4

Mulan's Fake Name Means "Eye Candy"

Disney, Buena Vista Pictures

Disney's Mulan is the story of a young Chinese girl pretending to be a man to take her elderly father's place in the army. But let's face it: On the whole, Mulan was about as Chinese as Tank Man T-shirts manufactured in independent Tibet, starting with the movie's most high-ranking characters being voiced by Americans of Japanese descent and ending with Eddie Murphy playing a particularly chatty Pokemon.

Disney, Buena Vista Pictures

However, there was still one genuinely Chinese (or rather Cantonese) thing about the movie: a joke that occurs when Mulan, disguised as a man, arrives at a military camp, where the unthinkable happens and someone asks her for her name.

Disney, Buena Vista Pictures

The name she ends up giving them is "Ping," and if you speak Cantonese, that apparently was a pretty hilarious joke. See, Mulan comes from the Fa family, thus making her full (fake) name "Fa Ping," which means "flower vase." But the term is also used to describe a woman whose only real skill is to stand there, look nice, and "Don't you worry your pretty little head 'bout it none," just like an actual flower vase. Or, in other words, "eye candy."

3

There's a Jerry Maguire Joke in King Kong ... in Morse Code

Universal Pictures

Disclaimer: If you object to me calling Morse code a language, please state your case in the comment section for a chance to win a horrible Paint drawing of a penguin.

Unless you're filming a Paris Hilton biography, it's near impossible to make a story about a horny monster rampaging through the streets of New York sound in any way serious or believable. Surprisingly, though, that's exactly what Peter Jackson did in his version of King Kong, which isn't to suggest that the original was a comedy or anything like that, but on the other hand ... this:

Turner Entertainment, Warner Bros.

In Jackson's movie, everything was made darker and edgier. Kong was made more threatening, the fauna of Skull Island more lethal, and the island natives more feral and deranged.

2

Pretty Much Every Non-English Restaurant Name Is a Joke

20th Century Fox

1

A Character From Game of Thrones Recites a Monty Python Joke

HBO

Disclaimer: [The Dothraki word for "spoilers"], [the Dothraki word for "... duh"]

I kind of hate Game of Thrones, because after each season finale, I find myself unable to enjoy any other serious show out there, always thinking stuff like "Man, GoT would have done that better" or "Man, GoT never made me use Google to see the cast naked." So the only things that I can watch in the summer are comedies, because comedy is the one thing that Game of Thrones doesn't really do ... intentionally, at least.

HBO

That is, except for one instance. During the third episode of Season 4, Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the Unburnt, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Scourge of Starbucks Baristas Everywhere, arrives at the gates of the city of Meereen, intending to conquer it. In response, the city sends out a champion to fight her best warrior, but not before he taunts Daenerys in the fictional low Valyrian language by suggesting many unorthodox things she can do with/to her genitalia.

HBO

At any rate, that's what Daenerys' translator tells us. But according to David Peterson, who created Valyrian for the show, the Meereenese champ is actually saying that Daenerys' mother was a hamster and her father smelled of elderberries. And yes, those insults do sound awfully familiar, because the guy is actually quoting the famous scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when a French soldier hurls taunts at King Arthur and his knights.

Peterson explains that the idea to sneak that reference into the show came from series creator Dan Weiss, who probably reckoned that no one would ever catch an obscure joke like that. But after the episode aired, Peterson immediately started getting tweets from apparently-Valyrian-proficient, definitely-unemployed people who caught the incorrect translation given in the show, forcing the man to come clean about the little joke, because Internet people are exactly that frightening.

Interestingly, no one ever seems to mention the episode's other Monty Python reference about Ser Davos Seaworth mispronouncing the word "knight" as "ka-niggit," which, oh, would you look at that, also comes from the rude Frenchman scene (starts at 1:27).

Of course, now that you know that, you'll never be able to watch Joffrey's funeral scene without wishing that Cersei and Jaime re-enacted the dead parrot sketch with his corpse.

HBO

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.

For more from Cezary, check out The 5 Most Insane Examples of Chinese Counterfeiting and The 5 Weirdest Things That Control the Global Economy.

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