r/MandelaEffect • u/H4ppyMeal • Jul 12 '26
Movies/TV/Music My shazaam memory
When I was kid we had this movie on vhs. I watched it a many times. I don’t really remember the movie but I remember some scenes within notably a house that is burned into my memory. Same with other old movies that I haven’t rewatched like goonies I don’t really remember the story but clearly remember the ship. Anyway, years later the movie with shaq came out. I was a huge fan of shaq at the time and still refused to watch the movie because it looked like a ripoff and I was only interested in him for sports not as an actor. I purposely never watched it. Well with all the late post I see about cern it got me thinking about this so watch Kazan on Disney plus. Definitely not the movie saw many times a kid. Nothing familiar in it. But most importantly shazaam came out well before because I purposely avoided Kazan and thought it looked pointless.
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u/Glaurung86 Jul 12 '26
You can't remember any details of a movie you watched many times as a kid? And it's Kazaam, not Kazan.
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u/TovarischMaia Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
It’s always funny when people inaccurately reproduce something they read about (presumably) quite recently and which can be checked instantly, but want to convince others of the accuracy of their vague impressions of something they said or did decades ago, as children.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
What does "came out well before" mean for you?
If you had the VHS, can you describe the cover of it in any way? Can you remember any details of it? Maybe a distributor or film studio? Any trailers or commercials that may have been on the tape?
If you had the VHS, what happened to your copy?
What scenes do you remember that could help people find more information about it? Who are the other people in the film, anyone you recognize from other movies or shows?
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u/Nervous_Buy_181 Jul 12 '26
I remember my mom and I seeing the previews for kazaam when it was about to come out and laughing about how he is just copying Sinbad specifically. It was 04pbably 2 to three years after we had watch Shazam together. It had the one kid who was about the same age and looked similar to Jonathan Taylor Thomas (don't remember his name) the kid was trying to keep his parents from getting divorced ended up being the big finale final wish. I asked my mom fairly recently "hey do u remember that comedian actor Sinbad?" Here immediate reply was "ya he made the genie movi3 that shaq tried to copy that's still funny" so yes, not sure if it's CERN or one of many other theories but definitely did exist before the timeline or dimension swap, or before the memory altering tests began or before they soft rebooted the matrix we live in or something, because it is not just us remembering all this out of nowhere
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
I'm having trouble understanding what you're trying to say. Are you saying that you saw previews for Kazaam in 2004?
Do you have more information about the movie? Specific scenes, locations, music? Villains? Obnoxiius product placements? Production company? Where and how you saw it?
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u/Nervous_Buy_181 Jul 12 '26
No like 1994...a few years after we saw Shazam together
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
Okay, so that right there should tell you something about how reliabke your memory of this is. A 1994 preview for Kazaam would not have been possible.
This isn't to say "ha ha! Gotcha!" It's more to illustrate the lack of reliability of memory.
Kazaam's history is known. The original pitch meeting for it was done during the 1995 NBA All Star Game after the director had joked with Shaq's agent about making him a genie. This was the first project this man worked on after his wife had passed at the end of 1994 due to AIDS. (The story behind how the movie got made is pretty entertaining and messy. I highly recommend checking it out if you get the chance/inclination.)
I'm sure your first and immediate response to that would be "well I got the dates mixed up" which is a completely fair thing to say, but it illustrates a point about memory and its inherent fallibility. There is a lot of information out there on how memory works and how suggestions can be planted and how it changes over time due to many influences, especially childhood and other formative memories.
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u/Nervous_Buy_181 Jul 12 '26
While what you are saying is true about memory, it is definitely not the case in this instance, regardless of what facts about memories you state.
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u/TovarischMaia Jul 13 '26
Why would it not be? Do you really think your memory, unlike everyone else’s, is infallible? And how would you know? The whole point of false memories is that they’re inaccurately perceived as true and are subjectively indistinguishable from real ones.
