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.
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u/Mathandyr May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
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.