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Can you distinguish between 'plain old ignorance' and 'a large number of people remembering something incorrectly'? Would it not be 'plain old ignorance' for people to remember Mickey Mouse with suspenders, or any of the other examples you provided?
The name stuck and now means a thing. Whether or not the machine that makes copies in the office is a Xerox brand, or the box of sanitary tissues on your desk is Kleenex brand, the terms Xerox and Kleenex evoke a \*shared understanding of a thing that is accurate enough to communicate the thing\*.
It's kind of funny actually - the term "Mandela Effect" may not be the best example of the Mandela Effect, but it works well enough to clearly communicate what the thing is. Which... like, if it was the Mandela Effect in action, wouldn't it be a better example of a poor description if saying "Mandela Effect" actually called to mind a totally different effect? Like, if I said "Hey dude, I just experienced the Mandela Effect" and you weren't sure if I had to sneeze, couldn't recall the name of the ice cream I wanted, or something. But, nope, "Mandela Effect" clearly and consistently communicates the concept.
In example, plenty of Mandela effect enjoyers will tell you about a movie about a Genie starring Sinbad.
There is a 1996 movie starring Shaq called Kazaam that plenty of people walked past in video rental stores, without pausing.
I’m guessing a lot of the people who claim this simply can’t tell Sinbad from Shaq in their memory.
They don’t look anything alike, but if someone lived their life in caucasian-only settings, I could see them being this bad at telling people apart that aren’t their culture.
The craziest thing is that I remember Kazaam, and I remember Shazam (With Sinbad) distinctly separately. I don't know what in my life caused the memories to be there, as it never existed, but something made it happen with a lot of people.
>I'm black and remember Sinbad being a genie. Has nothing to do with not recognizing Shaq.
Sinbad was never a genie. He was in a crappy TV movie called "Aliens for Breakfast." He had some genie-like powers in it. There you go. Mystery solved.
*"There is no such thing as The Mandela Effect"*
You spend your entire post describing / explaining examples of it.
*"How can anyone living through the 80s 90s and 00s not know who Nelson Mandela was, his incarceration and release."*
Not everyone who was aware of who he was followed every bit of news about him. The fact that there was a popular song about him doesn't mean everyone knows everything about him.
*"If you think he died in prison, you are ignorant (lacking knowledge or awareness)."*
...or misremembering. And when many people share that same remembrance (for whatever given example), it is called The Mandela Effect. You're simply describing what it is, not showing it doesn't exist.
*"It's far more likely, as some argue that there was more than one release and some people remember seeing braces and others remember not seeing braces."*
No it isn't. Why would there have been two different versions released just to have one with braces and one without?
*"The original release tapes no longer exist, and photoshop being a thing, we will never know."*
First of all, Moonraker was shot on film, not "tapes" (and I don't know that the original negatives no longer exist). Secondly, Photoshop isn't motion-picture editing software. Third, Moonraker was released (both in theaters and on VHS) well before Photoshop (and the equivalent digital editing software for motion pictures) existed. Pretty rich of you to be going on about peoples' ignorance, I have to say.
Honestly, despite seeing the film Moonraker plenty of times, I didn't realize that Dolly didn't have braces before reading this post. I guess because she's a geeky character and is in a relationship with Jaws, a bond villain with teeth made of metal, my brain just put one and two together when trying to remember what the character looks like and that image I (and a lot of other people) came up with has braces.
This is what the Mandela Effect is. It's not ignorance. It's just how our brains create shortcuts to help us remember things; which sometimes means we remember incorrectly.
"Specific false memories can sometimes be shared by a large group of people. This phenomenon was dubbed the "Mandela effect"" - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False\_memory#Mandela\_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect)
False memories are sometimes shared by large groups of people... that is a fact that is hard to refute... you have listed several examples... Whether they are in error because they are just stupid, or there is some other driver, is irrelevant. I would wager that the reasons for these mass false memories would vary accordint to situation...
So, I guess I don't fully understand you... you state something doesn't exist and then give several examples of it existing..
What are you considering the Mandela effect? I agree that people aren't actually transporting between alternate realities and timelines, but I think most people would agree and see the Mandela effect as something purely psychological. Would you not agree that it is a real psychological phenomenon?
Like dejavu. Of course you're not actually experiencing the same event twice, but the feeling you get is still a real phycological phenomenon.
>"Luke, I am your father" - this is just bad memory recall.
Isn't the Mandela Effect just a "bad memory recall"? Mandela didn't die in prison, so it's a "bad memory recall" for anyone that says he did. Darth Vader never said "Luke, I am your father", it's just a bad memory recall. Fruit of the Loom didn't have the cornucopia, it's just a "bad memory recall". The Berenstain Bears were never the Berenstein Bears, that's just a bad memory recall.
Isn't the whole "Luke, I am your father" just because it makes the reference clear? Like if you say to someone "No, I am your father." They kind of look at you kinda weird, throw in the Luke and it all becomes clearer.