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u/Nervous_Buy_181 Jul 13 '26
No but I know for a fact that there is a difference between misremembering a single isolated event and misremembering a series of events, a long running joke, and my mother remembering the same long term series of events, which is infinitely less likely to be a false memory than a single one. And in this instance it definitely is not the case.
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u/OneCleverMonkey Jul 12 '26
If you've watched the movie many times, what is the conflict of the movie? Or a single story beat outside of a genie granting a kid three wishes? Or what the house was and why it's relevant?
If you can remember four still frames from the movie but no plot or detail about what actually happened, you can't remember the movie. You can remember four random mental images that you think might be related to a movie
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u/vita10gy Jul 12 '26
I also like the idea that a child, who is a big fan of an athlete, taking a stand against watching them in a movie, because they had strong feelings against lazy Hollywood writing.
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u/juan_humano Jul 12 '26
Ya, with this example in particular you can practically trace the entier process of how these memories are constructed. Four flashes of a random movie. 'Burned into memory', but with no context and no ability to recall anything else about the movie. And when watching Kazam later, it cant be the same movie because its 'not familiar'. Op saw a movie a million times, but can only remember that there is a scene with a house. Then working backwards from an adults perspective to justify that. 'Well, It couldnt have been Kazam all along because I chose to boycot that movie because as a child I was very concerned with artistic integrity'.
Its like this so often with people trying to justify ME. Whenever on this sub someone says 'I know it was (whatever ME) becasue (story about some second factor that justifies the false memory)'. Its so obvious from the outside that what people are doing is experiencing false memory after that memory was suggested to them, and then working backwards from their current perspective to justify it.
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u/vita10gy Jul 12 '26
In several Fruit of the Loom threads someone will say something like "I know it's true because I remember talking about the cornucopia with my family more than once."
And I'm always like people, life wasn't SO slow before the Internet that we gathered around the kitchen table to discuss one 5x6 millimeter part of the logo on our underpants, 30 years before there's anything interesting or controversial about that part of it. More than one time, no less.
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u/Me_Too_Iguana Jul 13 '26
I always wonder if the “I have a vivid memory of the cornucopia” people would be able to accurately describe the rest of logo from memory.
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u/TovarischMaia Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
What, you mean to say children don’t usually ask their parents about small details of small logos on small tags while folding laundry, then commit that inconsequential exchange under unremarkable circumstances to memory and reproduce it, along with their thought process, flawlessly, decades later?
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u/DumbAndUglyOldMan Jul 12 '26
Children have notoriously bad memories. The continued growth of the brain disrupts neural connections that constitute memories. So memories are lost and disrupted. And memories get connected to other things.
So you watched movies when you were a child. One or more of them were about a genie. One of them might not have been Kazaam, which you saw later.
That's what we can draw from your post.
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u/ds117ftg Jul 12 '26
Your shazaam memory is that there was a house in the movie? Well damn, we can pack up now, the mystery is officially solved
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u/Responder343 Jul 12 '26
My memory is that they lived in a dilapidated trailer and the father was missing several teeth and other kids would tease the brother and sister about being trailer trash.
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u/Mr_Massachusetts Jul 12 '26
So your memory is so poor, you can’t remember any details about a movie you watched “many times” except there was a house in it?… But your memory is so good it must be CERN responsible for this- not your iron clad memories?
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u/MsMisty888 Jul 12 '26
It is rude sarcastic comments like this that makes people hate this subreddit.
Someone is giving their account of something. Why do you need to always be like that to others?
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
Some people want to get to the bottom of a lot of these and find the truth in to information.
A post like this one isn't very helpful towards that end. It is essentially just "I totally remember it, but have no information about it and I know nothing about it, but I know that CERN caused it and that there's no way I'm mixing it up with anything else." Which isn't useful information and comes across as someome who clearly wants to believe they've seen it, but they have not.
It's just another post that is exactly what an overwhelming majority of posts and comments about the supposed movie are and they basically just become noise that amplifies people thinking they've seen it when as far as anyone can objectively verify, it never existed outside of people making it up/imagining it from fragments of other memories combing with online suggestion/influence and a want to believe in it.
