
A movie that doesn’t exist and the Redditors who think it does - smacktoward
http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2016/12/movie-doesn-t-exist-and-redditors-who-think-it-does
======
flukus
Went through the article thinking "god, I do remember this movie" until I got
to the Kazaam part. Kazaam fits fine into my vague memory.

It was always the Berenstein bears though, get out of my universe!

Edit - If anyone wants a good sci-fi novel, the revelation space series
touches on the mandela effect a bit.

~~~
brandur
I had pretty much the same reaction — I was actually hoping a little bit to be
able to finish the article, run my own queries through Google, have them come
up empty, and get a small taste of the supernatural.

But nope, Kazaam is a perfect fit. I had remembered Shaq being in it from the
beginning too, and was starting to think that my memory was a a bit faulty.

I would have also guessed "Berenstein", but to be fair, I barely knew how to
spell when I read through those books.

~~~
ibejoeb
>I would have also guessed "Berenstein", but to be fair, I barely knew how to
spell when I read through those books.

I didn't know about the Berenstain alternate universe until long after it was
a thing, and I this was my first reaction as well. I never really _knew_ how
to spell it, and I hadn't see one of those for many years since.

I also think it's one of those easily confused suffices: -ein, -ine, -ien,
-een, -urg, -erg, etc.

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adpoe
It's very strange how memory works.

The first few paragraphs I thought - "yes, I remember this". But once I got
farther into it, I realized it was definitely Shaq's Kazaam that I was
__misremembering __.

However--I would never have thought it was Sinbad at all, if the article had
not __suggested it __first.

I'm not sure if that says more about the nature of memory, or _the power of
suggestion_.

Perhaps fading memory combined with strong and 'seemingly accurate' suggestion
is quite a powerful thing. There are tons of examples of this.

For example, was that old Tom Cruise movie called "Interview with _A_ Vampire"
or "Interview with THE Vampire"? Like 'Shazaam', many people say that at some
point the movie title changed. But there's no evidence of that at all.

Perhaps my all time favorite story about the strangeness of memory is more
relevant than ever. Borges' story, "Shakespeare's Memory". Read aloud for the
New Yorker: [http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-
podcast-h...](http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-podcast-
hisham-matar-reads-jorge-luis-borges)

Basically, a writer is magically given Shakespeare's memories. "But he soon
discovers that memory is a slippery thing, 'not a summation, it is a chaos of
vague possibilities.'"

The greatest labyrinth of all might just be the mind.

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erelde
Should we also discuss witnesses' recollections during trials?

I remember thinking about that very much when I listened to the podcast
Serial. What do we actually remember? I think _I_ only really remember
"methods". ( _neural passageways_?)

edit: I was a pain in high school for my physics teacher (and for myself), I
never learned any formulas and did everything with dimensional analysis...

~~~
Ntrails
Historically I believe we always trusted eye witnesses pretty heavily in
trial, but they're known to be unrelated. I remember myself testifying once,
and it's the strangest experience.

I remember what I thought I saw. I don't remember seeing. Even at the police
station immediately after the "replay" was fuzzy. 3 months later? I was
literally just parroting what I remember saying and thinking at the time _not_
what I remember seeing.

Was a weird experience

~~~
flukus
I Wonder if we should favorite witness statements taken shortly after the
event instead of involving witnesses in the trial?

~~~
Ntrails
I absolutely think that's a better way to behave. Once I replay/recall a
memory a couple of times in my head it becomes as real as the original,
eventually more real. I guess I'd favour my odds of being correct closer to
the event but overall I just think humans are unreliable overall.

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ChuckMcM
I have experienced this effect multiple times when my wife remembers me saying
something I have no recollection of :-). I like the idea of a mandella effect,
or perhaps someone _does_ invent time travel and the only change was who
starred in the movie and what its title was. Something like "in the timeline
where Sinbad was in a genie movie the world is destroyed but scientists
stepped back in time and changed just enough to save the world, unfortunately
causality resulted in the movie no longer existing even though some still
remember it. A small price to pay for saving the world."

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andrewclunn
MGM should cast Sinbad in a movie titled "Shazaam! 2" just to really fuck with
people.

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leereeves
TLDR: They're misremembering Shaq playing a genie in Kazaam as Sinbad playing
a genie in "Shazaam".

~~~
csydas
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure why people make such a big deal out of it,
muchless why it's a front page article here. When I read the first few lines
of the article I figured it was referring to the movie with Shaq, then
realized I remembered the name wrong when I saw the image for "Kazaam". It
wasn't exactly earth shattering that I misremembered something that was a
minor part of my childhood.

Same with the Berenstain Bear books - I'm pretty sure I remembered it as
Berenstein as well, but I guess I was wrong, or just mispronounced it as a kid
and it stuck. While I remember having read all the books multiple times, it's
not like they were that important.

The impact that this has and the amount of discussion it generates is very
confusing to me. If it's all in good fun and jest, then no worries I suppose,
but if misremembering or simply making a mistake with facts is this mind
blowing to people, I'm really curious how they handle more important incorrect
facts they hold dearly. Maybe it's a function of my education hammering home
the fact that what I knew yesterday might not be true to day (science and
technology is like this), but making a mistake like this isn't that earth
shattering to me. There's a lot of data out there to remember and of varying
priority - a kids movie about a genie and the name of a book I read when I was
4 isn't quite that important to me now as it was when I was 4.

