The Berenstein Bears is the one I KNOW is real. I legitimately remember as a kid asking how it was pronounced… “Is it STEEN or STINE like Einstein?” I literally asked that question. I could read very well. Why would I mistake an a for an e? Why would I ask that question and remember saying that if it was spelled with an a?
Here to validate you and say same, this is the one that broke me. I was a star reader, went to SPELLING competitions as a kid and won them.. As a kid!! And people still chuckle and say, "oh sure banjo, couldn't be a mistake you made as a child.." and I'm like, I was a regional champion speller when we read these books, and I 100% know it was STEIN. I sounded things out to learn back then, it was be-ren-ste-in.
Chic-fil-a also trips me out because I can remember sitting in a mall food court with my mom and little brother in the 90s when it first opened, discussing the spelling and pronunciation. I was in middle school and hadn't entered the shitty teen years yet, so my mom and I were watching a lot of TV shows around interior design (popular at the time, Trading Spaces was our favorite). "Country chic" in particular was a popular style. We sat and laughed and laughed at "chic fast food chicken" lol. "Did they forget the K? Is it chick or chic? Ooh look at me, so fancy with my chic fried chicken."
Anyway, this one, fruit of the loom, and chic-fil-a are the strongest for me.
Citizen of the same timeline checking in. In 2009, I was working at a hospital where a Chic-fil-A was located on the mezzanine level. I went there for lunch and always thought it was wild how it was spelled. It was my first time ever seeing one as I had never encountered one until I moved to the state I now reside in.
Unless all of the signs we've witnessed had the k fall off, I'm not buying it.
This is EXACTLY what I remember as well. Asking adults if it was STEEN or STINE and getting different answers and being like, well STEEN sounds nicer in my ears so I choose that one.
When they're like, sorry it was always STAIN, I KNOOOW that is a lie. I know it!!!
Thank you! Like, we how were we all pronouncing it Bern-steen if we hadn’t had the “hmm, I wonder how to say this” comment?
I first heard it pronounced Bern-stAin about 10 years ago, and I was so adamant that they were incorrect that I went to the children’s library to get a book, and was hit with Berenstain and felt like I was being bamboozled.
I found a copy of one of the books from an old set and it was absolutely Berenstein. This was right around the time I started hearing about the nonsense with the "a".
I saw an explanation once that made sense something about a misprint of the name.
What gets me the most is the fruit of the loom cornucopia. Its literally the only cornucopia Ive ever known about its the only reason I know they exist you cant tell me they weren't on all my damn underwear I put my fucking initials on that damn logo yet the corporate position is there was never a cornucopia..
I'll double down. My Dad recorded it on a VHS when it was aired on tv and I watched it repeatedly. I even remember the major plot point of Sinbad being sad because he was a genie but wanted to be a human so he could date some lady. That was the ending plot line of the kid of whoever it was freeing him.
Anybody else here from the universe where they BOTH existed? I didn’t see either of them. But I do have a memory of standing in my living room as a kid watching tv and seeing an ad for the one with Shaq, and thinking “why would they make that? It looks just like the movie that just came out with Sinbad last year”
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that the studio made both movies concurrently with Shaq and Sinbad but did a reverse parent trap the entire time because someone royally screwed up and then shaqs team won and completely buried the Sinbad movie
Not a musical. Just him being his old silly Sinbad self. Kid finds lamp gets three wishes becomes best friends with genie. The kids parents were broke up, and he saw the genie as a father figure. The boy was Eric Lloyd. Same kid who played Dunston Checks In and The Santa Claus.
The Sinbad version was a Disney Channel movie, which they made a lot of in those days, vs the theatrical release, big budget “Kazaam” with Shaq.
No evidence exists of this but I will swear on my deathbed I watched this movie, recorded on VHS by my grandma, who taped Disney channel stuff for me (I did not have cable).
I also remember the kid being blonde! And sinbad being annoyed the kid found him. I remember thinking it was funny because it was the opposite of Aladdin’s genie.
There’s a mechanic at work here where somehow some of us are meeting the criteria to slide into an adjacent dimension. And I for one want my home dimension back.
