Random Dumb Things Pop Culture Had Us Believing Until We Finally Figured Out The Truth 2021 (16 items)

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  (#5) Ammunition Never Runs Out In War

  The Trope: Film characters can go an entire two-and-a-half hour movie without ever needing to reload their weapons, despite firing large and indiscriminate bursts of ammunition with alarming frequency.

  Why Is It Inaccurate? Supply chains are an ever-underrated and pivotal aspect of warfare, and the limitations thereof have always ensured that real-life soldiers are a lot more conservative with their ammo than their Hollywood counterparts. This is especially true when it comes to World War II, with infantry usually able to carry 100 or so rounds at most into battle, and often far fewer.

  It’s also especially true when it came to WWII-era aircraft. The notion of one pilot shooting down multiple enemy bogies on a single run is essentially fiction, with Spitfires specifically carrying 14 seconds' worth of ammo on them at a time. Apparently, nobody told Tom Hardy.

  Notable Offenders: Dunkirk, Saving Private Ryan, Where Eagles Dare. In fact, it’d be far easier to list the few programs that make of point of showing their characters reloading and conserving ammo, like Band of Brothers.
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  (#9) Renaissance Women Wore Their Hair Long And Down

  The Trope: Renaissance women let their hair flow free, growing it extremely long.

  Why Is It Inaccurate? Although women did have long hair in the Renaissance, they typically swept it up and hid it under hairnets or veils. Long, flowing hair often interfered with fashion, like the collars and neck ruffs that became popular in 16th century England. 

  Notable Offenders: The Borgias, The Tudors, The Other Boleyn Girl
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  (#14) Victorians Had No Sense Of Humor

  The Trope: All Victorians maintained a depressive and dreary attitude about life, one completely devoid of humor.

  Why It's Wrong: How could the era that introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes lack any comedic qualities? Sharing jokes was an honored pastime in Victorian England, where the term "laugh and grow fat" was taken very seriously. Professional humorists made their living writing jokes all day, and personal ads were dominated by singles in need of a partner who could make them laugh.

  Notable Offenders: Popular Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy reveled in working-class woe, and this tone carried over into many of the BBC adaptations of famous Victorian written works.
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  (#10) Renaissance Men Wore Their Doublets Open

  The Trope: Renaissance men liked to show a fair amount of chest hair while walking down the street.

  Why Is It Inaccurate? That white shirt under the doublet is called a chemise, and wasn't meant to be seen at all - it was the Renaissance equivalent of underwear. So when Joseph Fiennes wanders the streets of London with his doublet wide open, he's showing off his underwear for everyone to see.

  Actors sometimes sport a similarly inaccurate style when they appear without a chemise at all. But the garment served a critical function during the Renaissance. In an era when people washed their clothes less frequently, the chemise kept sweat and grime off people's fancy clothes.

  Notable Offenders: Shakespeare in Love
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  (#4) Bullets Ripped Through People Underwater During World War II

  The Trope: A soldier attempting to storm a beach, probably somewhere near Normandy, has second thoughts when he's met with a barrage of bullets and dives back under the surf for protection - only to have bullets rip through the water and puncture his body anyway.

  Why Is It Inaccurate? Consider that, as recently as 2019, US Special Forces were still hard at working trying to invent a bullet that would travel effectively underwater. Water is, after all, 800 times denser than air, which is what most bullets are designed to pass through. In reality, and as The Smithsonian Channel and the Mythbusters have both conclusively proven, bullets can only pass through a few feet of water at the absolute most, continuously slowing down as they go. As it turns out, real soldiers on D-Day could, and did, earn a temporary reprieve from oncoming gunfire by ducking under the waves.

  Notable Offenders: No film is more guilty of this than Saving Private Ryan, where director Steven Spielberg described the difficulty he had replicating bullets passing through water on film without realizing the obvious reason why that was:

  Often the pellets wouldn’t go far enough but at least they gave us a really good reference so we were able to digitally augment the shot with a stronger visual of a projectile coursing through the water.
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  (#1) You Can Simply Pull Arrows Out Of Your Body

  Trope: Arrows are easy to pull out of the body.

  Why Is It Inaccurate? Imagine you're a French soldier fighting against the English at the Battle of Agincourt (1415). Suddenly, you're struck by a pointy triangle of metal launched from an English longbow with at least 100 pounds of force.

  Fortunately for you, the arrow didn't hit any major organs. Unfortunately, the metal tip has embedded itself in your humerus. Even if you could muster the strength and leverage to rip the arrow out of your arm bone, the pain would make it nearly impossible.

  Now, supposing you did, somehow, get that arrow out? Many arrow tips were barbed, so there's a good chance it would take pieces of you with it. You might also just rip out the shaft, leaving the arrow tip (and splinters) behind.

  And in the unlikely event you did manage to get the whole thing out? Now you have an infection to worry about.

  Notable Offenders: Troy, The Road Warrior, Heroes, Xena: Warrior Princess

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