The Mandela Effect

Earlier, Cody and Ma are toasting one another and she says "Top of the world, son," and he responds "Top of the world." But what everyone remembers is "Top of the world, Ma!"

EngProf said:

Speaking of "Young Frankenstein", I thought for years that Kenneth Mars' embedding of the darts in his (The Inspector's) wooden arm while playing darts with Gene Wilder was done for comic effect. I saw "Son of Frankenstein" for the first time in a long time this past weekend and saw that Lionel Atwill did exactly the same thing in the real movie.
In fact, I was slightly surprised to realize that most of "Young Frankenstein" was a parody of "Son of Frankenstein", not the first "Frankenstein".
The big door-knockers, Igor/Eyegor playing a horn, etc. were all there. So much so that I was getting "YF" flashbacks and laughing out loud at a lot of the serious scenes.
However, this may be just poor memory and not truly the Mandela Effect of remembering things that didn't really happen...

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Mel Brooks "borrowed" elements from the first three movies in Universal's Frankenstein franchise for Young Frankenstein, but I think he realized Son of Frankenstein had the most comedic value; Basil Rathbone's over-the-top performance through most of the movie is just begging to be parodied.

Edward said:

...Wonderful performer, truly funny man. I adored Gene Wilder and al the others, but Feldman really is the lynchpin that makes it all perfect.... Did you get a chance to see the stage version? Very well done, if not as strong as The Producers.. Fascinating especially to see how it was reimagined for the stage, bearing in mind that it had to be in colour (Brooks had to fight the studio and even threaten to walk, I believe, to get them to agree to let him shoot in B&W), and other elements of the original format - which was, after all, a satire on movies - wouldn't transfer...

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It may have been a "missed opportunity", but I had no interest in seeing the stage version of Young Frankenstein. I like the movie so much that I could only perceive an alternate version as inferior, and I have a strong dislike for musicals.

Edward said:

...IT's always fun to watch something like that if you'd not been aware of specific details that way. A few years ago, I MC'ed a double bill screening of Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire; many in the audience had seen the latter before but not the former the whole way through - it was interesting to see people realise how much of the original they'd seen in clips, or taken off elsewhere over the years (I still maintain the Thriller dance was a take off of a very specific moment in the film), and then to see the smiles of recognition at the scenes recreated in Shadow...

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The original Nosferatu (1922) is one of my favorite vampire movies, and I think Shadow of the Vampire was an interesting and rather well executed concept--a whole lot of fiction with just enough fact to make it almost plausible, and a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at how movies were made in those days.

Zombie_61 said:

Mel Brooks "borrowed" elements from the first three movies in Universal's Frankenstein franchise for Young Frankenstein, but I think he realized Son of Frankenstein had the most comedic value; Basil Rathbone's over-the-top performance through most of the movie is just begging to be parodied.

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"Borrowed?" He swiped the whole freakin' set!


Sent directly from my mind to yours.

So, what have I learned from this thread?
That in many cases our memories are false… from small things (movie quotes) to big things (family memories).
I’ve also learned that experiments have been conducted to make people believe they have memories of things that never happened.
Add to that the plain fact that all of us believe things (varying from individual to individual) that are just plain wrong.
Kinda makes me want to question my belief that I “know” anything at all.
It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility. –Yogi Berra

Edward said:

As memory serves, that line was in the forward to the first published volume by Voltaire, and was the publisher's summary of something he'd written at greater length. I have a half rememberee botion, as I type this, that something similar happened with "Give me liberty or give me death" and Ben Franklin.

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Frunobulax said:

That's because Patrick Henry said it.
.

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KILO NOVEMBER said:

The "give me liberty ..." was Patrick Henry.

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Quite right.... I realised this morning that the misquote attributed to Franklin I was thinking of wasn't liberty or death, but "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - though following this up it seems less a misquote and more that the popular notion of this maxim is quoting it out of context and thus giving it a different meaning than Franklin intended.

The ease with which false beliefs and false memories can be implanted in the mass mind by simple repetition is a technique that's long been known to the Boys and other propagandists, especially since the advent of advanced psychological marketing in the 1950s. Don't just question what you think you know, question what you think you remember.

Edward said:

As memory serves, that line was in the forward to the first published volume by Voltaire, and was the publisher's summary of something he'd written at greater length. I have a half rememberee botion, as I type this, that something similar happened with "Give me liberty or give me death" and Ben Franklin.

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As others have posted, that was actually Patrick Henry, who concluded his speech before the Continental Congress on 23rd March 1775 with the following:
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”


But speaking of Dr. Franklin:—
It’s an all-too-common misconception that Benjamin Franklin, whose portrait graces the front of the $100 bill, was once President. Some people even say they are carrying lots of ‘dead Presidents’ when they have several $100 bills, thinking that the man on the ‘Benjamin’ was once a President. In actuality, fewer than three-quarters of the denominations of U. S. paper currency in current circulation bear portraits of former Presidents of the United States. Neither Alexander Hamilton nor Benjamin Franklin, whose portraits are on the $10 and $100 bill, respectively, were ever President*. But George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Hiram Ulysses Grant, whose portraits are on the $1, $2, $5, $20, and $50, respectively, were.

That brings me to something a bit more relevant to the Mandela Effect: Two-dollar bills. For whatever reason, many people believe that $2 bills haven’t been made in decades and are rare and valuable; some people even hoard them in the belief that they are, or will be, valuable. However, except for a ten-year hiatus from 1966 to 1976, $2 bills have been in fairly constant production since 1862 and the most recent printing was in July 2016. Unless it has Monticello on the back and red serial numbers and seal, it’s worth exactly two dollars.

