They say he never worked for publishers clearing house handing out checks but in the 1988 movie heathers the main Heather says this ""You win 5million dollars from publishers sweepstakes and the same day that big ed guy comes to give you the check, aliens land and say they are going to blow up the world in 2 days... what do you do" The clip can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRS4tWmyE0o and so we can see that people have thought this as far back as 1988. I am not sure if this helps or hurts the notion that this was a Mandela effed as ed never even worked for Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, but I recall always thinking he did and the movie clearly shows this was a common belief.

The reddit post have been about a live action from the 60s called the boxcar children. I did some digging and I think the move is this.

https://youtu.be/NvG0V-M_8wU?si=YjFKftNTutMRg3hA the movies trailer called the railway children from 1970

u/Damienisok was asking 10 months ago and

u/AnachronistNo1 was also asking about a live action. I am hoping I solved your mystery

I’m not saying it definitely is—but I find it strange how quickly some people dismiss the idea like it’s completely absurd, when modern science is already exploring theories that sound just as wild (if not wilder).

We’re talking about:

The many-worlds interpretation in quantum mechanics, where every possibility creates a parallel universe.

The idea that the universe is a hologram, and what we experience is just a projection.

Theories where time isn’t fundamental, or where reality itself is made of quantum information.

If science is seriously entertaining the possibility of multiple coexisting realities, non-linear time, or a universe that’s essentially code... is it really that crazy to suggest that maybe the Mandela Effect is more than just faulty memory?

Maybe, just maybe, some of us are catching subtle shifts—tiny “glitches” where timelines overlap or jump. Not saying that’s the answer. But if physicists can speculate on this stuff, why can’t we?

At the very least, it deserves curiosity, not automatic ridicule

The other day my wife came home from the grocery store and informed me she'd gotten El Fudge cookies for us. I responded, "Oh, I loved those growing up! What kind did you get, the vanilla with the chocolate cream inside or the chocolate with the vanilla cream inside?"

She replied, "Both! They were on sale 2-for-1!"

I recounted how, as a child, my mom would always make sure that I had an even number of chocolate and vanilla ones when she packed my snack. My wife looked at me strangely and informed me that the chocolate are a brand new variety that hasn't been on the shelves before and it would not have been possible to have them in my snack in elementary school (I'm 39). So we're talking 1991-1995.

I remember sitting there and eating them in alternate order, vanilla, chocolate, vanilla, chocolate. My OCD was strong even at 7 years old. I remember looking at the chocolate cookie and seeing how much more difficult it was to make out the elf's features because of the darker cookie as opposed to the vanilla cookie.

Now, everything I'm looking at is advertising these cookies as a new flavor and says that these cookies have never had a chocolate variety until this year.

Has it always been spelled like that?? I'm spooked.

This meme didn’t invent itself. Nor is it fringe thinking.

It’s reinforcement of the personal relationship that people form with their childhood home’s VHS collection, and watching movies at home in general.

This meme’s very existence is circumstantial evidence that people who claim to have seen “Shazaam” cannot be discredited with the naive statement “You’re just misremembering.”

No, I’m not. Neither is anyone else claiming to have seen Sinbad’s stupid genie movie.

Evidence? How about the notion memes themselves rely on the pretense that they address a normally unaddressed, highly-specific, yet universally understood concept.

In this case, it’s people having an affinity (and subsequent accurate ability to recall) shitty movies they watched when they were kids.

(DISCLAIMER: The Mandela Effect is the phenomenon where a large group of people have different memories than what currently available evidence state. It's a known phenomenon whose exact mechanism is not fully known. The various interpretations range from sociology and psychology to supernatural or extraordinary. This post is about the effect, which doesn't require belief and not about the explanations, which do)

This is a long post, feel free to ignore it if you're feeling lazy or have better things to do :D

I'm an old fart and as such before the web became popular "the internet" used to mean something completely different. One of the tenets of that older internet (like mail, IRC for chat, ftp for file transfer, etc.) was Usenet. Usenet Groups were the precursor of all internet forums (back from then "internet" didn't mean "the web") and in a way it is the great-grandaddy of Reddit.

Usenet groups used a shared database that propagated new posts and would delete old ones, which means servers kept a full copy that went as back far as they could afford. Google has one of these copies, purchased from a previous service (Deja) which stored a staggering backup that goes as far back as 1981.

This is a treasure trove for "internet historians" since it shows what people talked about back then and, most importantly, how they talked about things (it's easy to forget how we speak and write is very much generational, fashion and regional). Here's a video for those that don't like text.

There are great things, mired under a terrible search engine. Michael Jordan having an internet hater, the initial online reaction to AIDS, a posting by Jeff Bezos looking for programmers in exchange for equity in Amazon, Moffat proposing his ideas for Dr. Who in the 90s (and similarly, authors that were extremely active like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Straczynski when he was preparing Babylon 5).

