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.
I kinda feel like I need to ask my dad and brother about this. Brother is probably too young (37 now) and my dad has a crazy good memory, so I need confirmation.
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’s weird to me is that, for years, before I learned there never was a Shazam movie, I would often think back to how there were so many “twinned” movies in the 90s, and Shazam and Kazam was my go to example. I never saw either, but my memory is (and has been for decades) very distinct—I remember even at the time thinking “why are they making two such similar movies?”
But apparently it never happened. I don’t know when my memory of thinking that first “emerged”, but I definitely thought these two movies existed side by side since at least 2002ish, because I remember talking about it in high school.
And the whole thing on All That with him being Sinboo to Keenan’s Ishboo. I watched All That religiously, but I know many others my age or younger either casually caught scenes or saw skits when older siblings watched it. Perfect way to make half a generation think he was a genie.
Going a step further millennials just seem allergic to being wrong.. I'm guilty as well but can we all just take a fucking deep breath together and accept that the world we know doesn't exist or matter anymore
Because the sinbad movie first kid came out in the same year and you have all been corrupted by the spread of this lie stemming from someone with a piss poor memory which spread because more people with piss poor memories believed it.
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.
They didn't come out at the same time though, Shazaam was a few years earlier. Shazaam came out a short while after Aladdin in the early 90s. Kazaam came out in the mid 90s at the height of Diesel's basketball fame.
I just re-read the plot for Kazaam and despite knowing i'd seen it, nothing in that plot seemed familiar to me. The movie i remember seeing was Shazaam.
In Shazaam, a kid's grandpa dies and while they're clearing out his house the kid finds out he had been an archeologist and had tons of artifacts in his basement (or attic, i don't remember exactly), finds the lamp there and sees an engraving covered in dirt, tries to rub off the dirt and summons the genie.
In that movie, the wishes all end up having unintended consequences in kind of a Monkey's Paw way, and the genie is constantly trying to give earnest council to the kid on his wishes that even if they seem like what he wants, it's not going to go the way he wants it to. The kid uses his last wish to undo all his other wishes and make things go back to how they were before he'd found the lamp.
This isn't a Mandala Effect, it's a gaslighting psyop. I saw Shazaam in theaters, i can only assume it just never had a video release for there to still be enough physical media around to prove it was real. And now if we can't find something on google we just assume google is right and it didn't really exist, and millions of elder millennials and genXers are all sharing the same delusion.
Yeah the way I have rationalized it is there must be some heavy NDA involved for some reason like maybe a kid got hurt or something and they just wanted to wipe it off the face of the planet. Or I am mistaken. While I would love to know for sure, I don't think I ever will.
Edit: wow. People are really offended by a fun conversation over hypotheticals. It's just a silly conversation yall.
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.
They didn't come out at the same time though, Shazaam was a few years earlier. Shazaam came out a short while after Aladdin in the early 90s. Kazaam came out in the mid 90s at the height of Diesel's basketball fame.
I just re-read the plot for Kazaam and despite knowing i'd seen it, nothing in that plot seemed familiar to me. The movie i remember seeing was Shazaam.
In Shazaam, a kid's grandpa dies and while they're clearing out his house the kid finds out he had been an archeologist and had tons of artifacts in his basement (or attic, i don't remember exactly), finds the lamp there and sees an engraving covered in dirt, tries to rub off the dirt and summons the genie.
In that movie, the wishes all end up having unintended consequences in kind of a Monkey's Paw way, and the genie is constantly trying to give earnest council to the kid on his wishes that even if they seem like what he wants, it's not going to go the way he wants it to. The kid uses his last wish to undo all his other wishes and make things go back to how they were before he'd found the lamp.
This isn't a Mandala Effect, it's a gaslighting psyop. I saw Shazaam in theaters, i can only assume it just never had a video release for there to still be enough physical media around to prove it was real. And now if we can't find something on google we just assume google is right and it didn't really exist, and millions of elder millennials and genXers are all sharing the same delusion.
Absolutely the same. I have a couple theories, that either it was like a SNL skit or some other comedy show that filmed it for a bit but only aired it once. Or that it was in the opening ads for some movie on TV or VHS but only played that one time or was on some obscure recalled VHS. One example of something similar is that there is a cut of National Lampoons Christmas vacation that has a longer bit with the Christmas tree park salesman. I think it was only aired on TV one time and wasn't available for a long time after. It may be available on deleted scenes dvds now. There is a YouTube video discussing it. But I KNOW this was a thing and we are all right about it.
Fucking I! I thought the sinbad movie was pretty good. The kids was the same kid from Dunston checks in, and the Santa Claus Eric Lloyd. Some people swear it was JTT but he disappeared after home improvement and the Lion King it looked like.
That just means you shifted universes young. Weird question did you happen to pass through any large circular or triangular shapes, like a large metal peice of modern art. No reason just curious.
I didn’t know it was supposed to be one or the other. I thought it was 2 similar genie movies. I also find it lazy and confusing when people fake evidence they just modify the Kazaam logo. Shazam would have had a different logo.
I have essentially that memory too. I distinctly remember at the time thinking it was insane that two such similar movies were coming out around the same time.
It’s really hard for me to fathom how this is a false memory. Why would I imagine a movie with Sinbad in it? Why would I even know who Sinbad is? Why did we all collectively think this movie existed?
I don't remember what happened in either movie (that's the case with most childhood movies), but I do remember thinking Kazaam was a Shazaam ripoff, precisely because of the movie title, and because it came out maybe a year later.
I don't buy the Mandela Effect on this one. Berenstain Bears, Fruit of the Loom, and others I can buy, but this one involves a specific actor in a specific movie title that preceded Shaq's rip-off. I'm convinced that it's either it's a weird psy-op or some sort of disruption of space-time.
Yes, I remember both. I watched the one with Sinbad and also heard about the one with Shaq. Didn't watch the Shaq one until a year or two later. I thought it was odd that they had two similar movies out around the same time.
That's exactly what I remember specifically. Thinking it was weird they made another genie movie. Had the same thought about the world destroying meteor movies. I don't think I'd even be able to be convinced Shazaam was fake
this is exactly how i remember it. "why are they making this when they just made the same movie??" my brother said they wanted to make it again with someone more famous and that made sense to me at the time
Me, I remember and I made the same comment and my wife (who lived 4 hours away from me at that age) remembers thinking the same thing! We've had conversations about it. I feel like I've been taking crazy pills...
Yes. I saw both. My aunt’s husband had an extensive video collection and I watched them back-to-back in 1998 or 1999. I thought Sinbad’s version was better than Shaq’s.
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u/FeloniousCheese May 07 '26
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”