Your Mandela Effect moment

[StockpotSoup]

I posted about mine on here a while back… it was about two celebrities that I distinctly remembered were supposed to have dated, but there’s literally nothing about in online, and no one here remembered either (and even found proof that one half of the supposed couple was married to someone else at the time!)

Have you had a Mandela Effect moment? And, when you realised you’d misremembered something, how did you react? My instinct was to look for logic explanations (e.g. I’d misunderstood a denial of a rumoured relationship). However, when I look at these things online, I’m amazed by how many people will accept literally any other explanation than “I was wrong”.

One that particularly fascinates me is around a film called Shazam. Countless people claim they can remember it, that they used to watch it all the time when they were kids… yet it doesn’t exist. When you read into it, it actually becomes quite obvious how it happened: there was a film called Kazaam that came out around the same time with the exact plot they describe, and Sinbad - the actor/comedian they believe starred as a genie in Shazam - starred in a series of TV ads as a genie around the same time. Yet thousands utterly refuse to believe that there’s no such film.

Anyone got any good examples?

I remember an alternate ending to the film 'Big' where at the end, Josh is sitting in the classroom and a 'new' girl is introduced to the class. She sits next to Josh and shows him the same card from the arcade machine...it's Elizabeth Perkins character who has made herself 'small' to be with him

I can see lots on the internet about it but nothing suggesting it was ever made!

@Avocadosandwic same, and I also vividly remember a Gary Linekar ad on the telly making a thing about the switch!

I’m wondering how long it’ll take before someone posts the mockup of Walkers crisps packets that were made on Back To Time as “proof.”

I remember the only time I had money for a pkt of crisps at school and queuing for salt and vinegar but coming away with cheese and onion.
I can't stand cheese and onion was it smiths crisps that were blue salt and vinegar I think Seabrook's are too.

My Mandela moment is remembering standing in the bedroom in a house I lived in 1997 and looking at my then husband and the song I don't want to miss a thing was on the radio alarm. I thought I don't love you this song is telling me I don't love you.
I have the memory but the song and film didn't come out till July 1998 and we had moved house twice by then different bedroom etc. but the memory is in my head.

I loved that cartoon and don't remember that episode - sorry! 🙈

What year do you think you remember that? His first advert was 1995 and most people who believe walkers are lying about never having changed their packet colours think that change happened in the 80s

I’ve just remembered this one…

An online friend of mine, an American, posted on Facebook once about how weird it was that nobody remembered that Donald Trump’s death had been reported in the 90s, was all over the news for days, but then disappeared from the news and every acted like it hadn’t happened. One of his friends had replied, “OMG, how weird! I don’t remember that at all!” I was sat there thinking “Of course you don’t remember it - it never bloody happened!”

Walkers crisps have been blue for cheese and onion and green for salt and vinegar since at least the 80s.

I know this is true because I grew up in the north east where all we ate was tudors crisps and I remember being baffled by walkers being the 'wrong' colour when we visited family down south (south being leciester 🤣)

On the crisps topic, I was utterly convinced for years that Walkers used to make a Spring Onion flavour with a light green packet. A bit of Googling has since confirmed that that was also Golden Wonder!

Spring onion must have been the rage, I remember Seabrooks doing them, and they used to come in an M and S Multipack with other more standard flavours. Mid to late 80s.

Golden wonder and Smith's were definitely the walkers of the 70s and 80s!

I think walkers ended up buying Smith's didn't they?

Does anyone remember Tudor crisps? They made the best pickled onion crisps ever!

I remember a painting I liked as a child that I had seen in the Walker art gallery. An auntie said she looked like me and bought me a print of it for my bedroom wall. Over the years I lost the picture and forgot what the painting was called and hadn't been to the art gallery in years. I googled the painting lots of times and nothing came up. I was convinced it was a girl sitting at a dinner table holding a fork and a knife or spoon with her elbows on the table. I went to the art gallery last week with my kids and I found the painting. It's definitely it, but it's of a girl sat a table with 2 flowers in front of her. It's so weird. I distinctly remember it being a certain way and it wasn't.

Perhaps you are thinking about Golden Winder crisps? They are blue for salt and vinegar etc

This is interesting, because another common misconception is that Cadbury’s Crème Eggs used to be a lot bigger. Cadbury has denied this several times, but you can see why people might think this is a false denial - companies don’t generally like to acknowledge that they’re charging you more for less. But as you say, the colour of crisps bags would be a bizarre thing to lie about.

(FYI, I know the Cadbury’s Crème Egg thing is true because I know someone who runs a chocolate website, and he posts pictures of old wrappers he collected over the years. The weight is the same on old crème egg wrappers as it is on the new ones.

My other half says this did exist. He remembers seeing it to as it was borderline triggering for him.

I thought they got home too.

I'll add that to my long list of childhood stuff I remember wrong 😁

Gary Lineker didn't start working with them until 1995 , I think his first ad was about the new cheese and onion flaver . They just changed the taste

@milesmachine I totally remember that too! I watched Big some time last year and was perplexed that she didn’t come back as a young girl in his class! Is there another film we are combining our memories with?

My Mandela effect is quite niche but I discovered George Benson’s music when my son was a baby. I was gutted when I learned that he had died…except he didn’t, as he’s still alive!

Not quite a Mandela effect because the event itself occurred. There was an Aeromexico plane crash/mid-air collision with a piper in 1986. The jet crashed into a neighbourhood across the road (equivalent to a dual carriageway here) from my cousin’s neighborhood. We were both 14 at the time and it was the Labour Day weekend/Bank Holiday, just before going back to school in September.

My memory says I had gone for a sleepover ant my cousins’ and remember seeing the smoke rising from the opposite neighbourhood. My older cousins ran over to see if they could find out what happened/if neighbours were ok. I seem to recall faces and reactions, shock and panic. I feel like I experienced that event but I’m not sure I actually did. I’m not sure if I was just so impacted by my cousins’ experience (I’d spent most of my childhood at their house, so it’s easy for me to think I was there). I should just ask them! I hadn’t thought about this in years… last time I gave it thought was when Breaking Bad came out because Walter White is the name of the air traffic controller who lost Aeromexico on the radar.

Genuine wow from me, I was convinced I’d grown up hearing he had died way before 1997 🤔

You really don’t. Walkers were a smaller brand that became more dominant. This was early 80s, long before Lineker had anything to do with them.

I have a memory of watching a TV sci-fi/ fictional game show, where contestants collected objects (they were all decorative, eg carved wooden box, silver candlestick). At the end of the game, they placed the collected objects on a table/surface that had outlines for each object with a value written inside, e.g. a circle to fit the baseof a candlestick, with '50'. I've googled and can't find that it exists.

But it definitely wasn't The Adventure Game.