About that hiatus:— In 1966, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing** decided to discontinue the two-dollar bill. A decade later, with the Bicentennial looming, it was decided to reïntroduce the denomination to commemorate the author of our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. The obverse was left essentially the same, but the back was changed to an engraved version of John Trumbull’s painting Declaration of Independence. These were first released on Jefferson’s 233rd birthday. Interestingly, for a memento, some people went to the bank to get one on the first day of issue, then went to the post office to put a stamp on it and have it cancelled “April 13, 1976”. I have a few of these that I’ve found in circulation.


*If you really want to be pedantic though, Benjamin Franklin was once Governor of Pennsylvania at a time when the title was still ‘President’; he was the penultimate man to hold the office before the title was changed.
**Another misconception: it is not the Mint, but the B. E. P., that prints our currency. The Mint mints our coins.

No matter what Patrick Henry said, it was undoubtedly Groucho who said "Remember, there's nothing like Liberty, except Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post."

Getting back to historical misinformation, there were, not so long ago, millions of Americans alive who would swear up and down that they heard CBS newscaster John Daly break into a Sunday afternoon broadcast of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with the very first announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But they didn't. There *were* interruptions in the Philharmonic program, and there was a full news summary during that program's intermission period, but these aren't what people "remember" hearing.

What they "remembered" was a doctored audio clip produced for a record album in 1948. CBS actually carried its first announcement of the attack in a regularly-scheduled news program which began at 230pm Eastern time, half an hour before the Philharmonic program began. The producers of that record album wanted to create something more dramatic than just an ordinary news program, so they took Daly's delivery of the Pearl Harbor story from the genuine recording of that newscast, and spliced onto the front of it a recording of Daly saying "We interrupt this program..." taken from his bulletin announcing the death of FDR in 1945. They then dropped this doctored clip into a recording of the Philharmonic broadcast, creating something that never actually existed in that form, but which has become a part of the accepted historical record. What millions of people remembered hearing was not what they actually heard at all -- but a manufactured bit of history designed for commercial purposes.

The record album in question, Columbia's very popular and widely circulated "I Can Hear It Now: 1933-1945," used many such 'recreations." The producers of that record album? Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly. Even they couldn't resist messing around with reality when it made for a better story.

I would also guess that many folks who claim to have witnessed many of these events, such as the "That oughta hold the little b******s" line actually heard the Kermit Shafer recreation, and not the actual event.


Sent directly from my mind to yours.

F. J. said:

That brings me to something a bit more relevant to the Mandela Effect...

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On target!

Aha. Finally a rational, down-to-earth explanation of the Mandela Effect. Talk about going to extreme lengths to explain false memories. (The article offers a variation of the “parallel universe” explanation.)

But wait. Didn’t the monopoly man wear a monocle? I could have sworn he did. And I STILL swear it was Berenstein Bears.

https://brobible.com/culture/article/tiktoker-immortality-theory-life-after-death/

It's not the Monopoly Man who wear a monocle -- it's his contemporary, Lord Plushbottom from "Moon Mullins." Right? Oh wait, Lord Plushbottom wears a pince-nez. Then why do I always picture him with a monocle -- even when I'm LOOKING RIGHT AT HIM.

LizzieMaine said:

It's not the Monopoly Man who wear a monocle -- it's his contemporary, Lord Plushbottom from "Moon Mullins." Right? Oh wait, Lord Plushbottom wears a pince-nez. Then why do I always picture him with a monocle -- even when I'm LOOKING RIGHT AT HIM.

View attachment 370906

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Maybe you're conflating him with Mr. Peanut.

I'm sure repetition plays a big role in false memories. As a former professional musician there are several (perhaps even many) pieces that I've heard so many times and know so well that I swear I've performed them, though I can't find any evidence that I actually did. Maybe its just a matter of the older I get the better I was.

Hercule said:

Maybe its just a matter of the older I get the better I was.

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Ain’t that the truth.

The older you get, the more you realize the things you remember and the things that actually happened are often two different things. Memory is like a record you can play too many times without changing the needle.

F. J. said:

…

But speaking of Dr. Franklin:—
It’s an all-too-common misconception that Benjamin Franklin, whose portrait graces the front of the $100 bill, was once President. Some people even say they are carrying lots of ‘dead Presidents’ when they have several $100 bills, thinking that the man on the ‘Benjamin’ was once a President. In actuality, fewer than three-quarters of the denominations of U. S. paper currency in current circulation bear portraits of former Presidents of the United States. Neither Alexander Hamilton nor Benjamin Franklin, whose portraits are on the $10 and $100 bill, respectively, were ever President*. But George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Hiram Ulysses Grant, whose portraits are on the $1, $2, $5, $20, and $50, respectively, were.
…
.

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What with the brouhaha over the prospect of putting Sojourner Truth’s likeness on our currency, the new First Ladies series has gone essentially unnoticed. Witness the new Barbara Bush $1 bill.

Martha Washington already had her chance on the dollar bill, a hundred and thirty five years ago...

For modern generations I think a part of The Mandela Effect is caused by the entertainment we watch and listen to. How many comedians or impressionists have done some version of James Cagney saying, "You dirty rat!" or Cary Grant saying, "Judy, Judy, Judy!"? Our minds record the information and, eventually, things get confused and we're convinced we've actually seen or heard James Cagney or Cary Grant utter those very words when, in fact, it never happened. This doesn't explain every instance, but it must surely explain some of them.

Richard Blaine never actually said, "play it again, Sam"?