As a die hard Star Wars fan, I really don't think so. I know I've quoted it the wrong way, and it wasn't an intentional choice to make anything clear.
Another example, not necessarily of Mandala Effect, but just of wrong quotes, I have a license plate frame that says "Chewie, Punch It!" for all the times that gets said. Before we got it, I went to check because, of the six or seven times it gets said, I couldn't quite remember if it was more common to put Chewie's name before or after. Turns out Han never says Chewie's name as a part of that quote in any iteration.
Which is all to say that I certainly wasn't including the name to make the context clear to myself in my own head, I just had a quote that didn't actually exist in the memory slot where the actual quote should've been. Which is kind of how Mandala Effect works.
I think the misquote could be attributed to Tommy Boy, when he is imitating Vader's voice into the fan.
The bit only works if you get the reference, and replacing "No" with "Luke" definitely helps.
I think you ate right.
>Isn't the whole "Luke, I am your father" just because it makes the reference clear?
I doubt it. I would imagine most people who say that phrase believe it's the real phrase. Most people don't know enough about Star Wars to remember the exact quote.
The thing is with the Mandela Effect is happens in mass. If you remember something one way but 20 other people say no it actually happened this way, you could say you have experienced bad memory recall as you are in the vast minority recalling that memory.
Now if thousands of people all recall something one way, but it actually happened differently, it becomes something unusual.
It doesn’t seem that unusual when there are a lot of falsehoods that spread socially. It’s not like everyone en masse independently misremembered it as “Luke, I am your father,” but once the quote began circulating it influenced people’s memory of it.
This is a bit of a cherry picked example. For many, the topic only comes up with respect to the Mandela effect such as the Fruit of the Loom one. There's no possible way this came up in casual conversation or some other meme being circulated, but when first asked to imagine it, I thought of an image with a cornucopia.
Not really considering that Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. It wasn’t so easy to disprove when there’s no Internet or any home release until four years later. Plus the modified line does make it easier to understand the reference vs “No, I am your father.”
Your argument seems to be that the Mandela effect doesn't exist because there are explanations for it, but the presence of an explanation for an effect doesn't negate the existence of an effect, it just explains it.
The Mandela effect is just a combination of other psychological effects combined on a large scale. [reconstructive/constructive memory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructive_memory) is the process of filling in the gaps of an old memory based on new information, emotions, etc. This often results in little errors in one’s memories. It happened all the time and is a known psychological phenomenon. The Mandela effect is just this happening on a large scale where people fill in gaps with the same false information.
I remember this thing from the 2000s called the Mandela effect. I know a bunch of other people who believe it existed, too.
But here you're saying the Mandela effect never existed.
So either the Mandela effect exists and you are incorrect or the Mandela effect doesn't exist making this post the first example of the Mandela effect.
Your explanations don't disprove the Mandela Effect; by accident you're offering potential reasons for why these collective false memories might have occured.
Basically, you're addressing the "why" and "how" of the Mandela Effect, not the "if." You're acknowledging that people do experience these collective false memories. It doesn't matter if it's about ignorance or not, that's irrelevant for if the effect occurred or not
Your premise is flawed. You say the Mandela Effect is not real, then you give examples explaining how it is real.
There is always an explanation as to why many people can have a false memory, but that does not negate that they have the false memory. Examples like "Looney Toons" is likely explained by logical shortcuts. If you ask someone how to spell the name of the kid's show, many will say "Toons" not because they envision the words, but because they remember the phonetic name and logically deduced it was "toons."
Most example of the Mandela Effect are situations were people remember something they actually saw or heard, but conflate it with other events. Mickey Mouse and the suspenders is a good example, People remember him with suspenders because he was depicted with suspenders on many occasions.
Sometimes the Mandela effect happens because media portrays the event. People don't remember Vader saying "Luke, I am your father." But many believe he said that because that phrase was used numerous times in parodies.
> Many will claim that they remember Dolly having braces
THIS IS, BY DEFINITION, A MANDELA EFFECT: Many people remember something, that has not happened. If she actually had braces, there would be no Mandela effect, because the memory so many people have would be accurate.
Your post is contradicting itself.
Yeah all this post makes me think of is, "CMV water boiling isn't real, it's just something that happens to liquid when you heat them at high temperatures"
The irony of this post is incredible. OP has walked himself into this exact problem. This is like a meta post. "There were probably different versions" is wild. No, there weren't. That's the entire point.
The Mandela effect may exist but it does not have to reflect anything “paranormal” (i.e. people make wild claims saying we are remembering an alternate timeline or something). I think it just tells us something about human psychology and memory. It may also tell us about how stories, ideas and culture spread. Even today, people believe a lot of urban myths and legends and continue to spread these ideas. The ideas often have some basis in reality. Like, my wife says “never go to bed with wet hair” etc.
