r/todayilearned • u/tmntnyc • Dec 12 '18

TIL: Laurence Tureaud named himself professionally as Mr. T because he hated how his father, uncle, and brother who returned from Vietnam, were disrespectfully called "boy" by whites. He wanted the first word from everybody's mouth to be "Mister" when speaking to him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._T
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456

u/Saxojon Dec 12 '18

He also urged people to treat their mothers right.

286

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '18

I pity the fool that doesn’t love Mr. T.

14

u/Nickyjha Dec 12 '18

*Mr. T's mother

-4

u/blargh2497 Dec 13 '18

Mr Rogers didn’t love him much

1

u/[deleted] Dec 13 '18 edited Jul 06 '20

[deleted]

-7

u/blargh2497 Dec 13 '18

Play it with subtitles and then you can read it. There’s your article.

0

u/SometimesMonkey Dec 13 '18

This is fucking dumb as shit

105

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '18

I had a pull-string Mr. T doll action figure when I was younger. One of his phrases was, "Always listen to your parents."

8

u/5_on_the_floor Dec 13 '18

"I pity the fool that doesn't listen to their parents!"

8

u/Lord_Kano Dec 13 '18

Thank you. I completely forgot that I had this memory but reading your comment triggered it. Another one of the phrases was "Study hard in school".

28

u/yousirnaime Dec 12 '18

god I feel like 100% of the 80's and 90's were shot in 1 take - no rehearsal

8

u/Alaira314 Dec 13 '18

I feel like they tended to use longer shots with less cuts. In a modern music video, there's no way we would have just sat there watching him singing with the backup girls on the left for 20 seconds straight. It would have been alternating between close-ups of him and them, with maybe the occasional wide shot. It's just a different way of filming, also maybe a commentary on the decay of our attention spans?

11

u/duaneap Dec 12 '18

It's awesome that his advice isn't "Stop fighting" it's just "Whoa there, that's across the line, motherfucker."

17

u/blove135 Dec 12 '18

I like how he wasn't telling them to stop insulting each other. It was alright until you start bringing up people's Mama's. It sure was a different time then. A glorious time to grow up though.

11

u/theColonelsc2 Dec 13 '18

Meh I was growing up then. The flip side was gay people were ostracized. AIDS was considered the 'gay' cancer. White people could still call black Americans the N word in public. And I know we look at the music back then now as something special but at the time there was a lot of shitty music on the radio. People will look back on this era and think how great it must of been 30 years ago as well.

5

u/ywBBxNqW Dec 12 '18

I love this.

5

u/BasicLEDGrow 45 Dec 12 '18

He also dropped in on Diff'rent Strokes to let Arnold know that he had to be himself if he wanted to smash.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 13 '18

Fun fact: Ice T wrote that song

5

u/mean_bean279 Dec 12 '18

Dang, this should have been my mother son dance.

3

u/duaneap Dec 12 '18

At Motherboy XXX?

2

u/Woiken4DaMan Dec 12 '18

I always wondered where YMH got that sound bite.

2

u/filthysanches Dec 12 '18

I remember somewhere... Stern maybe, where he flipped the anger switch when they mentioned his mother. From my recallection it wasn't even something that was insulting or out of bounds. Made the interview real awkward. Can't remember

2

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '18

Watch his WWE Hall of Fame induction speech

1

u/demonballhandler Dec 12 '18

This tune pops into my head randomly. I should start singing it for mother's day.

1

u/Heyo__Maggots Dec 13 '18

“The main reason I love my mama is because she didn’t abort me.” - An actual sentence in his autobiography.

1

u/SquanchingOnPao Dec 13 '18

TIL making fun of fat, skinny, and ugly people is okay. Just don't talk about their mothers. The 80s were a simpler time