, Colbert said, "Unless you've been on the moon this week, you know I broke my wrist. And if you have been on the moon, congratulations, you are the first!"
 * In February 2007, Craig Ferguson commented that the Lisa Nowak scandal was the biggest thing to happen to NASA "since they faked that moon landing thing in the sixties."
 * In a Washington Mutual commercial, the spokesperson is confronted by rival branch members in a parking garage. Comparing the rates of Washington Mutual to other known banks, one of them mentions that the moon landing was staged.
 * In an episode of The Whitest Kids U'Know, Trevor Moore tells a group of young schoolchildren that the Moon landings were faked.
 * In the TV show Codename: Kids Next Door, The Kids Next Door say they faked the moon landing by redirecting the ship to a fake moon set on earth so the adults couldn't find their headquarters in the moon.
 * In some episodes of My Name Is Earl, Darnell Turner (Crab Man) suggests that the moon landing is a hoax.
 * In a Red Bull drink commercial, Neil Armstrong is shown to actually land on the moon, then drinks a Red Bull, causing him to start flying and never actually walk on the surface. Someone over a radio then says, "You drank a Red Bull, didn't you? Come back and we'll shoot it in a studio."
 * On July 3, 2009, in an episode of Coronation Street, character Tyrone Dobbs makes reference to the fact that he doesn't believed that the moon landings happened because of the "Van Halen Belt" (sic) - actually the "Van Allen Belt".
 * In the episode of Megas XLR "Don't tell mom, the baby sitter is Coop" Coop flys Megas to the moon in an attempt to show off to his cousin, once there they land next to one of the Apollo sites knocking over the lander. Coop then says "See I told you they didn't fake that" and then kicks some dust over the lander.

In video games

 * The plot of Activision's 1998 computer game Battlezone is based largely on the idea that while the lunar landings did take place, both the United States and Soviet Union had already spent considerable time on the moon and were actively waging war against each other on the lunar surface using equipment based on alien technology and materials discovered there. In the game's universe, the Apollo landings were a hoax of a different kind, using only technology that had been admitted to the public, rather than the highly advanced and secret alien technology.


 * In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, on the movie studio lot, one of the rooms has a set up of the moon surface with cameras surrounding.


 * In the 2005 first person shooter Area 51, one level is based on the idea that the lunar landing was faked. The room is filled with cameras, cranes, lunar vehicles, and recordings of radio transmissions, positioned in a way to portray a fake lunar terrain and a black wall in the back with a picture of the Earth in the distance. In an unlockable video, the character Dr. Cray says that they did land on the actual Moon, but makes a point that "the mysteries and horrors found there" would expose the alien conspiracy and, of course, would not be suitable for public release.


 * In the 2006 Video game Destroy All Humans! 2, scanning a male Russian while in disguise, will cause him to sometimes say that he thinks that the moon landing was just a TV set in Newark. Whilst on the moon planet, one of the side-quests involves a delivery from a certain company; "It's being delivered by a courier company called... The North American Shipping Association."


 * In the 2007 video game The Simpsons Game in the History Museum there are pictures on the wall (in the "history of man" section) with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon with TV cameras around him.

In music

 * The Men From Earth song "I Faked the Moon Landing" tells an imaginary story of someone's deathbed confession to assisting with the hoax. Among the many references in the song to popular hoax accusations is the line "that wasn't Buzz next to the LEM / just a guy who looked like him."
 * The group Looper have a song called "Dave the Moon Man" on their album Up a Tree. It features a character who does not believe in the Moon landings and repeats several of the major conspiracy arguments.
 * The video for the Rammstein song "Amerika" depicts the band on a movie set wearing NASA suits and a theme of the video is the faking of the Moon landing.
 * There is a song by metal band Margret Heater called "Apollo Conspiracy".
 * Swedish hardcore punk band Refused recorded a song called "The Apollo Programme Was a Hoax" for their final full-length album, The Shape of Punk to Come.
 * The song 'Fall Out' from the album Six by British band Mansun features the lyric, "Did Stanley Kubrick fake it with the moon?"
 * The Solillaquists Of Sound song 'Mark It Place' includes the phrase "I saw the American flag waving proudly on its own without a care, but it was on the moon and there's no wind out there."
 * Scottish Folk-Rock Group Runrig feature the lyric "There was the man who walked on the moon; something I never really believed" in their UK top 40 single Hearthammer.
 * The Diamond Rio song "It's All in Your Head" includes the line "we never walked on the moon" as well as other conspiratorial references such as "Elvis ain't dead."
 * The song Holloway Prison Blues by British Rock band Million Dead features the lyric "And I confess I helped fake the Moon Landings as well."
 * The Mekons' 1988 single, "Ghosts of American Astronauts" mentions "a flag flying free in a vacuum" and a backlot in Texas, seemingly referring to popular arguments by conspiracy theorists.
 * Quebec rock group Exterio made reference to the lunar conspiracy theories in their song "Le Complot".
 * The song "Man on the Moon" from REM's 1992 album Automatic for the People references the moon-landing debate in both its title and lyrics.