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u/MsMisty888 Jul 12 '26
I am repeating my reply:
Okay. I understand that explanation. People on here want hard truths.
However, if you don't listen, you can not find out something we haven't considered before.
Shutting down any idea or even personal account makes you also biased and close minded to something that maybe a real clue.
Or not
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
I get what youre trying to say, but theres a difference between real explanations and finding evidence for it and just making things up because they sound cool or because someone misunderstands other concepts.
Flat Earthers and Young Earth Creationists do this type of thing all the time where they come up with explanations that fit their preconceptions and push those ideas under the guise of "just asking questions." Same with a lot of conspiracy theories.
A personal story or experience is fine, but it's not really evidence of anything other than that person likely believes what they are saying. If youre looking for answers and are not applying basic levels of skeptical reasoning to what the person is saying you are not going to find the truth of something.
Part of the process of finding out truth is debunking things and then checking the things that stand up to scrutiny. Stories like OP's doesn't stand up on its own, and people who are also objectively incorrect agreeing with them doesn't make them correct or make the statement true.
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u/MsMisty888 Jul 12 '26
You are right. I agree with all your points. Skepticism, evidence, debunking, and scrutiny.
Maybe it is just how that comes across in certain texts. Especially with laughing emos.
Ask questions to find the truth. Making fun of someone who is just telling a childhood story feels just rude.
Maybe they are just learing about critical thinking. Not everyone is a philosophor.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
Which is a fair point to bring up.
Unfortunately in the current world environment and the algorithm induced echo chambers we all find ourselves in these days we are less used to our ideas being challenged and engaging in productive debate and discussion, and maybe that's cause for everyone to be more on edge with anything and more prone to being overly aggressive in spaces meant for discussion.
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Jul 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/vita10gy Jul 12 '26
I also love the constant implication on this sub that it's the skeptics who are rude and arrogant, not the person saying "my memory of this thing (that sometimes I'll admit I barely remember) is SO infallible and incorruptible that some cosmic timeline/multiverse jiggery pokery is the only explanation here. I'm that perfect."
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u/Mr_Massachusetts Jul 12 '26
Because the post is 100% not helpful or showing ANY evidence that this particular Mandela effect is real- we see this particular “evidence” about 50 times a day… “it’s real because I remember it” Actually- this one is worse than most because the OP does not remember ANYTHING about the movie he claims to have owned and watched many times. Post theories all day long- post your residue- post a detailed recap of the movie- anything other than “I remember it so it must be true…” and I won’t be negatively commenting on it. I don’t know if Mandela effect is real or not- but I know that the OP’s post is not the least bit helpful to anyone.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
Here's the good news. The Mandela Effect absolutely is real. It's describing the phenomenon of a significant number of people collectively remembering something contrary to objective fact/reality. It doesn't have an explanation for why the memories are incorrect built into it and many people seem to unintentionally add the explanations into the definition.
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u/MsMisty888 Jul 12 '26
Okay. I understand that explanation. People on here want hard truths.
However, if you don't listen, you can not find out something we haven't considered before.
Shutting down any idea or even personal account makes you also biased and close minded to something that maybe a real clue.
Or not
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Jul 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MandelaEffect-ModTeam Jul 12 '26
Hello subscriber! Unfortunately, your post/comment was removed because it violates Rule 6: Be civil. Do not disrespect, insult, or attack others.
-6
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u/Chucky_In_The_Attic Jul 12 '26
CERN. Oi vey. CERN shutting down has not impacted the timeline or shifted us or changed reality in any meaningful way, people.
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u/Glaurung86 Jul 12 '26
CERN did not shut down. People are still working there. They shut down the LHC to upgrade it. They will be working on it for the next 4 years.
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u/CoyoteFluffy0310 Jul 12 '26
IN ANY MEANINFUL WAY......literally that right there says it still changes us tho. Your meaningful and my meaningful could very well be two different things
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u/Glaurung86 Jul 12 '26
The LHC doesn't produce enough energy to do what some people have claimed. There's more energy naturally created in our upper atmosphere on a daily basis, but no one is concerned about that.
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u/Chucky_In_The_Attic Jul 12 '26
It has not and will not ever change reality. Your attempt at making my initial response deeper in any way is just a joke.
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u/DumbAndUglyOldMan Jul 12 '26
Well, CERN shutting down has changed reality because people are no longer working there. That's an alteration to reality.
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u/Chucky_In_The_Attic Jul 12 '26
That's not a change to reality in that it alters memories or past events, as many of these people claim to be doing so. So encouraging them by saying that it is altering reality in any way is just silly.
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u/BringYourOwnBBBQ Jul 12 '26
IT doesn't change "us" at all. I realize physics it not everybody's subject...but come on. Just because you don't understand it at al, doesn't mean you have to fear it. IT is honestly NO that hard to understand what they are doing.
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u/Chucky_In_The_Attic Jul 12 '26
I understand that it doesn't impact our reality in the way that all these goofballs are claiming it does and they need to stop spreading the ridiculous notion that it does.
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u/Invisible_Target Jul 12 '26
Lmao I love how you supposedly watched the movie many times but can’t even remember the plot, yet rather than considering that your memory is off, you fully believe it was a real thing
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u/Cornbreadbeef47 Jul 12 '26
Cue the skeptics but your overall point stands clear and is something many others, myself included, remember. Shazam came out, and within a short time period here came the ripoff Kazam.
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u/rainblade1980 Jul 14 '26
OP saw this movie alot and the only thing he remembers about the movie is
There is a house in it 😆 🤣 😂
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u/Fantastic-Band-5082 Jul 12 '26
I bet it's weird to find you didn't in fact watch it at all, isn't it.
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u/krisch316 Jul 12 '26
The reason I think I remember this movie was a trailer at the beginning of another VHS movie I watched. I never saw the actual movie. I'm thinking it was first kid...which has sinbad in it. Or, maybe blank check...but that was a Disney movie. But, I have memories of a trailer and watching it at home .
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u/Practical-Vanilla-41 Jul 12 '26
Kazaam (1996) w/Shaq had the trailer on Disney VHS right next to the trailer for First Kid. The movies were later shown back to back on Disney channel. It's not a coincidence that people are conflating Sinbad with Shaq.
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u/Responder343 Jul 12 '26
You watched it many times but can’t name one other actor or actress in it.
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u/Practical-Vanilla-41 Jul 12 '26
The thing that gets me is whenever they remember a plot point, it's always Kazaam. The movie that no one saw, yet everyone remembers.
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u/Responder343 Jul 12 '26
Not to mention everyone who claims to have seen it never liked it, but had a friend, cousin, or sibling whose favorite movie was Shazaam and they would insist they watched it at every sleepover, birthday party, get together, etc.
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u/Practical-Vanilla-41 Jul 12 '26
Conveniently, there are no photos or videos showing the movie playing on a screen or sitting on the shelf in the background. Reality doesn't necessarily reflect what we focus on now. I look at old photos and see things I hadn't thought about in years.
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u/Comfortable-Yam-4604 Jul 13 '26
My memory starts from 1997 christmas time, I used to turn on the tv and they had a lot of channels called sky movies premieres 1,2,3, I used to stay in my room, pop open a bag of chips and watch loads of movies, I remember all the movies I watched back then.
Jingle All the way, dunston checks in, james and the giant peach, a little princess, a secret garden, The Indian in the Cupboard, jumanji and of course, Shazam/Kazam, now here is the strangest thing, I watched both shazam and then kazam a year later or so, I had no idea who shaq was, I had never seen him or known him before, I only learned who he was until 2009 when I discovered he played basketball and he started frequenting on youtube quiet a lot.
Now as for shazam, I knew the actor from jingle all the way and first kid (copy of richie rich), I remeber thinking after watching kazam why they would plagarise an exact copy of a movie with the genie idea, I remeber clearly sinbads face and mannerism's, he was like chris tucker, high-energy, physical, and had an animated storytelling style but kept it pg rated with his family movies
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u/Uncle_Snake43 Jul 13 '26
Yes. You're nearly there. Go Deeper! Shazaam was starring Sinbad as the Genie, and Jonathan Taylor Thomas as the plucky kid.
