What is the Mandela Effect? Is it Imaginary or a Glitch in the Matrix?

Ten days ago I was watching a movie called Run & Gun on Paramount+.  A part of this movie is a gangster is obsessed with a movie that was supposed to be called Shazaam (with two A's not one like the superhero movie) that starred comedian Sinbad in the 90s.  It was supposed to be about him playing the eponymous genie and mayhem ensues.  

Fake!

The thing is, the movie doesn't exist!  You can't find it on streaming.  You can't find it on eBay.  You can't find it on IMDB.  Even Sinbad himself says it's not real.  Yet people insist it's real and go to great lengths describing it.  Scammers then of course try to make a buck by making "real" copies to sell on auction sites.  In the movie I mentioned, the copies the gangster gets are Spanish language versions of Kazaam starring Shaquille O'Neal with fake covers.

This is a real phenomenon that's called "the Mandela Effect" because there are people who are convinced Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s.  Despite that there is no evidence to support this, they continue to insist he died about 30 years earlier than he really did.  For many it's "proof" of time travel or a glitch in the Matrix or multiverses or science-fiction things like that.

There are other less severe versions of this.  For instance, in Casablanca, Bogie never says, "Play it again, Sam."  In original Trek, Kirk never says, "Beam me up Scotty."  In Empire Vader doesn't say "Luke, I am your father."  The real line in the latter is "No.  I am your father." after Luke says Vader killed his father.  In Trek, Kirk would usually say, "X many to beam up" or something.  The one that surprised me was someone mentioned Forrest Gump doesn't actually say, "Life is like a box of chocolates."  He doesn't?  I was pretty sure he did.  Or something along those lines.

I had my own brush with the Mandela effect (it's the third item on my Potpourri list) when I chided someone on a Facebook group about saying everyone died in Rogue One not long after the movie came out.  This person insisted the crawl for Episode IV said the spies all died.  Which it doesn't.  Then he insisted they mention it in Episode IV, which they don't.  All Vader says is they traced a transmission to Leia's ship, which doesn't in any way imply the spies died.  Even after we had this argument, some idiot swung in to agree with the first idiot, which goes to show how hard it can be to convince people of the truth.

In a documentary about Christmas music or something, they talked to the lead singer of the Flaming Lips.  He told this story about his mom who claimed she saw a Christmas movie that didn't really exist.  What most likely happened is she started watching a movie and then fell asleep and woke up during a different movie and mentally spliced them together into something that isn't real--at least until they made it real by recreating it.

This is a mostly harmless phenomenon.  A lot of it is just I think we tend to summarize things in our memories.  Maybe to save mental space we paraphrase things like Bogie's lines in Casablanca or Vader's line in Empire or Kirk's line in Trek.  Remembering the whole conversation in those movies/TV shows would be tedious so we just paraphrase.  Human memories are not always great, which is why eyewitness testimony is often very suspect.  And then also you get that telephone game effect where one person might paraphrase a scene one way and tell it to someone else who tells it to someone else and so on.  In the pre-Internet age especially it was easy then to misremember things like that because you didn't have some asshole to go, "Aaaaaactually..." if you got it wrong.

But like "Flat Earthers" or anti-vaxxers, people who believe in the Mandela Effect aren't always harmless.  Probably no one has died like in that movie on Paramount+ over copies of a movie that doesn't really exist, but it can't be good for their mental health and of those around them.  

There's often a Mandela Effect when people read too.  I've gotten more than a few reviews where someone will say something that isn't even remotely true about the book.  Is it that they're purposely lying to sabotage me or is it that they simply don't remember the book the way I actually wrote it?  This 2018 entry talks about a couple of instances of this.

I always find those instances annoying because I'm the author so maybe I know better than you what I actually wrote.  Maybe Sinbad feels that way about that stupid fake movie.