I'm sure most of this is just people having fun with a really widely held mis-
memory, but I really hope people don't take it too seriously.

edit: changed opening to include my confusion why this hit front page.

~~~
rbanffy
> Yeah, I'm not entirely sure why people make such a big deal out of it

Memory is our connection to the past, to the events that led us to the
present. We perceive and interpret the present through the models we
constructed with what we experienced before. If we can't trust our memories to
be good approximations of past events, we can't trust our judgement.

Let's say physicists around the world start reporting consistent FTL neutrino
detections. It could be, of course, a batch of defective cables, but it'd be
much harder to convince those who made the measurements when lots of people
are getting the same results.

------
imafish
Read an article a few years ago, where a lot of people claimed that New
Zealand used to lie north of Australia. The same conclusion was made: it must
be a merge of two parallel universes. Nobody stopped up to think that maybe
they're just really bad at geography.

~~~
DozNuts
o.m.g. i thought it was always north of australia... but why lol

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kazinator
My Shazaam.1994.DVDRip.x264.AC3 torrent has been stuck at 15% for five years.

Plz seed!

~~~
rbanffy
Did you set your VLAN tag to the correct timeline?

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rl3
I think what makes this magical is the suggestion that a misremembered,
imaginary D-list 90's movie—supposedly featuring Sinbad—is somehow evidence
for Bostrom's simulation hypothesis.

------
jandrese
As a 90s kid I thought the article was going to talk about the Shaq Genie
movie, and it turns out it was.

I do know there was a Shazam cartoon on VHS. My local Rite Aid used to have a
tiny VHS rental section. It was organized by having all of the covers stuffed
into a poster display (the kind where a good number of flat frames are hinged
at once side and attached to a shelf so you can flip through them like a
book), and you simply found one you wanted to rent and told the clerk. The
clerk would pull out the movie from underneath the shelf for the one day
rental. Anyway, they had an extremely narrow kids selection, which we burned
through almost immediately. Except for one title. The only cartoon in the
list, Shazam was apparently some kind of superhero, but we would never know
because the VHS tape was lost long ago and the manager wasn't interested in
either ordering a second copy or removing the cover from the display. So every
week we would ask and every week the tape would be missing.

In retrospect it was probably shit, but so was most everything kid oriented in
those days.

~~~
xsmasher
That was probably SHAZAM - based on the Captain Marvel character that is now
owned by DC comics.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmm781WHxdk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmm781WHxdk)

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omnibrain
my own "favourite" false memory is a cover version of Leonard Cohen's
Hallelujah done by Nick Cave. The is a song named Hallelujah by Nick Cave but
it is a different song. None the less I remeber very distinctly Nick Caves
cover version of Hallelujah sung in his unmistakable style. I went so far to
listen to several dozen cover versions of Hallelujah on Spotify and Youtube
but found none that came even near.

~~~
amouat
He did do a version of Avalanche, which might be confusing you
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyuEu2vOY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyuEu2vOY8)

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kahrkunne
False memories are very interesting (and a bit scary) stuff! For example, I
distinctly remember eating moose meat at a restaurant with my grandparents,
even though that never happened.

I wish there was a way to find out how much of what I remember never actually
happened

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kazinator
There is an old French Canadian folk tale, "John Labadie's Big Black Dog". It
was written up by author Natalie Savage Carlson in 1952.

It revolves around a town of people who all claim the existence of a dog.
Trouble is, there is no such dog.

~~~
kazinator
Oops!

Being shaper in the morning I see I should have written _Jean_ Labadie.

------
dham
The crossed movie is Aliens for Breakfast. I distinctly remember a Sinbad
genie despite never having been on the Reddit discussion or thinking twice
about it since the dawn of the internet. I'm pretty sure the movie people are
thinking about is Aliens for Breakfast though.

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Yhippa
Whenever I see stuff on reddit I have to think there are a bunch of trolls
doing stuff like this "for the lulz". This is relatively harmless but then you
have stuff like /r/The_Donald and even worse, Pizzagate.

~~~
herbst
The stuff about europe on the donald and related places is totally crazy IMO.
At first it was a joke, one europe earned after merkels public invite. But
then it slowly creeped into mainstream media and now is used by politicans in
the USA and even "documented" in propaganda material.

~~~
Gravityloss
Can you summarize?

~~~
herbst
Sure i'll try. Obviously europe had a few more immigrants than otherwise over
the last 2 years. The general idea was that under these immigrants will be a
lot of terrorists (which showed to be wrong, because by far most attacks were
done by people living there for a while) but is used until now from right
partys. These US dominated subreddits like /r/The_Donald or even /r/4chan
turned this into memes along "Blacks come to rape your woman" (projecting
much?). And meanwhile Trump uses Europe as example for getting overrun by
terrorists and turning Islam (whatever this means) in every other speech.

The thing is, what most european leaders are fully aware of, its not
immigration that is the problem but bad immigration where Germany and France
are prime examples.

I hope this helps :)

~~~
herbst
To the guy that answered and then removed the question (Got a notifaction).
Yes i live(d) in europe. In Switzerland where this whole thing barely seemed
to be a problem and only named as problem by a few right politics. Also i am
not claiming the sitation wasnt hard to some countries to scope. Its just that
criminality & terrorism did not rise at all in most of them.

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photik
It's classic confabulation. Corporate confabulation is a thing.

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jlubawy
Best Sinbad movie was by far was First Kid
[http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0116311/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0116311/)

Edit: Sorry forgot about Jingle All the Way, after that

Edit2: Oh man, and he was great in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia