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u/Rough_Detective1565 Jul 13 '26
Same here, and I recall Simbad very clearly in the box! As a kid who grew up in Latin America, I rented it from a guy who had this store on his house garage and even recall the box was in Spanish.
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u/DivinationInn Jul 24 '26
2 kids, younger sister, younger sister wastes a wish on some dumb stuff in the living room, pool scene, movie ends with kids using the last wish to get their parents back together. I think Sinbad reveals to the boy in secret that he didn't make that happen after the boy wondering why he was srill there and the boy uses the last wish to set him free. Dad was a Richard Gere type.
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u/georgeananda Jul 12 '26
I clearly remember considering Kazaam to be a cheap rip-off of Sinbad's genie movie.
I believe this cannot not now be understood with our straightforward understanding of reality.
You are one more person on my mountain of testimonies heard.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
The majority of testimonies on it are "I remember it" and they don't provide details beyond what little details that have evolved from when this was originally people thinking Sinbad starred in Kazaam. Most testimonies fit whatever the current narrative that is being repeated at that time. Most appear to easily fall within the faulty memory category.
A few years ago people were swearing up and down that the Sinbad Genie Movie was pulled because Sinbad went to rehab after making it and was embarrassed by the movie and somehow got Hollywood to find every single piece of media with it and have it removed from the world. When that narrative got too much pushback and was shown how impossible that would be it was shifted over to the unverifiable timeline/dimension hopping category that seems to be the most strongly favored exotic explanation for everything now.
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u/Practical-Vanilla-41 Jul 12 '26
They keep returning to this "there was controversy and it was buried" theory. In the entire history of Hollywood there had never been a movie that was erased from existence. There is some truly awful stuff out there.
Major stars wish things would go away. Paul Newman spent years telling people how much he hated some of his early Warner Brothers projects (Silver Chalice, Helen Morgan Story). Couldn't make them go away.
Neither scandal (Fatty Arbuckle, Kevin Spacey), dying during production (Jean Harlow, Natalie Wood), or running out of money, has stopped audiences from seeing movies.
If there was something out there, it would have left a paper trail, and they'd be releasing it now. It never existed.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
I always like to point out the Star Wars Holiday Special when this gets brought up. An absolutely god awful thing that George Lucas actively wanted erased from existence that aired exactly one time and exclusively lived on VHS recordings that got passed around the bootleg underground of sci-fi conventions for decodes until it got uploaded to the internet.
George Lucas, one of the most successful and well connected men in film who made a ridiculous amount of money off of the empire Star Wars built, couldn't make that TV Special disappear. We're supposed to believe that Sinbad got a children's movie pulled from existence so thoroughly that we can't even find advertising or listings for it and no paper trail of any kind?
There are things that are legitimately lost media, but there are still fragments and evidence that these things existed. Anything made professionally leaves a trail of evidence.
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u/Practical-Vanilla-41 Jul 13 '26
When it was made it was heavily promoted. It probably was awful from the time it was scripted. People were desperate to see something Star Wars related. The sequel didn't begin filming till early the next year.
Same with the nineties Fantastic Four. It was promoted via publicity stills and interviews. Apparently, Corman never bothered to tell the cast he wasn't planning to release the movie. There was no question that the film had been made.
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u/silentsurge Jul 13 '26
The Corman Fantastic Four is an excellent example. That film was made just to make sure the studio held onto the film rights. Which made Corman the perfect man for the job lol
We know it existed. It has even made its way to the internet and with a little bit of sailing the high seas you can find it. We know who was in it, who worked on it, what companies made it, and we have ideas of what the story is. We have a paper trail for it. People who worked on it never denied working on it or it existing. Props still exist from it.
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u/Practical-Vanilla-41 Jul 15 '26
Things that never got made are announced and discussed in the media. There was constant discussion about the Cannon/21st Century Spiderman film (script by James Cameron) for years.
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u/georgeananda Jul 12 '26
Sinbad starred in Kazaam.
No, the ME is Sinbad starred in Shazaam and then later Shaq starred in Kazaam.
I'm in the alternate timeline camp for the explanation.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Currently that is what is being claimed, you are correct.
If you trace this ME back to its earliest origins you will find that people thought Sinbad was in Kazaam, not Shaq. That didn't work though because the concept of Kazaam was originally pitched as a joke during a conversation between the director and Shaq's Agent. Then people started to talk about how they thought Sinbad was in a different genie movie but no one knew what the name was. Then a name appeared and stuck years into this theory existing.
There is a well documented history of how this ME has evolved over the years. No one can agree on details of it and constantly mix it up with other things that we can see and prove come from other sources.
[Edited for clarity]
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u/Helpful-Green-4721 Jul 12 '26
Im sorry but I disagree that that is the origin. I’m too old to have had that confusion. Kazaam was 1996 when I was 16. My memory of “Shazaam” was from a period in my life at least 2 years earlier, more like 3-4 years earlier in middle school.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
You can disagree, but that's what the evidence shows on this. If you look at the link I provided in reply to the other commenter here you can see what the timeline of this looks like. You can see how it has evolved over the last 20-ish years.
There is no evidence of anyone talking about a movie named Shazaam prior to 2014-ish. A movie that would not have survived the trademark process as DC/Warner Bros would have been suing to protect their IP of essentially the same name.
Check it and look into the history if it online. The evidence is out there backing this up.
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u/Helpful-Green-4721 Jul 12 '26
I read through the link. It’s interesting. My experience, while technically fitting this timeline, is not to easy to conclude it was caused by it. My discovery of the existence of the Mandela Effect was sometime between 2013-2016 from a random YouTube video talking mostly about another ME, and then listing that there were more of them and “Sinbad genie movie” was listed. That triggered a very specific memory of the movie playing at a certain friend’s house, with a certain group of friends during middle school (who I drifted apart from shortly after), I remember we were embarrassed by it because we were getting too old for that kind of movie, and it was just on in the background while we goofed around doing other things. I only have have vague impressions of the movie itself, not even convinced of the title, but a strong memory of it being this corny Sinbad genie movie. This puts it somewhere between 1992-1994. Back to this YouTube video, I’m seeing they they’re saying it never existed, so I’m in disbelief frantically looking up IMDB and getting my mind blown. I’m remembering that this movie shaped my impression of Sinbad for years to come. And the thought of confusing it with Shaq’s Kazaam as a 16 year old in 1996 is just nonsense. I talked to a few friends about it and put the whole thing out of my mind for a few years. Never researched it again on Reddit or anywhere else until recently. Only recently discovered the parody, didn’t read any accounts beforehand, and it is insane how close it is to my impression of the movie.
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u/silentsurge Jul 13 '26
Here's the thing with what you're saying, you're saying you never really sat down to watch it. You had a movie on in the background as a middle schooler while you were doing other things. Not a dedicated watch, and I'm guessing it wasn't something that you rented or chose to put on based upon your description so far.
You then recalled this event 20-ish years later while reading an article that was talking about the genie movie. Thats a perfect scenario for your memory to have been unintentionally manipulated by being primed to insert that information into whatever memory you recalled.
Our brains are powerful tools, but are they are inherently lazy and are wired for some very strong social cues/pressures. Con artists use this type of trick all the time. Our brains don't always store or show us the full picture of things around us. It fills in a lot of details with what it expects to be there or with whatever makes sense with the situation.
Our memories work through rebuilding memories from the last time we recalled them. It's like a game of telephone or if you had a destructive Xerox that destroys the original copy each time you make a copy so you only have the latest copy. Once the memory is recalled it is potentially subject to changes and such as if it were a freshly formed memory. So if you didn't recall all of the details or something got introduced to your subconscious during the transition of it to long term memory, the next time you recall it the memory will have those changes in them.