Others

 * In the book Great Lies to Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley one of the lies is, "All the Moon landings were shot on a set on Mars".
 * In Wandaba Style, boy genius Susumu Tsukumo is convinced that man never landed on the moon and regards the Moon landings as a hoax,hence his intention to fly to the moon without using fossil fuels.
 * Episode 45 of the machinima Red vs. Blue involves the characters arguing about conspiracy theories, including "We never landed on the sun!"
 * One strip of Wulffmorgenthaler features alien conspiracy theorists asserting that "the Earth landing has never happened."
 * In one strip of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, two astronauts discuss that they have apparently missed the Moon and landed on Mars and that they don't know how to "break it to the public." The strip is followed by a caption underneath reading, "That's right, the moon landing was a fake!"
 * In the Smurfs album The Astrosmurf a moon-landing is faked.
 * "Aldrin About The House", a 2003 Viz strip by Cat Sullivan, features a pair of young female flatmates farcically trying to conceal from their Apollo hoax-obsessed landlord Mr. Sibrel that their third flatmate is Buzz Aldrin (in EVA suit). The strip ends with Sibrel discovering Aldrin in bed with Sibrel's wife and exclaiming "I don't believe it! ... I mean, look at those shadows, which indicate multiple light sources even though only one lamp is on. And the indentations in that matttress aren't nearly enough to account for the mass of two bodies! No, I don't believe it at all!"

Clean slate
I removed a vast quantity of irrelevant trivia from this article, see the above thread. I'm not necessarily saying that what is left is necessarily noteworthy either, but it seems a good place to start. The President Clinton and Norman Mailer quotes are certainly notable and this topic could indeed be a useful resource for someone researching the "Apollo hoax", provided it is expanded with credible sources and non-trivial information. Thoughts? Polyamorph (talk) 20:12, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
 * This popular culture article shows how many times in popular culture the hoax has been mentioned, showing how it has spread. That is the point of this.  You have two people against your removal so far, and no one supporting it.  Form a real consensus please.   D r e a m Focus  17:29, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The above trivia does not belong in wikipedia. There have been many comments on the AfD saying that the trivia must be removed. I simply did that. Poor form on your part for 1. reverting my good faith attempts at actually improving the article so that it contains only notable information, and 2. removing the rescue template. Polyamorph (talk) 17:45, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Many? Uh, no.  Most people said keep.  And some believe that every single thing in a popular culture article is in fact trivia.  What makes mention in one notable work trivia but not others?  Is it the ratings of the television show, the sales of the book, what?  Do you just remove things you don't like, or is there a method to this?   D r e a m Focus  17:53, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * My interpretation is that most people said keep but with some pruning required, and besides consensus isn't formed by vote counting and instead by weighing up the valid arguments. Escape Orbit mentioned pruning the article to a quarter of it's size and "Could do with a clear out of uncited trivia". BeSkepticalOfAll highlighted some very notable points, which I kept in. Bearian said notable examples can be kept and trivia removed. User:Jclemens suggested trimming the listings. etc. I didn't agree with the delete arguments as I think they were tarring the entire article with the same brush as the pointless trivia. I made a point of listing everything that I removed here on this talk page so that if I removed listings that others deemed notable they could be re-added easily. Ultimately I won't support keeping an article this full of such trivial nonsense and was trying to improve it, inline with what I saw as consensus. i.e. that the trivial stuff has to go. You can disagree with that but that doesn't make your viewpoint consensus either. Polyamorph (talk) 18:14, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh, and in answer to your question, I kept all the entries which dealt significantly with the hoax stories, and only removed those which had a passing reference to it. Polyamorph (talk) 18:21, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I accidentally removed the rescue template, and have thus put it back again. Simple mistake.  As the most active long term member of the Rescue Squadron, I'm certainly not trying to remove that.   D r e a m Focus  17:54, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
 * No problem, thanks for putting it back. Polyamorph (talk) 18:14, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Article cleanup
A recent AfD resulted in keep, so it has been decided that this material is suitable for inclusion on wikipedia. I have already removed a lot of unsourced and possibly un notable entries during AfD. At the time this wasn't the most popular thing to do and in hindsight I should have waited. So if there is anything that I removed that should have been kept feel free to discuss here. Additionally, if there is still cleanup needed in the article, lets discuss it here before removing more content. Polyamorph (talk) 19:22, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I would definitely advocate removing the long quotes in the "In print" section. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:06, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The former president of the nation that did the Apollo landing making a statement like that, is very relevant to this article. Both quote explain why the hoax still exist in popular culture, why some still believe it was all a hoax.   D r e a m Focus  21:42, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

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