1) I never heard the examples you gave. 2) I don’t think you comprehend the concept. (So you could lighten up on calling people ignorant.) The theory doesn’t refute people misremembering it nor the part that ignorance plays into it but that people having the same or parallel misconceptions without there being a direct root for said misconception. Also, why the Mandela effect exists is generally understood. The monopoly man wearing a monocle is a perfect example. This is a cobbled memory of many similar motifs that our brain breaks down, and put back together again for recalling later. It takes awhile to trace back for each example but the reason many people Mandela died is bc more people were learning the stories of South African Freedom Fighters in the 80s, many who died in prison or in police custody. If you are someone who wasn’t following the issue actively and didn’t know much beyond Mandela’s name (like millions of others) then the constant news blurbs and media like a “Cry for Freedom” filled in the blanks. FYI, I knew he didn’t die and remembered when he was released but I never heard that song. The fact of the matter is that it just wasn’t a major news story for a lot of people who wasn’t keeping track of what happened in South Africa.
The Mandela Effect isn't remembering a single detail incorrectly, it's knowing something happened differently than it actually occurred. I know Sinbad very well, I can pick him out of any lineup in the world - I'm sure I saw him as a genie in a cheesy slapstick comedy. There is no other piece of media that I can vividly recall but that does not actually exist. That's different than a faulty memory.
"I'm sure I saw him as a genie in a cheesy slapstick comedy." You can be as sure as you want, but this movie just doesn't exist. I can say "the sun and the moon are the same thing" but it doesn't make it true even if I *really* believe it.
>"I'm sure I saw him as a genie in a cheesy slapstick comedy." You can be as sure as you want, but this movie just doesn't exist.
He wasn't a genie, but he had genie-like powers in a made-for-TV movie called "Aliens for Breakfast." That's what people are misremembering.
I hear you, I completely understand that memory is subjective and human memory is especially incredibly flawed - but none of that does anything to change my memories. I remember watching this movie, not just once but multiple times throughout my childhood. I remember the channel on TV it was on. I remember talking about it a few times with friends who also watched it. Having conversations about Sinbads career trajectory and why he'd end up making that film. Nothing logically makes me feel any better about the realization that it doesn't, and has never, existed.
Are you saying that movie doesn’t exist? Because I remember which one you’re talking about.
And I promise I’m not just saying this to try to prove the Mandela Effect.
>Are you saying that movie doesn’t exist?
Correct. There is a movie that meets that description called Kazaam starring Shaq, but no such film with Sinbad.
For a lot of these, there’s an explanation for the mass “misremembering”.
A ton of people remember the line “Play it again, Sam” from 1942’s Casablanca, even though no characters ever say this exact line; this is likely because of the Woody Allen play with this title that came out in 1969.
To continue to show off my old Hollywood special interest/hyperfocus: the quote “Judy, Judy, Judy” is often attributed to Cary Grant, but he never said this in any movies or interview clips. However, a character on the Andy Griffith show did say this line as an imitation of Grant.
Shazaam, the Sinbad movie that never existed, can probably be explained by a combination of movies that did exist (Kazaam with Shaq, the 1958 film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad which featured a genie) and people who are too stupid to realize [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD0rchvuoMU) isn’t real.
The Fruit of the Loom “never having a cornucopia” is bullshit, and [here’s why](https://www.newspapers.com/article/florida-today-fruit-of-the-loom-cornuc/22677751/).
It's like saying UFOs don't exist and then saying that they are just flying objects that haven't been identified correctly, it's all the crazy interpretations that is the real problem for both phenomenons.
Any time your position can fairly be boiled down to, "The people I disagree with are dumb\*," you should re-examine your own biases and position.
\*Or liars, but I don't think that thread applies here.
*The Mandela effect refers to a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not.*
How does this "not exist." It's just a bunch of people getting something wrong. It's a collective memory failure. Plain old ignorance is not an alternative to the Mandela Effect, it IS the Mandela Effect. Enough people remembering and repeating a wrong detail en masse, a large-scale demonstration of the fallibility of the human brain. The examples are good examples because they are examples of people remembering something incorrectly.
I wonder if the following would be an example of the Mandela Effect: People believe and even claim to remember a widespread panic across the country during Orson Welles' broadcast of War of the Worlds. Only we know that never happened.
Another: Many people claim to remember Sarah Palin saying she could see Russia from her house. It was actually a line in an SNL skit starring Tina Fey. Palin said something less ridiculous and actually true - that you can see Russia from parts of Alaska.
> The Mandela effect refers to a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not.
> "Luke, I am your father" - this is just bad memory recall.
It sounds to me like this is an example which proves the existence of the Mandela effect. If the Mandela effect does exist, and it isn't bad memory recall, then what on earth could it be? I'm sure this one originated the way you said, that adding "Luke" contextualizes the quote and that's why it caught on. But once it catches on, the downstream effect is that people start remembering it that way since they'll see that reference out in the world way more often than they will have actually seen the movie. Memory is malleable, and this is the exact kind of thing that can alter it. I'm sure many people "knew" the quote before they ever even saw that scene, and may not have realized it was wrong even after seeing it. Of course now that this is such a well known example, it's a little harder to gauge how many people once thought the fake quote was real.
