A movie that doesn’t exist and the Redditors who think it does
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
It was always the Berenstein bears though, get out of my universe!
Edit - If anyone wants a good sci-fi novel, the revelation space series touches on the mandela effect a bit.
But nope, Kazaam is a perfect fit. I had remembered Shaq being in it from the beginning too, and was starting to think that my memory was a a bit faulty.
I would have also guessed "Berenstein", but to be fair, I barely knew how to spell when I read through those books.
I didn't know about the Berenstain alternate universe until long after it was a thing, and I this was my first reaction as well. I never really knew how to spell it, and I hadn't see one of those for many years since.
I also think it's one of those easily confused suffices: -ein, -ine, -ien, -een, -urg, -erg, etc.
There's some mandala drawings in Revelation Space (Philip Lascaille draws them on the pavement in chalk), and there are huge structures called Mandalas in the second and third parts of the Poseidon's Children series. Is it possible that this is what you refer to?
Or does it have to be more widespread to be the Mandela effect?
The first few paragraphs I thought - "yes, I remember this". But once I got farther into it, I realized it was definitely Shaq's Kazaam that I was misremembering.
However--I would never have thought it was Sinbad at all, if the article had not suggested it first.
I'm not sure if that says more about the nature of memory, or the power of suggestion.
Perhaps fading memory combined with strong and 'seemingly accurate' suggestion is quite a powerful thing. There are tons of examples of this.
For example, was that old Tom Cruise movie called "Interview with A Vampire" or "Interview with THE Vampire"? Like 'Shazaam', many people say that at some point the movie title changed. But there's no evidence of that at all.
Perhaps my all time favorite story about the strangeness of memory is more relevant than ever. Borges' story, "Shakespeare's Memory". Read aloud for the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-podcast-h...
Basically, a writer is magically given Shakespeare's memories. "But he soon discovers that memory is a slippery thing, 'not a summation, it is a chaos of vague possibilities.'"
The greatest labyrinth of all might just be the mind.
I remember thinking about that very much when I listened to the podcast Serial. What do we actually remember? I think I only really remember "methods". (neural passageways?)
edit: I was a pain in high school for my physics teacher (and for myself), I never learned any formulas and did everything with dimensional analysis...
I remember what I thought I saw. I don't remember seeing. Even at the police station immediately after the "replay" was fuzzy. 3 months later? I was literally just parroting what I remember saying and thinking at the time not what I remember seeing.
Was a weird experience
Same with the Berenstain Bear books - I'm pretty sure I remembered it as Berenstein as well, but I guess I was wrong, or just mispronounced it as a kid and it stuck. While I remember having read all the books multiple times, it's not like they were that important.
The impact that this has and the amount of discussion it generates is very confusing to me. If it's all in good fun and jest, then no worries I suppose, but if misremembering or simply making a mistake with facts is this mind blowing to people, I'm really curious how they handle more important incorrect facts they hold dearly. Maybe it's a function of my education hammering home the fact that what I knew yesterday might not be true to day (science and technology is like this), but making a mistake like this isn't that earth shattering to me. There's a lot of data out there to remember and of varying priority - a kids movie about a genie and the name of a book I read when I was 4 isn't quite that important to me now as it was when I was 4.
I'm sure most of this is just people having fun with a really widely held mis-memory, but I really hope people don't take it too seriously.
edit: changed opening to include my confusion why this hit front page.
Memory is our connection to the past, to the events that led us to the present. We perceive and interpret the present through the models we constructed with what we experienced before. If we can't trust our memories to be good approximations of past events, we can't trust our judgement.
Let's say physicists around the world start reporting consistent FTL neutrino detections. It could be, of course, a batch of defective cables, but it'd be much harder to convince those who made the measurements when lots of people are getting the same results.
Edit: In fact, they were both mentioned in Scheherazade's 1001 Nights
I have no truck at all with this being mystical or a conspiracy, but I'm enjoying the idea of it.
Plz seed!
I do know there was a Shazam cartoon on VHS. My local Rite Aid used to have a tiny VHS rental section. It was organized by having all of the covers stuffed into a poster display (the kind where a good number of flat frames are hinged at once side and attached to a shelf so you can flip through them like a book), and you simply found one you wanted to rent and told the clerk. The clerk would pull out the movie from underneath the shelf for the one day rental. Anyway, they had an extremely narrow kids selection, which we burned through almost immediately. Except for one title. The only cartoon in the list, Shazam was apparently some kind of superhero, but we would never know because the VHS tape was lost long ago and the manager wasn't interested in either ordering a second copy or removing the cover from the display. So every week we would ask and every week the tape would be missing.
In retrospect it was probably shit, but so was most everything kid oriented in those days.
I wish there was a way to find out how much of what I remember never actually happened
It revolves around a town of people who all claim the existence of a dog. Trouble is, there is no such dog.
Being shaper in the morning I see I should have written Jean Labadie.
The thing is, what most european leaders are fully aware of, its not immigration that is the problem but bad immigration where Germany and France are prime examples.
I hope this helps :)
Edit: Sorry forgot about Jingle All the Way, after that
Edit2: Oh man, and he was great in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia