Forums » Smalltalk » Since When- (Mandela Effect)

I'm sure a lot of you know what the Mandela Effect is, but if not, the basic definition of it is 'when a large amount of people remember something that never actually existed.' For example (and I've tested this with people in real life too), in Britney Spears's music video 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', a lot of people remember her skirt being plaid, but nowhere in the video is there any plaid clothing item and Britney is wearing a plain black skirt. Or, in my case, I didn't realise that 'Febreze' was spelled like that and not 'Febreeze', which turns out to be another thing a lot of people remember.

Here is a list of more:
-It's 'Looney Tunes', not 'Looney Toons'
-Avril Lavigne never had a 'Got Milk' ad
-Pikachu does not have black at the end of his tail, but that never existed (which really confused me my whole life too. I have old drawings of Pikachu with the black on his tail)
-The brand 'Fruit of the Loom' never had a cornucopia in its logo
-C3-PO is not all gold - he has a silver leg (this also threw me, a huge Star Wars fan, for a loop)
-In the movie 'Jaws', Roy never said 'We're gonna need a bigger boat' - he said 'You're gonna need a bigger boat'
-Apparently a lot of people remember the lyric in Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics being 'Sweet dreams are made of these', but it had always been 'Sweet dreams are made of this'. However, I personally do see this as a pronunciation thing, because the singer's accent does made it sound like 'these'
-In the movie 'Silence of the Lambs', Hannibal Lecter never said 'Hello, Clarice'

So I guess I'm throwing this topic out here just because I wanna hear some of your 'no I swear it was never like that!' things. It'd be interesting to learn about new ones that I don't know, and also, yeah, the Mandela Effect is just cool anyways to me.

In the song "we are the champions" from Queen, many people believe that the song ends with a "We are the champions... Of the world". But actually, it never says "of the world", the song ends with "we are the champions".

YES I've seen that one and I was just- So confused

Here's another good one.

"Luke, I am you're Father." Spoken by Darth Vader to his son in one of the most stunning revelations in cinematic history. Only, Vader never actually said that. The actual line is, "No, I am you're Father." But people the world over swear by their right arm its always been, "Luke, I am you're Father."

But hey, don't take it from me. Skip to about the 1:00 in the video and see for yourself.

That is a good one. I can't exactly recall what I ever truly thought it was, but I remember first seeing that and being like 'oh yeah, he did say that, didn't he?' I think the only Star Wars Mandela Effect that has thrown me for a loop was C3-PO's silver leg. I know another Star Wars one though in Revenge of the Sith. Apparently a lot of people remember Padme saying:
'So this is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause.'
When it was really:
'So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.'
Though I really don't remember it as democracy.

The version that most people have always heard is that on Queen’s Greatest Hits and if you bought this on CD or have downloaded it then your version will not end with an extra “of the world”. However, if you bought it on vinyl then you will get the full and final ending, which has sometimes been played on the radio. So no, it's not a Mandela Effect. It was also included when Queen sang live.

There's a few things that seem like the mandela effect but simply aren't. It very well could just be that the public memory is so short that we just kind of forget things or why things are the way they are.

I've seen official merch with both berenstain and berenstein. So it's not like it was once one spelling and they swapped to the other one, even the official merchandise couldn't decide sometimes.

Fruit of the loom did have a cornucopia, but they kind of silently removed it one day. You can still find old pieces of their stuff with the old logo and I actually saw the cornucopia logo on a piece of clothing just today actually.

The human memory is super fallible and has a tendency to either make things up or fill in the blanks. It's constantly making things up and sometimes multiple peoples brains make things up in the same way at the same time.

I find the Mandela Effect urban legend, or... theory...to be a fascinating idea as well. I love science fiction and alternate reality plots and theories. That being said though, I don't believe in the Mandela Effect; I think it's simply people misremembering things then the mis-memory (?) gets propagated in pop culture until a lot of people think it's the way it was.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I'll offer another fun example.

Supposedly a lot of people remember Ed McMahon delivering Publisher's Clearinghouse checks to winner's houses with bouquets of balloons. But, supposedly, that never happened--Ed McMahon never worked for Publisher's Clearinghouse. He did, however, work for a competitor of Publisher's Clearinghouse.

Still, even people *at the time* made jokes about Ed McMahon coming to your house with Publisher's Clearinghouse checks, so I think that's why we all misremember it. Interesting stuff. *cue Twilight Zone theme*

I like how people here are obviously going by different definitions of the Mandela Effect and don't even seem to be noticing (or at least not mentioning) it.

I actually got really confused about this recently, because the version I knew is basically the one OP stated, but I stumbled across a video refuting it - which didn't make sense with my understanding of it and who the video was by, until I noticed that he was clearly working from a different definition. Cue looking up what the heck was going on, and...

The Mandela Effect has three-ish simultaneous, closely-related and somewhat conflicting definitions. I'd say it's become an example of itself, but as noted: they're all being used simultaneously, so any of them could easily be the first version a given person learns of. Based on what I was seeing, my guess is that things played out something like this:

1. The term "Mandela Effect" is coined by people who think it's too far-fetched for masses of people to incorrectly remember the same thing in the same way, and that weird space-time quirks/alternate reality bleeds/far-reaching conspiracies make more sense than a social memory glitch.

2. Discussion of how psychology, sociology, and neurology could lead to people having and broadly sharing the same incorrect memory and their rejection that they are mistaken will naturally include a lot of discussion of the supposed Mandela Effect, and abbreviated discussion/statements start redefining the term to refer to the persistent/insistent mass mis-remembering of something, particularly around how it can become a shared experience and how it being a shared experience makes people more convinced that the memory is accurate and something crazy is going on.

3. Further abbreviated discussion reduces the definition to to merely the phenomenon that groups of people can share the same incorrect memory (without the aspect of being unwilling/unable to accept that it's a mistake necessarily being part of it, and seeming focused more on just that it happens rather than how it might be caused).