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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: They're misremembering Shaq playing a genie in Kazaam as Sinbad playing a genie in "Shazaam".

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure why people make such a big deal out of it, muchless why it's a front page article here. When I read the first few lines of the article I figured it was referring to the movie with Shaq, then realized I remembered the name wrong when I saw the image for "Kazaam". It wasn't exactly earth shattering that I misremembered something that was a minor part of my childhood.

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.

> Yeah, I'm not entirely sure why people make such a big deal out of it

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.

I don't remember Sinbad in anything related to this story. Although I very clearly thought the Shaq movie was named "Shazaam", even as far as remembering his catchphrase from the movie as "I am Shazaam".

Probably a stretch, but Sinbad the Sailor was a character from Arabian folklore, as were genies.

Edit: In fact, they were both mentioned in Scheherazade's 1001 Nights

And also that Sinbad did dress up as Sinbad the Sailor as host of an afternoon of Sinbad movies in 1994.

I don't think that was the only time Sinbad dressed as a genie. I have no memory of a movie but I remember a nineties commercial where he played a genie but I don't recall the product.

Was he wearing blue and gold? I seem to remember Sinbad in a genie suit too but nothing like what Shaq's costume looks like in Kazaam. I'm totally in the camp of memory is faulty but it's just fascinating to me that so many people misremember the same things. I vote that it's the government testing time travel technology.

Incidentally, "Shazam" is associated with the comic book character Captain Marvel; I'm not sure whether the comics introduced the name or merely popularized it, but in Google Ngrams it's virtually nonexistent before taking off in the 1960s (Captain Marvel first appearing in 1940).

Probably. But some people are acknowledging both films, and remembering that when they saw the Kazaam publicity that it looked like a crappy rip off of Shazaam.

I have no truck at all with this being mystical or a conspiracy, but I'm enjoying the idea of it.

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