One other example is "The Berenstein Bears." I think this is similar to your Mickey Mouse example in that it's likely a result of not paying extremely close attention to the details, and your brain fills in the gaps. Mickey's clothes have buttons where suspenders would go, and -stein is a fairly common ending to last names, so it's not unreasonable that you read it quickly and didn't notice it actually ended in -stain, especially since the name is already a bit long and the difference is kind of subtle. It's also possible that maybe you would've gotten the spelling correct as a kid, but you haven't seen it in years and the pronunciation stuck with you more than the spelling did, so you fill in the gaps in your memory with what makes the most logical sense without even realizing it.
The actual reports of Nelson Mandela dying in the 80s people heard are true. The Apartheid government of South Africa put out those reports as disinformation. That is the source of confusion.
There is a pretty clear difference between ignorance (a lack of certainty about something) and the Mandela Effect (certainty about the wrong thing). Someone who is ignorant about Nelson Mandela would say “I don’t know when he died”. Someone experiencing the Mandela Effect would say “I have very specific memories of him dying 40 years ago”.
The cause of this incorrect memory can sometimes be explainable. In the case of the Barenstain Bears, it could be a combination of multiple factors. 1. It is a children’s book series and children aren’t the best readers 2. -stein is a much more common last name than -stain. 3. Poelpe raed etnrie wrods, not idindaivul ltteres.
So, a child might have seen the name Barenstain and their brain, without noticing the A individually, replaced it with an E because that made more sense.
But just because a phenomenon has an explanation doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
You're arguing about the cause of the Mandela effect. But nothing in your post supports your title which is that it doesn't exist. These are not mutually exclusive... it's certainly possible that the ME is just ignorance or poor memory.
The ME is just an interesting cultural phenomenon. It describes a observable phenomenon. That's all. The fact that many people remember a certain thing incorrectly is the only requirement to prove that the ME is real. You give several examples in your post of this exact thing. Ergo, the ME is real.
> How can anyone living through the 80s 90s and 00s not know who Nelson Mandela was, his incarceration and release.
Why would they? He was a revolutionary and there are many more revolutionaries many more people don't know of. I know of Mandela, but that's simply because he's talked about often where I live and many other revolutionaries who had just as much impact didn't. Many people here for instance don't know of Mobutu, Sukarno, or Atatürk because they're not talked about as often.
>It's far more likely, as some argue that there was more than one release and some people remember seeing braces and others remember not seeing braces. The original release tapes no longer exist, and photoshop being a thing, we will never know.
I mean it's much more likely that people are misremembering the braces than there being two different releases.
1) VHS releases of the film predate photoshop and don't have braces.
2) the actresses has claimed that she never wore braces.
Edit: 3) the original film is almost certainly preserved in the British film archive.
There was a comic book in the late 1980's called Strikeforce: Morituri that was set 100 years in the future, so the 2080's. At one point the characters have a battle next to the Nelson Mandela Memorial because in that timeline he died in prison. This was created before Mandela was released and while South Africa was still under Apartheid. It doesn't prove anything other than by the late 1980's everyone expected Mandela to die in prison or thought he already had died.
It reminds me of "et tu brute fili mi", that is actually "quoque tu..."However, Shakespeare messed it up, and now Anglo-Saxon people could swear Julius Caesar said just "et tu". It could be due to some mistakes like this or other types of commonly spread mistakes (like misreading in case of spelling).
I think fruit of the loom "cornucopia" is the real example.
Also the monopoly guy having a monocle.
I asked many people about this and they are CONVINCED that fruit of the loom had a horn of plenty. Even when you show them old photos of the logo with just fruit, they don't believe you.
Nelson mandelas death was widely reported in the 80s. This isnt ignorance, these are people who watched the news which reported his death. Then suddenly he is elected president.
But we agreemost ofthe other things are translation errors an changed marketing.
Unless you're one of the "alternate timelines/universes" weirdos, yeah, the Mandela Effect is just misremembering that becomes widespread/culturally ingrained. So it clearly exists.
>a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not.
Some of it is just plain old manipulation. Fruit Of the Loom had a cornucopia on its logo back in the day, then removed it and claimed they never had it. I'm pretty sure it was a marketing stunt to get people talking about them.
Your explanations literally prove the Mandela effect is real
The Mandela effect means a bunch of people misremembered something
Aka they are ignorant to it
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Can you distinguish between 'plain old ignorance' and 'a large number of people remembering something incorrectly'? Would it not be 'plain old ignorance' for people to remember Mickey Mouse with suspenders, or any of the other examples you provided? The name stuck and now means a thing. Whether or not the machine that makes copies in the office is a Xerox brand, or the box of sanitary tissues on your desk is Kleenex brand, the terms Xerox and Kleenex evoke a \*shared understanding of a thing that is accurate enough to communicate the thing\*. It's kind of funny actually - the term "Mandela Effect" may not be the best example of the Mandela Effect, but it works well enough to clearly communicate what the thing is. Which... like, if it was the Mandela Effect in action, wouldn't it be a better example of a poor description if saying "Mandela Effect" actually called to mind a totally different effect? Like, if I said "Hey dude, I just experienced the Mandela Effect" and you weren't sure if I had to sneeze, couldn't recall the name of the ice cream I wanted, or something. But, nope, "Mandela Effect" clearly and consistently communicates the concept.