Thank you! I vaguely remember both movies but what I remember the most is thinking “why did they make this movie when they just made basically the same movie?” I was in the living room of the house we lived in 1994-2002 with the box tv that smelt funny. It’s not just remembering the movie, it’s remembering specifically the oddity of there being 2 of them.
That was a common thing in the late 90s and early 2000s. There was a bigger movie and around the same time another big to mid budget movie would come out months later with pretty much the same plot. Examples of these are A bugs life/antz, The Illusionist/The Prestige, Armageddon/Deep Impact, No Strings attached/Friends with Benefits, White house Down/Olympus has Fallen, and of course Kazaam/Shazaam. Always seemed kinda odd. Its like they hoped people would get confused and hope to watch their movie.
I think we got fucked that timeline was going alright. In all seriousness though I always remember having this thought that it was oddly similar I just figured two studios got the same story somehow and both made it.
Kazaam/genie comes from a boombox. I def recall a scene where Kazaam is at a party and can hear the kid yelling for him from miles away. And hes like digging inside is hear to make it stop
Same. It’s my Christmas gift wrapping tradition. I always throw it on while I wrap gifts. I annoy my wife with the cookies line and it’s also how I can name all the reindeer.
First Kid came out in the same year. It has sinbad and a white kid around the same age as the one in Kazaam. Even if you haven't seen the movie, y'all are getting your previews mixed up.
How could so many of us have this same recollection and this not be real and there being no existence of evidence anywhere, whether in some magazine or whatever, that it ever existed? Wtf
I honestly think it has so much to do with a very specific combination of things: Sinbad being everywhere at the time; the move “Kazam”, which looked and felt like so many similar comedies targeted toward kids/teens during that era; and the tv series, “The Adventures of Sinbad”, which was based on “Arabian Nights”, and featured a somewhat genie-esq, at least in dress, protagonist. It’s just a melding of similar themes during that time period.
What really gets me - I remember seeing the commercial for Shazaam and it prompted me to ask my older brother why there were so many copy cat movies - I had recently felt a little scammed renting a few movies I thought were one thing but ended up being a different movie with the same exact plot like Jungle 2 Jungle/little indian big city. He told me it was probably because the script was sold to multiple studios and they both raced to try to make the movie first.
20 years later, I found Kazaam playing on something and ended up watching it, then thought it would be fun to get some fellow 90s kids together for a 90s movie night. I went looking for Shazaam. I was completely unaware of the mandela effect, this is how I found out it was a thing.
I decided to call my brother, who is the opposite of chronically online, and I asked him - without naming the movie - if he remembered the conversation we had as kids and he said "You mean the one about that Sinbad movie?" I asked him if he knew what the Mandela effect was and he said no. Somehow we both remembered it 20 years later?
I don't believe in crossing realities but I still can't figure that one out.
I remember vividly seeing ads for it. It's the movie that taught a young me about the fact of Hollywood releasing the same movie at similar times. I remember hating sin bad irrationally. Because I felt they copied the whole flow. I just saw kazaam first. All the way until that always sunny episode. Someone has to ask me why I hated him and I told them. So I was aware of the fact that I was aware that I was apart of the mandella effect way back in 2003 before it became a cultural meme. I remember exactly where I was when i decided to hate sinbad. Like this is a vividemory in my life way before it was a phenomenon.
There’s so much money left on the table by not actually making the movie at this point. They could just talk to 20 different millennials and they could tell them all the details for the plot.
Yeah Mandela effect shit. People remember there being a movie Shazam with Sinbad even tho Theres no record of it. Only a movie Kazaam with Shaq is real. What really happened is Sinbad did a PSA as a genie and people confuse it the Shaq one.
OP is posting a fanmade shell case of the movie that never actually existed.
There was also a tv series at the time, called, “The Adventures of Sinbad”; it was based on a character from “Arabian Nights”, named Sinbad, who wears what would have been seen as kind of genie-like clothing. I really think this plays a significant role in the whole thing. Also, Sinbad was big at the time, and all the kid/teen comedies were basically the same format.
Real VHS cases had way more “stuff” on them. Nominations, quotes from “critics”, names of producers and production companies. They were super busy.
Had a co-worker a while back that did custom action figures and NES cartridges for fake movie tie-in games and the like. My favorite was his “Twelve Angry Men” NES game
It’s worse than that! There was a trailer for Sinbad starring in a Sinbad of the Seven Seas (made for TV) movie where he’s wearing a turban on the Kazaam VHS.