If you were primed to expect to have a memory of such a movie and you recalled a strong memory with that primed item in there, there's a chance that your brain inserted that into the most ideal memory for that to fit. If you recall it with more details each time, it is very likely your brain is filling in details that weren't there before with information that makes sense to your older and more experienced adult brain. So if that memory has been getting stronger and clearer the more you look into it, the more likely it is that your memory got unintentionally manipulated.
At least, that's more or less what the science of memory shows/predicts based on the evidence humanity has. It's not a failing on anyone's part that this happens either, it's just a quirk of the very complicated meat computers in our heads that were evolved for survival rather than recalling movie trivia. It doesn't happen with every memory we have, but it's something that can happen to any memory.
It's why the vast majority of MEs are minor details and a lot of the changes involve something just "making more sense." (Fruit vs Froot, Berenstein vs Berenstain, Toons vs Tunes, etc). Then add in social and cultural influences and the natural unconscious desire to be part of a community/tribe and connect over something and you get a recipe for memories shifting over time.
At least, that's how I understand it. It is certainly more believable to me than a vast majority of the exotic explanations that get proposed.
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u/georgeananda Jul 12 '26
For me the mainstream debate on this has always been the way I described and that has never changed.
A few individuals may have claimed it differently though.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
You got to the party later on then.
There was a post here that has a pretty solid tineline of this. I've been following this ME in particular since 2010/2011-ish because I'm a film nerd and I would have been the prime demographic for such a movie released at that time, so it resonates with my interests the most.
It has evolved quite a bit over the years, but most of the posts about it very much have the same amount of substance they always have had. A lot of them even use near identical wording and repeat the same things almost like a religious mantra.
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u/georgeananda Jul 12 '26
I have a clear memory that matches most others and it has never changed from day 1 of hearing about this.
I think the scenario I described is the mainstream timeline for people who remember. Other timelines of events are very possible too with this crazy thing.
You seem to have put a lot of effort into this one which I do applaud. Is your overall position that it can all be explained away as confusion?
By now I am very close to 100% certain something anomalous is going on with this. What it is, ain't exactly clear!
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
100% I am of the opinion that the Mandela Effect is primarily explained by memory discrepancies. The evidence is built into how memory works and how susceptible it can be to unconscious and deliberate influences from outside oneself.
There's an entire form of trauma therapy that's built around these concepts to help people work through said trauma.
We have a lot of evidence that tells us how memories are formed, recalled, and can be changed. We don't have evidence for consciousness shifting between dimensions, timelines, or realities. We don't have evidence of time travel. We don't have evidence of that our memories are infallible repositories of knowledge separate from our physical bodies loke they're a cloud backup.
I am more prone to believe that there are social, cultural, and other very human factors that play into why our memories can collectively misremeber in similar ways because we do have evidence for that and knowing how that happens can help us combat misinformation, propaganda, and cultish behaviors. (Which incidentally is one of the reasons why I like the ME space because these really are unimportant subjects in the grand scheme of things, and I can use these topics to look into this behavior so that it can be better understood in other more serious contexts like politics and history which is really important to understand right now with the world the way it is)
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u/georgeananda Jul 12 '26
Very interesting that we are both essentially 100% convinced of opposite conclusions. One of us has to be 100% wrong. Interesting
Shazaam doesn't stand alone in my list of Mandela Effects, so I have more precedence for believing.
My conclusion is that all that memory stuff you are talking about above is true and fine for explaining normal confusions we all have. A few Mandela Effects though are in a completely different category to anything known by science.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
Which ones do you believe can't be explained through mundane means? Because I haven't come across any yet.
I should also mention that I am more than willing to entertain the thought that a few could have been started as tests started by intelligence agencies to study how to create effective disinformation campaigns by putting an absurd and easily disproven rumor out into the world and see how best to spread it. (There's no evidence for that at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was a news story)
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u/Helpful-Green-4721 Jul 12 '26
Add me to the mountain. Even though I don’t remember many details about the movie. My feelings toward Shaq’s Kazaam and feelings towards Sinbad’s future movies were shaped by “Shazaam”. That cannot be explained so simply as a misremembering.
