Dateline 6-30-2016

Yesterday I fell down the Mandela Effect rabbit hole and I have to say it was pretty fun. 

Though I heard of the effect several years ago during the great debate over the last name of a family of fictional bears. For those of you who don't know, the Mandela Effect is when people seem to collectively believe that some aspects of history have magically changed over time.

I'm not talking views and opinions like how I was taught that Christopher Columbus was a great person to be celebrated as the person who discovered the new world when now we seem to see him as a genocidal man who "discovered" a land that already had a healthy population.

No, these changes are more frivolous and obscure which makes the whole effect more frustrating yet fascinating at the same time. Take Forrest Gump for example. I have never heard anyone not say, "Momma always said, life IS like a box of chocolates," but when you watch the movie it turns out the line is, "life WAS like a box of chocolates." To add to the confusion there is also behind the scenes footage of Tom Hanks delivering the line with "IS" yet "WAS" is still what made the cut. 

I can see what might have happened here because when Sally Field delivers the line she does say "IS", and since she is dead when Forrest delivers the line he could have been talking about her life which was a "WAS" at that point in the story.

The interesting thing about the Mandela Effect is that other than the effect that triggered the name, where many people remember Nelson Mandela dying in jail instead of much later in life after being released and running his country for a while, for the most part, the effect only tampers with a single letter to a couple words.

Like is it Interview with THE Vampire or Interview with A Vampire, meanwhile I remember it as AN Interview with A Vampire, but I've never seen the movie so I'm not the best judge on this one. I did, however, do some research and on Amazon all I had to do was start to type the title when this happened...

I didn't even finish the first word and the results were a title for a film that doesn't technically exist.

For the most part, I find these phrase changes to be more fun than anything so I set my TV to play YouTube videos of other examples. For the most part, I feel that pop culture has unintentionally taken and misquoted a lot of these cases the same way that when I think of Bill Clinton I think of Darrell Hammond's take on his personality leading me to like this false idea of a person that I otherwise don't really like. 

There was one example though that just blew my mind. This was about the fifth video in so I thought I had heard them all. When I heard the title Star Wars I was fully expecting to hear that it's actually "No, I am your father," and not "Luke, I am your father," like how I remember Chris Farely yelling into a fan in Tommy Boy. Instead, their example was about C3PO always having a silver leg...

WHAT???

Star Wars came out right before I was born and though I'm not a huge fan now, I was head over heels for the film as a kid and I somehow managed to go 40 years without seeing a single sight of silver on C3PO. I thought maybe this was a change from the new movies that was corrected in the digital rereleases but no this was apparently always the way.

This was the first example that blew me away. That said, I still find this phenomenon more interesting than accurate but I'm still going to keep my eye out for my examples because it's the most entertaining of the supernatural arguments that I've seen in a long time.

I can't wait to fire up the next Mandela Playlist to run in the background as I take my classes. If I find anything else interesting I'll be sure to let you know.

Talk to you tomorrow,

- The Wicker Breaker