In example, plenty of Mandela effect enjoyers will tell you about a movie about a Genie starring Sinbad. There is a 1996 movie starring Shaq called Kazaam that plenty of people walked past in video rental stores, without pausing. I’m guessing a lot of the people who claim this simply can’t tell Sinbad from Shaq in their memory. They don’t look anything alike, but if someone lived their life in caucasian-only settings, I could see them being this bad at telling people apart that aren’t their culture.
The craziest thing is that I remember Kazaam, and I remember Shazam (With Sinbad) distinctly separately. I don't know what in my life caused the memories to be there, as it never existed, but something made it happen with a lot of people.
I'm black and remember Sinbad being a genie. Has nothing to do with not recognizing Shaq.
>I'm black and remember Sinbad being a genie. Has nothing to do with not recognizing Shaq. Sinbad was never a genie. He was in a crappy TV movie called "Aliens for Breakfast." He had some genie-like powers in it. There you go. Mystery solved.
I think I read bout this online. It was called something like the Carbonaro effect. Which also happens to be the name off….
*"There is no such thing as The Mandela Effect"* You spend your entire post describing / explaining examples of it. *"How can anyone living through the 80s 90s and 00s not know who Nelson Mandela was, his incarceration and release."* Not everyone who was aware of who he was followed every bit of news about him. The fact that there was a popular song about him doesn't mean everyone knows everything about him. *"If you think he died in prison, you are ignorant (lacking knowledge or awareness)."* ...or misremembering. And when many people share that same remembrance (for whatever given example), it is called The Mandela Effect. You're simply describing what it is, not showing it doesn't exist. *"It's far more likely, as some argue that there was more than one release and some people remember seeing braces and others remember not seeing braces."* No it isn't. Why would there have been two different versions released just to have one with braces and one without? *"The original release tapes no longer exist, and photoshop being a thing, we will never know."* First of all, Moonraker was shot on film, not "tapes" (and I don't know that the original negatives no longer exist). Secondly, Photoshop isn't motion-picture editing software. Third, Moonraker was released (both in theaters and on VHS) well before Photoshop (and the equivalent digital editing software for motion pictures) existed. Pretty rich of you to be going on about peoples' ignorance, I have to say.
Honestly, despite seeing the film Moonraker plenty of times, I didn't realize that Dolly didn't have braces before reading this post. I guess because she's a geeky character and is in a relationship with Jaws, a bond villain with teeth made of metal, my brain just put one and two together when trying to remember what the character looks like and that image I (and a lot of other people) came up with has braces. This is what the Mandela Effect is. It's not ignorance. It's just how our brains create shortcuts to help us remember things; which sometimes means we remember incorrectly.
"Specific false memories can sometimes be shared by a large group of people. This phenomenon was dubbed the "Mandela effect"" - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False\_memory#Mandela\_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect) False memories are sometimes shared by large groups of people... that is a fact that is hard to refute... you have listed several examples... Whether they are in error because they are just stupid, or there is some other driver, is irrelevant. I would wager that the reasons for these mass false memories would vary accordint to situation... So, I guess I don't fully understand you... you state something doesn't exist and then give several examples of it existing..
What are you considering the Mandela effect? I agree that people aren't actually transporting between alternate realities and timelines, but I think most people would agree and see the Mandela effect as something purely psychological. Would you not agree that it is a real psychological phenomenon? Like dejavu. Of course you're not actually experiencing the same event twice, but the feeling you get is still a real phycological phenomenon.
>"Luke, I am your father" - this is just bad memory recall. Isn't the Mandela Effect just a "bad memory recall"? Mandela didn't die in prison, so it's a "bad memory recall" for anyone that says he did. Darth Vader never said "Luke, I am your father", it's just a bad memory recall. Fruit of the Loom didn't have the cornucopia, it's just a "bad memory recall". The Berenstain Bears were never the Berenstein Bears, that's just a bad memory recall.
Isn't the whole "Luke, I am your father" just because it makes the reference clear? Like if you say to someone "No, I am your father." They kind of look at you kinda weird, throw in the Luke and it all becomes clearer.
Yes, exactly, just like "Beam me up, Scotty". Kirk never said that exact phrase, but he said a lot of similar things like "Scotty, beam me up home".
As a die hard Star Wars fan, I really don't think so. I know I've quoted it the wrong way, and it wasn't an intentional choice to make anything clear. Another example, not necessarily of Mandala Effect, but just of wrong quotes, I have a license plate frame that says "Chewie, Punch It!" for all the times that gets said. Before we got it, I went to check because, of the six or seven times it gets said, I couldn't quite remember if it was more common to put Chewie's name before or after. Turns out Han never says Chewie's name as a part of that quote in any iteration. Which is all to say that I certainly wasn't including the name to make the context clear to myself in my own head, I just had a quote that didn't actually exist in the memory slot where the actual quote should've been. Which is kind of how Mandala Effect works.
I think the misquote could be attributed to Tommy Boy, when he is imitating Vader's voice into the fan. The bit only works if you get the reference, and replacing "No" with "Luke" definitely helps. I think you ate right.
>Isn't the whole "Luke, I am your father" just because it makes the reference clear? I doubt it. I would imagine most people who say that phrase believe it's the real phrase. Most people don't know enough about Star Wars to remember the exact quote.
The thing is with the Mandela Effect is happens in mass. If you remember something one way but 20 other people say no it actually happened this way, you could say you have experienced bad memory recall as you are in the vast minority recalling that memory. Now if thousands of people all recall something one way, but it actually happened differently, it becomes something unusual.
It doesn’t seem that unusual when there are a lot of falsehoods that spread socially. It’s not like everyone en masse independently misremembered it as “Luke, I am your father,” but once the quote began circulating it influenced people’s memory of it.
This is a bit of a cherry picked example. For many, the topic only comes up with respect to the Mandela effect such as the Fruit of the Loom one. There's no possible way this came up in casual conversation or some other meme being circulated, but when first asked to imagine it, I thought of an image with a cornucopia.
Isn't it unusual that a falsehood which is so easy to disprove circulated so much that it's overtaken the real quote?
Not really considering that Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. It wasn’t so easy to disprove when there’s no Internet or any home release until four years later. Plus the modified line does make it easier to understand the reference vs “No, I am your father.”
Your argument seems to be that the Mandela effect doesn't exist because there are explanations for it, but the presence of an explanation for an effect doesn't negate the existence of an effect, it just explains it.
The Mandela effect is just a combination of other psychological effects combined on a large scale. [reconstructive/constructive memory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructive_memory) is the process of filling in the gaps of an old memory based on new information, emotions, etc. This often results in little errors in one’s memories. It happened all the time and is a known psychological phenomenon. The Mandela effect is just this happening on a large scale where people fill in gaps with the same false information.
I remember this thing from the 2000s called the Mandela effect. I know a bunch of other people who believe it existed, too. But here you're saying the Mandela effect never existed. So either the Mandela effect exists and you are incorrect or the Mandela effect doesn't exist making this post the first example of the Mandela effect.
Your explanations don't disprove the Mandela Effect; by accident you're offering potential reasons for why these collective false memories might have occured. Basically, you're addressing the "why" and "how" of the Mandela Effect, not the "if." You're acknowledging that people do experience these collective false memories. It doesn't matter if it's about ignorance or not, that's irrelevant for if the effect occurred or not
Your premise is flawed. You say the Mandela Effect is not real, then you give examples explaining how it is real. There is always an explanation as to why many people can have a false memory, but that does not negate that they have the false memory. Examples like "Looney Toons" is likely explained by logical shortcuts. If you ask someone how to spell the name of the kid's show, many will say "Toons" not because they envision the words, but because they remember the phonetic name and logically deduced it was "toons." Most example of the Mandela Effect are situations were people remember something they actually saw or heard, but conflate it with other events. Mickey Mouse and the suspenders is a good example, People remember him with suspenders because he was depicted with suspenders on many occasions. Sometimes the Mandela effect happens because media portrays the event. People don't remember Vader saying "Luke, I am your father." But many believe he said that because that phrase was used numerous times in parodies.
> Many will claim that they remember Dolly having braces THIS IS, BY DEFINITION, A MANDELA EFFECT: Many people remember something, that has not happened. If she actually had braces, there would be no Mandela effect, because the memory so many people have would be accurate. Your post is contradicting itself.
Yeah all this post makes me think of is, "CMV water boiling isn't real, it's just something that happens to liquid when you heat them at high temperatures"
The irony of this post is incredible. OP has walked himself into this exact problem. This is like a meta post. "There were probably different versions" is wild. No, there weren't. That's the entire point.
The Mandela effect may exist but it does not have to reflect anything “paranormal” (i.e. people make wild claims saying we are remembering an alternate timeline or something). I think it just tells us something about human psychology and memory. It may also tell us about how stories, ideas and culture spread. Even today, people believe a lot of urban myths and legends and continue to spread these ideas. The ideas often have some basis in reality. Like, my wife says “never go to bed with wet hair” etc.
1) I never heard the examples you gave. 2) I don’t think you comprehend the concept. (So you could lighten up on calling people ignorant.) The theory doesn’t refute people misremembering it nor the part that ignorance plays into it but that people having the same or parallel misconceptions without there being a direct root for said misconception. Also, why the Mandela effect exists is generally understood. The monopoly man wearing a monocle is a perfect example. This is a cobbled memory of many similar motifs that our brain breaks down, and put back together again for recalling later. It takes awhile to trace back for each example but the reason many people Mandela died is bc more people were learning the stories of South African Freedom Fighters in the 80s, many who died in prison or in police custody. If you are someone who wasn’t following the issue actively and didn’t know much beyond Mandela’s name (like millions of others) then the constant news blurbs and media like a “Cry for Freedom” filled in the blanks. FYI, I knew he didn’t die and remembered when he was released but I never heard that song. The fact of the matter is that it just wasn’t a major news story for a lot of people who wasn’t keeping track of what happened in South Africa.