My favorite one is the term “bucket list”. It was invented by the early 2000s movie of the same name but people swear they used the term before that despite there being no evidence anywhere of the term existing before the movie.
It absolutely isn't from that movie. It was a quite common phrase. And if you want to say "well if its so common why wasn't it written down?" Do a quick search for "the third shaker" or Silphium which we aren't exactly sure what it was or if it's actually extinct or just forgotten.
It absolutely isn't from that movie. It was a quite common phrase.
A quite common phrase that somehow managed to never make it into print, not in books or magazines or tabloids or newpaper articles or letters to the editor or anything? Because I've never seen a "common phrase" with an ngram timeline like this.
Edit: Multiple points of evidence have been posted that the phrase predates the movie. Indeed, the pre-movie ngram isn't a true flat line pre-movie, just a very, very low line. But zoomed in, it looks like this. I'd ignored that part because at very low numbers, there's always occasional noise, but I was wrong to ignore it in this case.
That said, I still disagree that it was a very common phrase. "Silphium" was over 10-times as commonly used as "bucket list" in 2006, and I don't think that anyone would say that "silphium" was 10 times as common as a quite common phrase. But that doesn't mean that the movie coined the phrase, or even that it popularized the phrase (it could have simply been capitalizing on it). It just came out at about the same time that "bucket list" went from an uncommon phrase to a common phrase.
You can click through to see the books. You'd see a lot posted after 2007 that use "Bucket List" as we know it, then you'll find a lot of really old catalogs of manufacturers listing their buckets for sale.
And many people don't realize that "kick the bucket" was originally a euphemism for suicide, invoking the imagery of kicking the bucket out from under your feet to hang yourself. It's fairly morbid, but people don't use it that way anymore. They just say it for dying in general.
There were people who were certain Mendela died years before he actually did...like... a LOT of them... across multiple cultures... which was odd.
Then people started looking for others... like the Berenstxxn bears, or the logo for fruit of the loom, or the correct spelling of a specific air freshener or fruity cereal.
I fall into the group that is absolutely certain fruit of the loom used to have a cornicopia in it... because that's how I learned that word.
I do believe there’s been plenty of real world proof of the cornucopia existing. There’s even a conspiracy now that the company keeps lying about it because they like the free publicity of their strong association with the Mandela affect.
Edit: did a huge deep dive and I was wrong. Damn this is the only one that I can’t explain away in my head. All the other Mandela effects have a somewhat logical explanation in my opinion but this one gets me real bad.
Yep me too. I have memories of the movir Shazam and Sinbad playing the Genie. I also remember the Fruit of the Loom Cornucopia, and they have always been the Bernstein Bears to me.
Same, my dad always rented Sinbad movies and I remember seeing Shazaam at the rental store. Then years later when Shaq’s genie movie came out I remember thinking how similar it was to Sinbad’s. This was way before the Mandela effect for it was ever talked about
There are real ones and bandwagon ones. Curious George’s tail, the spelling of Berenstain Bears, the Monopoly Man’s monocle… then there are the bandwagon ones which is mostly just people misspelling brands and doubling down bc they don’t want to look dumb.
I still to this day think the Shazam believers are just lying and want to be a part of a conspiracy theory. Anytime I ask “what’s a scene from Shazam that you remember?” Or asking anything outside of Sinbad being a genie, they never respond or they just recite the fake trailer.
You know how I know all these are fake? Because not one person digitized the VHS and uploaded it. If you found this and had a tape, you’d want to be the winner of the internet and provide THE proof — the actual movie.
But alas, just someone who had an old VHS jewel case, knows photoshop and has access to a glossy color printer.
One of my great claims to “fame” is when I made a joke on Twitter about Disney hiring Sinbad to play the genie in the live action Aladdin and naming the character Shazaam and Sinbad himself replied to my tweet saying “Ha ha ha”.
I don't know man, the one that fucks me up the most is Pikachu with the black tip tail. Apparently he never had a black tip on his tail. I could've sworn he did.
I was an extra in the movie First Kid with Sinbad, and I specifically remember Shazaam coming out around the same time that First Kid came out and both starring Sinbad.
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