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The Mandela Effect: False Memory

Tribble said:
Over the years, hundreds of people online have shared memories of a cheesy Nineties movie called “Shazaam”. There is no evidence that such a film was ever made. What does this tell us about the quirks of collective memory?

http://www.newstatesman.com/science...doesn-t-exist-and-redditors-who-think-it-does
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Fascinating. Psychologists with nothing better to do have done experiments in this area and it's surprisingly easy to 'implant' memories in a percentage of the population. It isn't surprising that those conditions might be duplicated in the outside world by chance conditions, but it's fascinating nonetheless.
 
Coal said:
Fascinating. Psychologists with nothing better to do have done experiments in this area and it's surprisingly easy to 'implant' memories in a percentage of the population. It isn't surprising that those conditions might be duplicated in the outside world by chance conditions, but it's fascinating nonetheless.
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That's just what the guy who plays Bugs Bunny at Disneyworld was telling me the other day.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Bugs Bunny, eh? At Disneyworld, you say? ;)
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Tribble's referencing a fairly well known experiment that investigated how easy it is to 'prime' people to have false memories. They used doctored Disneyworld images, including Bugs Bunny, in the waiting room before asking people if they remembered seeing him there.
 
Fluttermoth said:
Tribble's referencing a fairly well known experiment that investigated how easy it is to 'prime' people to have false memories. They used doctored Disneyworld images, including Bugs Bunny, in the waiting room before asking people if they remembered seeing him there.
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That spoiled my joke along the lines of "I made you think that..." :)
 
When I read that Shazam article, I thought, wait, I remember that film, hearing about it anyway, but read further and realised it was Kazaam I'd heard of. That was enough for me to dismiss it, so why are there so many people holding onto false memories in the face of all evidence? Even Sinbad is tired of correcting them. Nobody likes to be wrong, but it's part of life you're not going to get everything right, no need to make up conspiracy theories or parallel universe explanations instead.
 
"Shazam!" was the magic word which converted the nerdy Billy Batson into the flying muscle-mary Captain Marvel in the 1941 Republic Serial.

Such was the stuff dished up to ABC-Minors in the 1960s. I saw it again this year for the first time since!

Wow! They had multi-storey carparks in America in 1941! Only theirs had hidden rooms with sliding doors! :clap:
 
Can't say that I care for the name Mandela Effect either, have never thought or met anyone who thought that Nelson had died in the 80s.

We have a thread around here somewhere where a number of posters remember Oh Fortuna being used in The Omen, which is one of the better collective misrememberings - the actual music that they use when it's gearing up for a 'death by troll physics' event to happen isn't even that similar.

Also the Moonraker Dolly brace thing.
 
Curiously, I was at a workshop a few years ago where a supposed 'expert' on CRB/DBS told us that the reason we have it is because Ian Huntley murdered Holly and Jessica who went to the school where he was a cartaker.

I did feel compelled to point out that the girls didn't go to the school where Huntley worked at all, they went to a different school where his partner was a teaching assistant - the tutor wasn't buying that and when I wouldn't back down, various members of the group started backing her up and telling me that she was right.

When I checked it out afterwards, I thought for a little while that I was going quite potty, until I figured out that most of the reporting around Soham strongly implies though doesn't actually state that Huntley went to the same school as his victims. So as much deliberate misleading by the reporting as misremembering, if disturbing how quickly people will support a BS expert.

The Wiki page on the subject gets it right, at least until someone edits it to the contrary.
 
There were CRB checks before the Soham case. When I signed up with an agency in 2001, I was told of the check and that a deduction would be made from my pay for it. The deduction was not made. When the Soham case struck, agencies were jolted into action and submitted their entire payroll belatedly for clearance, leading to a massive backlog on the system. Everyone had been very lax about protection which was already theoretically in place!

