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Merged The MANDELA Effect.

I see utility in the application of the name.

After all a confabulation is mundane. I thought I closed the drawer but it turns out I didn't.

But an ME is different because it shakes you to your core. My own is a Simpsons episode called Bart of Darkness. If you don't know episode names it is the one where they get a swimming pool, Bart injures himself, gets banished to his bedroom and then reenacts the Hitchcock film Rear Window. I have always remembered it as a season ending episode. It wasn't. And while that is a possible mere confabulation what elevates it, for me, is that I have a distinct memory of talking to my friends about it being a great season ending episode when it first aired.

So...what gives? After many years of dwelling on it I can only figure that I must have missed the first airing of the episode (odd because I was such a fanatic at the time that I always caught first runs) then saw it as a rerun after the real season ender and assumed it was the season ender that year. Apparently my friends all made the same mistake.

But being wrong about this was emotionally disturbing. And I think the degree that the error frightens you determines if it is just a confabulation or something that might rise to a full on ME moment.

Just my thoughts.
 
alfaniner said:
So, anyone ready for the "Episode IV" argument? :D
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Do you mean the one about C3P0's silver right shin in eps. IV-VI? That's the only pop-culture ME that made me an impression on me. Then I rewatched the movies and it felt pretty obvious why so many viewers have never noticed it.

In most scenes with C3P0 his shins are not in the frame. And while he is obviously (mostly) golden, in any scene there are many parts of him where the golden colour is obscured by highlights and reflections. So when there finally is a shot where his shins are visible we are primed to think: 1) he is golden, 2) this can be a bit hard to see.

Also much more interesting things are happening in the rest of the frame.
 
3point14 said:
the Mandella effect ...
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William Parcher said:
It happens when you are absolutely certain that his name used to be spelled this way.
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I think you’re mistaken, WP. It’s what happens when you confuse Nelson Mandela with Leo Mandella. It’s very easy to make the mistake since the two guys not only look so much alike but also have similar aspirations: Leo Mandella
 
dann said:
I think you’re mistaken, WP. It’s what happens when you confuse Nelson Mandela with Leo Mandella. It’s very easy to make the mistake since the two guys not only look so much alike but also have similar aspirations: Leo Mandella
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In my universe, a Tibetan Buddhist geometric pattern used to be the president of South Africa.
 
alfaniner said:
So, anyone ready for the "Episode IV" argument? :D
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Didactylos said:
Do you mean the one about C3P0's silver right shin in eps. IV-VI?
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No, I meant literally the "Episode IV" in the title crawl of Star Wars, along with the words "A New Hope". Neither of those were there in 1977 when the original Star Wars debuted and were not added until later.

I thought it was such a well-known argument that nobody here wanted to open that can of worms.
 
alfaniner said:
No, I meant literally the "Episode IV" in the title crawl of Star Wars, along with the words "A New Hope". Neither of those were there in 1977 when the original Star Wars debuted and were not added until later.

I thought it was such a well-known argument that nobody here wanted to open that can of worms.
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Are you saying it's in dispute that 'A New Hope' wasn't on the original posters and that the film was called "A New Hope" from the beginning?
 
I am relieved to know that all these years I have not been incorrectly singing all those song lyrics. In my dimension they are correct!

I didn't know too much about this claim before this post. I am just at a loss as to why people would go to such great lengths to get around admitting that people remember things incorrectly. I have mistakenly thought a few of these things but they have easy, rational explanations that have been provided by others in this post already. Why is it so unbelievable that we are easily led to believe things by the masses? It's not an "effect", it's human nature. You can take a perfectly benign house with zero history, turn out all the lights and tell a fictitious ghost story to the people in a group, and suddenly it has a "creepy" vibe. Almost all will talk each other into feelings, unease, and even paranormal sightings.
 
alfaniner said:
No, I meant literally the "Episode IV" in the title crawl of Star Wars, along with the words "A New Hope". Neither of those were there in 1977 when the original Star Wars debuted and were not added until later.

I thought it was such a well-known argument that nobody here wanted to open that can of worms.
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3point14 said:
Are you saying it's in dispute that 'A New Hope' wasn't on the original posters and that the film was called "A New Hope" from the beginning?
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Yeah I was under the impression everyone knew this too.
 
Some ME enthusiasts on YouTube have some alternative map of the world. On that map North and South Korea are much south, in the same tropical area as Thailand. Its a common knowledge that 38 parallel is a border beetwen North and South Korea. And all Koreans Know that Korea is a snowy country with cold winters. And if Japan was near central China they wouldnt invade Manchukuo which is Northern province. The whole history would be significantly different
 
Here's my list of personal miss-rememberings:

1. There was a drainage canal next to my childhood home in Jacksonville, Florida. To my memory the canal continued on parallel to our property and that of the property behind us. We moved to my grandfather's house in the city. A few months later I was with my father when he went back to the house in preparation for its sale. I noticed the canal did not continue parallel to the property behind but made a 90 degree angle at the end of ours. I told my dad that's not how I remembered. he told me the canal had meandered.

2. For years I remembered that I had flunked and had to repeat both first and second grade. Actually it was only the second.

3.)I remember from childhood a Donald Duck cartoon animation in which the hapless Donald falls onto a conveyer belt in an assembly line and is subjected to all kinds of horrible processes till he comes out a series of gold plated Oscar statutes. It horrified me as much as The Wizard of Oz's Flying Monkeys, and the pistol pointed at the viewer at the intro of each Superman episode. But I have never seen or found that cartoon again.

4. At an English conversation school I taught at, we had some poster board visuals for teaching a number of different constructions and idioms. I remember having seen one covering "makes me." A picture of a tall glass of ice-water was used for "This makes me thirsty." A plate of food for, "This makes me hungry." And for this "makes me sick" there was a picture of an ugly bald guy dangling a frog over his mouth. Fellow instructors and I laughed about this one. It was unforgettable. But when I searched for it to use in a lesson, not only could I not find it, but none of my fellow teachers remembered it existing. Even the school director who had made the posters had no knowledge of it.

5.) In 1995 on occasion of the Hanshin Earthquake that devastated Kobe, Japan. I remember being in San Rafael, CA and learning about it there. However according to the visas stamped in my old passport, I was in Fukuoka, Japan at the time.

6. I remember the debut of the Twin Peaks TV series in '97. I was living in San Jose, CA at the time. I clearly remember the hoopla about it on entertainment shows and an article in Time Magazine. People I knew couldn't miss an episode. We'd fill each other in on episodes we'd missed.
But recently I learned that Twin Peaks was televised in '90,91. I was in Japan those years and certainly didn't see it there.

7. A recent x-ray reveled that at sometime years ago I broke the tibia of my right leg, and it was never set properly. What? I'd remember breaking a leg. But I do remember I totaled my right ankle in a slip on ice my senior year of college. Another X-ray revealed that the fracture cam up from my ankle. Well of course it was the tibia!
 
3point14 said:
Are you saying it's in dispute that 'A New Hope' wasn't on the original posters and that the film was called "A New Hope" from the beginning?
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I can't quite parse your question the way it was worded so I'll say the truth directly.

There was no "Episode IV: A NEW HOPE" on the original poster(s) in 1977/1978. Neither was it originally there at that time on the title crawl ("It is a period of civil war"). I did see a big discussion of that (again) recently and thought it might have been on this board.
 
Apathia said:
Here's my list of personal miss-rememberings:


3.)I remember from childhood a Donald Duck cartoon animation in which the hapless Donald falls onto a conveyer belt in an assembly line and is subjected to all kinds of horrible processes till he comes out a series of gold plated Oscar statutes. It horrified me as much as The Wizard of Oz's Flying Monkeys, and the pistol pointed at the viewer at the intro of each Superman episode. But I have never seen or found that cartoon again.
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That sounds quite like "Modern Times" by Charlie Chaplin.
 
Pope130 said:
That sounds quite like "Modern Times" by Charlie Chaplin.
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Could that have created the horrible memory? The iconic caught in the works scene?

Anyway I've found a youtube of a Donald Duck carton in which he falls onto a mining conveyor belt. I could have misremembered that.

#6: Perhaps Twin Peaks was in rerun in '97.

#5: My memory is sitting in the San Rafael Public Library reading about and looking at pictures of the quake devastation in a Time Magazine. Shortly after that I returned to Fukuoka. But actually I was in Japan when the quake happened. My memory is quite messed up about this.

A friend of mine remembers a house at a specific intersection on her way to work. One day she noticed it wasn't there. Instead there was a hill covered with trees.
 
Apathia said:
Could that have created the horrible memory? The iconic caught in the works scene?

Anyway I've found a youtube of a Donald Duck carton in which he falls onto a mining conveyor belt. I could have misremembered that.
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I can give you a definitive "maybe" on that. I have a few anomalous memories myself. They mostly run to remembering movies, TV shows or books slightly differently. In the most dramatic case I have a memory of seeing a movie based on a book that has never, in fact, been filmed. I've been relieved to find in a few cases that there were alternative versions. Mostly I think that, in my case, it's simple conflation of the memory of similar sources, or my own re-imagining of how a production should have gone. In the case of the film that never was (H. Beam Piper's "Space Viking") it could be an artifact of the extremely vivid writing going into my memory as images rather than words.

The more dramatic examples people cite; buildings not being where the used to be, roads not going where you used to take them, and so on, are a lot harder to explain.
 
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