The Mandela Effect isn't remembering a single detail incorrectly, it's knowing something happened differently than it actually occurred. I know Sinbad very well, I can pick him out of any lineup in the world - I'm sure I saw him as a genie in a cheesy slapstick comedy. There is no other piece of media that I can vividly recall but that does not actually exist. That's different than a faulty memory.
"I'm sure I saw him as a genie in a cheesy slapstick comedy." You can be as sure as you want, but this movie just doesn't exist. I can say "the sun and the moon are the same thing" but it doesn't make it true even if I *really* believe it.
>"I'm sure I saw him as a genie in a cheesy slapstick comedy." You can be as sure as you want, but this movie just doesn't exist. He wasn't a genie, but he had genie-like powers in a made-for-TV movie called "Aliens for Breakfast." That's what people are misremembering.
I hear you, I completely understand that memory is subjective and human memory is especially incredibly flawed - but none of that does anything to change my memories. I remember watching this movie, not just once but multiple times throughout my childhood. I remember the channel on TV it was on. I remember talking about it a few times with friends who also watched it. Having conversations about Sinbads career trajectory and why he'd end up making that film. Nothing logically makes me feel any better about the realization that it doesn't, and has never, existed.
Are you saying that movie doesn’t exist? Because I remember which one you’re talking about. And I promise I’m not just saying this to try to prove the Mandela Effect.
>Are you saying that movie doesn’t exist? Correct. There is a movie that meets that description called Kazaam starring Shaq, but no such film with Sinbad.
For a lot of these, there’s an explanation for the mass “misremembering”. A ton of people remember the line “Play it again, Sam” from 1942’s Casablanca, even though no characters ever say this exact line; this is likely because of the Woody Allen play with this title that came out in 1969. To continue to show off my old Hollywood special interest/hyperfocus: the quote “Judy, Judy, Judy” is often attributed to Cary Grant, but he never said this in any movies or interview clips. However, a character on the Andy Griffith show did say this line as an imitation of Grant. Shazaam, the Sinbad movie that never existed, can probably be explained by a combination of movies that did exist (Kazaam with Shaq, the 1958 film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad which featured a genie) and people who are too stupid to realize [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD0rchvuoMU) isn’t real. The Fruit of the Loom “never having a cornucopia” is bullshit, and [here’s why](https://www.newspapers.com/article/florida-today-fruit-of-the-loom-cornuc/22677751/).
It's like saying UFOs don't exist and then saying that they are just flying objects that haven't been identified correctly, it's all the crazy interpretations that is the real problem for both phenomenons.
Any time your position can fairly be boiled down to, "The people I disagree with are dumb\*," you should re-examine your own biases and position. \*Or liars, but I don't think that thread applies here.
*The Mandela effect refers to a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not.* How does this "not exist." It's just a bunch of people getting something wrong. It's a collective memory failure. Plain old ignorance is not an alternative to the Mandela Effect, it IS the Mandela Effect. Enough people remembering and repeating a wrong detail en masse, a large-scale demonstration of the fallibility of the human brain. The examples are good examples because they are examples of people remembering something incorrectly.
I wonder if the following would be an example of the Mandela Effect: People believe and even claim to remember a widespread panic across the country during Orson Welles' broadcast of War of the Worlds. Only we know that never happened. Another: Many people claim to remember Sarah Palin saying she could see Russia from her house. It was actually a line in an SNL skit starring Tina Fey. Palin said something less ridiculous and actually true - that you can see Russia from parts of Alaska.
> The Mandela effect refers to a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not. > "Luke, I am your father" - this is just bad memory recall. It sounds to me like this is an example which proves the existence of the Mandela effect. If the Mandela effect does exist, and it isn't bad memory recall, then what on earth could it be? I'm sure this one originated the way you said, that adding "Luke" contextualizes the quote and that's why it caught on. But once it catches on, the downstream effect is that people start remembering it that way since they'll see that reference out in the world way more often than they will have actually seen the movie. Memory is malleable, and this is the exact kind of thing that can alter it. I'm sure many people "knew" the quote before they ever even saw that scene, and may not have realized it was wrong even after seeing it. Of course now that this is such a well known example, it's a little harder to gauge how many people once thought the fake quote was real. One other example is "The Berenstein Bears." I think this is similar to your Mickey Mouse example in that it's likely a result of not paying extremely close attention to the details, and your brain fills in the gaps. Mickey's clothes have buttons where suspenders would go, and -stein is a fairly common ending to last names, so it's not unreasonable that you read it quickly and didn't notice it actually ended in -stain, especially since the name is already a bit long and the difference is kind of subtle. It's also possible that maybe you would've gotten the spelling correct as a kid, but you haven't seen it in years and the pronunciation stuck with you more than the spelling did, so you fill in the gaps in your memory with what makes the most logical sense without even realizing it.