You are right about the irony that Huntley was trusted by the girls, presumably, on the basis of his relationship with their TA. The current DBS has a question about cohabitation with sex-offenders, though that hardly begins to cover the contingencies. :rolleyes:
 
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I'm wondering if the Mandela Effect can be induced by social media and indignant tabloids. A seasonal example : Easter Eggs. People are complaining (or we're being told they're complaining) about chocolate companies removing the word "Easter" from their Easter Egg packaging to avoid offending Muslims, political correctness gone mad, etc. Some people swear blind that this has happened. Truth is, the word has hardly ever been used on packaging since they were first made in 1873. A few examples from the 1970s :

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The PR departments at Nestle and Cadbury must be working overtime at this time of year, fending off offended idiots.
 
Tribble said:
...The PR departments at Nestle and Cadbury must be working overtime at this time of year, fending off offended idiots.
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Yep. It's another example of that 'Political Correctness Gone Mad...Gone Mad' thing that I've mentioned elsewhere (the 'White Lodge incident' - top of the page).

My grandad was generally the most unpedantic of people, but the odd isolated little thing used to drive him up the wall. Easter eggs were one of those things: 'An Easter egg is an egg some idiot has covered in paint - a chocolate egg is an egg made of bloody chocolate'.

And they've always been Cadburys Creme Eggs - although no-one has ever explained to me exactly what 'creme' is.
 
creme
kriːm/
noun
  1. a substance or product with a thick, creamy consistency.
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
creme
kriːm/
noun
  1. a substance or product with a thick, creamy consistency.
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Bleurch...horrible. For some reason that word reminds me of platform shoes, faux lather pouffes (so faux that they actually looked like faux plastic) and men going to discos dressed like Peter Sutcliffe - it's just so 70's...and not in a good way.
 
Aren't Easter eggs symbolically pagan rather than Christian? Where are the offended pagans? No, let's not encourage them.
 
OK, this is sheer messing with Mandela Effect sufferers' minds:

Er, April Fool? Until it's cited as the genuine article?
 
Is that the film that is not supposed to exist? :huh:

Or, it could be a skit on some long-forgotten cable-station comedy show? :confused:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Is that the film that is not supposed to exist? :huh:
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It still doesn't exist, it's a new clip devised as a prank on those who believe it does exist (hence all the other ME references in it). You can tell because Sinbad looks as old as he is now, rather than as young as he was in the 1990s.
 
GNC said:
OK, this is sheer messing with Mandela Effect sufferers' minds:

Er, April Fool? Until it's cited as the genuine article?
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Definitely College Humor.
 
Vardoger said:
Definitely College Humor.
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And there's apparently a few Mandela Effect easter eggs (or are they now called chocolate eggs?) in there too.

There's a lot to love about the spoofed clip though, as the creators put some real effort into paying homage to the Mandela Effect. From the dialogue ("We have our memories, they're real, no-one can take that from us"), to the various props (including a newspaper report on Nelson Mandela dying, and a Berenstein Bears book), there's a bunch of easter eggs in there for those Mandela Effect aficionados who want to have some fun hunting all the references down

http://dailygrail.com/Forteana/2017...ge-Non-Existent-Film-Shazaam-Puts-the-Mandela

(only 1 comment so far on that article, and the commenter thinks Kazaam (starring Shaq, and does exist) is the non-existent film. The Mandela Effect is looping round on itself)
 
The "Shazam" thing: the old Banana Splits thing that ran on Saturday morning kids' TV for donkey's years incorporated a cartoon seral set in Arabia or a fantastic equivalent of. Four heroes, at least two of whom had some sort of magical power, one of whom used "size of a {{insert name of animal}}!" to transform into a creature; and the other used "Shazam!" as his magical "abracacadabra!" word. As this ran for a significant fraction of forever on a repeating loop on Saturday mornings, could this be how the word and a vague association with something Arabic stuck in so many heads?
 
That cartoon was Captain Marvel - my mate had the wallpaper, with 'shazam!' all over it.
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
That cartoon was Captain Marvel - my mate had the wallpaper, with 'shazam!' all over it.
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As an aside - Captain Marvel (or a spoof thereof) had a cameo in Marshal Law (Super Babylon). Toxic waste resurrected a load of Golden Age superheroes. Unfortunately, he had a lapse of memory and showed up a few times in the background...

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(And this one, from Marshal Law takes Manhattan)

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