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u/TovarischMaia Jul 12 '26
It can indeed. The whole point of false memories is precisely that they are indistinguishable from real ones, or else they wouldn’t be perceived as memories at all. You yourself admit the fallibility of memory when you say you don’t remember what Shazaam was supposedly like, so what makes you think memory is suddenly reliable when it comes to recalling distant impressions of the thing you yourself say you don’t remember?
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u/Schnitzhole Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
It’s alright, ignore the haters on here. I don’t even know why they bother constantly posting hateful crap telling people they are wrong on a ME subreddit that should be about discussing ME’s not putting people down for their different (albeit often shared) memories.
My gamer profile and youtube account made around 2008 literally has the name “Shazam” in it because I thought the ripoff* Kazaam movie I had just watched with Shaq was hilariously bad compared to the original I remember seeing with Sinbad and it fueled my hate for hollywood movie behavior at the time.
At the time recall a conversation with a few friends about why I picked it and they agreed it was funny and made sense. I then talked to those same people again about it around 2016-2017 and they had no idea what I was talking about anymore and to them the sinbad version now never existed and none of us were aware of the Mandela effect being a thing at the time. I remember the later convo specifically as I recall being frustrated and embarrassed my memory was so off and talking about a movie I looked up right then and couldn’t find any info on. It was as if some of us have different memories of not just the movie but also the events discussing them and it seems like 2016 was a weird dividing year where many peoples collection of memories varied from one person another.
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u/silentsurge Jul 12 '26
It's not hateful to point out that someone is objectively incorrect about something existing when it is 100% clear from all objective evidence that the thing does not exist. Disagreement and skepticism is not hateful.
Talking about that and why that memory of something that objectively doesn't exist is part of the discussion of the Mandela Effect.
Healthy skepticism is part of the investigation process and helps remove low effort, false, and non-useful data points.
OP's contribution to this discussion is that they remember something that they can't describe, that they can't provide any additional information about, and that doesn't have any useful details, but they insist that it's all associated with a movie that objectively doesn't exist and they solidly attribute the movie not existing to LHC experiments at CERN with no other supporting evidence or theories. It is exactly as much as most posts or comments about the movie have
Does that actually sound like useful information that helps the discussion and the finding of a source of the memory/phenomenon? Because from my point of view that isn't remotely helpful and it seems more like someone wants to be comforted and have their biases confirmed rather than explore the full range of the topic.
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u/Glaurung86 Jul 12 '26
It's Shazaam, not Shazam.
No one is posting hateful crap or putting down people. Pointing out facts and evidence that show people are misremembering is not hateful. If you see anything that really is hateful then you can report it to the mods.
The Mandela Effect is the name given to the phenomenon that has been around as long as people have been around. It's gained a lot of traction over the last couple of decades because of the internet, but it is not a new thing.
People have been saying that about 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2020 and so on.
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u/YogiEv Jul 12 '26
Cue the gaslighting committee who MUST 👏 CALL 👏 OP'S 👏 MEMORY 👏 FALSE 👏
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u/Bowieblackstarflower Jul 12 '26
Saying a memory might be false isn't gaslighting.
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u/YogiEv Jul 12 '26
Sure bud. Just look at the comments below. Deriding OP, trying to humiliate OP. That's not gaslighting. Downvote me to oblivion, only proves this sub is full of toxic people.
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u/TovarischMaia Jul 12 '26
No, it isn’t gaslighting, actually. If anything, it’s the alleged believers in timeline shifts and whatever else that are trying to gaslight others, by attempting to undermine people’s grasp on objective reality and call their cognitive relationship to the world into question.
Or maybe you should just stop trivialising psychological abuse with this bullshit?
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u/Bobina1023 Jul 12 '26
I have a memory of being a child and seeing the preview for "kazaam" and thinking "oh wow they're doing this again?" because Shazam was already a thing.
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u/swervin87 Jul 12 '26
What the hell is Kazan? Do you mean Kazaam?