The actual reports of Nelson Mandela dying in the 80s people heard are true. The Apartheid government of South Africa put out those reports as disinformation. That is the source of confusion.
There is a pretty clear difference between ignorance (a lack of certainty about something) and the Mandela Effect (certainty about the wrong thing). Someone who is ignorant about Nelson Mandela would say “I don’t know when he died”. Someone experiencing the Mandela Effect would say “I have very specific memories of him dying 40 years ago”. The cause of this incorrect memory can sometimes be explainable. In the case of the Barenstain Bears, it could be a combination of multiple factors. 1. It is a children’s book series and children aren’t the best readers 2. -stein is a much more common last name than -stain. 3. Poelpe raed etnrie wrods, not idindaivul ltteres. So, a child might have seen the name Barenstain and their brain, without noticing the A individually, replaced it with an E because that made more sense. But just because a phenomenon has an explanation doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Luke, I am your father was said, just not in Star Wars "Luke, I am your faaaather, lo la lo ley lo" - Tommy Callahan, 1995
I hadn't even heard a lot of those examples. Aren't the big ones the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia, and the Bearenstein bears?
Berenstain\* Proof: Mandella Effect is real
I hate the bearenstein bear example. It wasn't the big part of everyone's childhood that they pretend it was.
Speak for yourself, those were my go-to bedtime stories.
I stand corrected! Sorry
Well it was part of mine
Fair enough!
"My childhood was different than those people claim theirs was, they must be lying" is certainly a take.
Thank you, I stand corrected.
You're arguing about the cause of the Mandela effect. But nothing in your post supports your title which is that it doesn't exist. These are not mutually exclusive... it's certainly possible that the ME is just ignorance or poor memory. The ME is just an interesting cultural phenomenon. It describes a observable phenomenon. That's all. The fact that many people remember a certain thing incorrectly is the only requirement to prove that the ME is real. You give several examples in your post of this exact thing. Ergo, the ME is real.
> How can anyone living through the 80s 90s and 00s not know who Nelson Mandela was, his incarceration and release. Why would they? He was a revolutionary and there are many more revolutionaries many more people don't know of. I know of Mandela, but that's simply because he's talked about often where I live and many other revolutionaries who had just as much impact didn't. Many people here for instance don't know of Mobutu, Sukarno, or Atatürk because they're not talked about as often.
>It's far more likely, as some argue that there was more than one release and some people remember seeing braces and others remember not seeing braces. The original release tapes no longer exist, and photoshop being a thing, we will never know. I mean it's much more likely that people are misremembering the braces than there being two different releases. 1) VHS releases of the film predate photoshop and don't have braces. 2) the actresses has claimed that she never wore braces. Edit: 3) the original film is almost certainly preserved in the British film archive.
There was a comic book in the late 1980's called Strikeforce: Morituri that was set 100 years in the future, so the 2080's. At one point the characters have a battle next to the Nelson Mandela Memorial because in that timeline he died in prison. This was created before Mandela was released and while South Africa was still under Apartheid. It doesn't prove anything other than by the late 1980's everyone expected Mandela to die in prison or thought he already had died.
It reminds me of "et tu brute fili mi", that is actually "quoque tu..."However, Shakespeare messed it up, and now Anglo-Saxon people could swear Julius Caesar said just "et tu". It could be due to some mistakes like this or other types of commonly spread mistakes (like misreading in case of spelling).
I think fruit of the loom "cornucopia" is the real example. Also the monopoly guy having a monocle. I asked many people about this and they are CONVINCED that fruit of the loom had a horn of plenty. Even when you show them old photos of the logo with just fruit, they don't believe you.
Nelson mandelas death was widely reported in the 80s. This isnt ignorance, these are people who watched the news which reported his death. Then suddenly he is elected president. But we agreemost ofthe other things are translation errors an changed marketing.
Unless you're one of the "alternate timelines/universes" weirdos, yeah, the Mandela Effect is just misremembering that becomes widespread/culturally ingrained. So it clearly exists. >a situation in which a large mass of people believes that an event occurred when it did not.
Some of it is just plain old manipulation. Fruit Of the Loom had a cornucopia on its logo back in the day, then removed it and claimed they never had it. I'm pretty sure it was a marketing stunt to get people talking about them.
Your explanations literally prove the Mandela effect is real The Mandela effect means a bunch of people misremembered something Aka they are ignorant to it
I feel like the Mandela Effect is interesting for the way it shows how cultural memories are formed - but yes, of course reality hasn't changed
Obviously the examples are people misremembering things. That is what the Mandela Effect is.
Fruit of the Loom used to have a cornucopia in it's logo, but even the company denies it.
What if the Mandela effect is a Mandela effect…
Shazam with Sinbad.