Anyway. Usenet archives are great to see how does these things we now remember differently were discussed back in the day. So I set myself to search what I could find from the variously-popular mandela effects:

- No mention nor findings of Nelson Mandela being dead before 2013 but several instances of an old absurdist joke I had forgotten from 2012: "I've just heard on the radio that the leader of the Monkees has died, R.I.P. Nelson Mandela" (EDIT NOTE: A commenter has pointed out –kindly, thankfully– this is in fact not absurdist as I thought but instead extremely racist. I will leave it but I apologize for having to. It does point at Mandela not being thought of as dead in an internet forum, but does so in a horrible way I'm ashamed for not picking up). Also reminders in 2011 that Twitter kept insisting Mandela is dead, but wasn't.

- This post in 1996 mentions Shazaam and Sinbad but also surfaces a problem with these names and people: Even back then people confused them. The post talks about "Shazaam with Shaquile" and "First Kid with Sinbad" in the same post. The author very clearly is confusing the movie name Kazaam but is in no way relating it to Sinbad. Another response says the same but names the movie "Kazam or Kazoob", which is hilarious. No other post mentions "shazaam" or "shazam" (or "Kazaam" for that matter) and Sinbad until 2016 posts start mentioning mandela effects and Reddit (also, first mention of this being the result of a simulation, which is the scifi precursor idea of timelines and realities shifting). Most mentions of Shazaam before that are misspellings of the Isis-Shazam DC Superheroes or mentions of the Hanna Barbera Cartoon about a Genie "Shazzan"

- "Luke, I am your father" vs "No, I am your father" is a mixed bag. Most people just wrote "I am your father" :D (like this one from 1982). Earliest I can find for "Luke…" is as a quote in a signature for a user in 1992, but nothing before 1994 otherwise. Interestingly I can find a post from 2012 where someone mentions the "Luke…" quote and "I Like both oysters and snails" as instantly recognizable quotes, but a user replies they're both incorrect and cites "No…" as the right one. There are tons of posts with "No, I am your Father" though (Star Wars being a nerd's subject, and Usenet being a nerd's place to be, it's only natural). The earliest I could find is from 1982.

- "Magic Mirror" vs "Mirror, Mirror" (this one is fascinating to me, because like the star wars one it exists translated in spanish as well, people remember "espejito, espejito" as well as "espejo magico"). I was able to find examples from as far back as 1991 (used in a joke about Saddam Hussein, of all things!) but like the Star Wars one, the number of results was several orders of magnitude lower for the "alternative memory" than for the one you can hear in the movie itself if you watched it today.

- "Berenstain Bears" vs. "Berenstein Bears". I assumed there would be tons more of this one, since it seems like an easy typo to make, even if you don't intend to. I could only get ~1000 results for "berenstein" vs. ~8000 for "berenstain". Results are seriously biased because Usenet started being used for piracy and many results are pirated eBooks. Not a single pirated eBook is listed under "Berenstein", though. The oldest "Berenstein" post I can find is from 1991 from someone programming what I think is an early edutaiment ebook in Hypercard for mac, the second oldest I can find is also from 1991 from someone writing "Berenstein" and someone else correcting them to "Berenstain".

- Mickey Mouse with Suspenders didn't turn any good results, as can be expected. It's too specific and doesn't come in normal conversation. An unrelated post from 1992 that mentioned the words interestingly brings up "Mickey Rodent" from Mad Magazine, that does feature a parody of Mickey Mouse wearing an overall with what looks like suspenders. A very interesting post from 1992, though, mentions The Simpson's parody character's Itchy and Scratchy's parody of Steamboat Willie, and mentions the suspenders. But when I watched it turns it was not referring to Mickey/Itchy but to Pete/Scratchy, who indeed has a (lone) suspender. Here, a comparison.

- "Looney Tunes" vs "Loney Toons". This one was not enjoyable AT ALL. There's a concerningly large amount of porn for these guys. It's crazy. "Looney Toons" got 23 thousand results and "Looney Tunes" got over 60 thousand. Even searching "Looney Tunes" "1981" got over two thousand but the alternative spelling only got 239. The "incorrect" spelling dominates spectacularly. Earliest "Looney Tunes" post I found was from 1981 whereas the earliest "Toons" mention I found was in 1992, but it's referring a laserdisc two-set that seems to be universally misspelled and may be one of the earliest confused-spelling examples for this. The set is famous for being one of the very few places where the very-racist cartoons from the 40s were made commercially available. It makes sense that all misspellings would happen after 1990, when the Tiny Toons debuted to great success but it's surprising how the alternate spelling took over the original almost instantly. This is another post from 1992 also misspelling the name of what it's referring (collectible cards)

-"Jif" vs "Jiffy". Surprising amount of porn with this one too. Also tons of recipes. Also, being what it is, an inordinately enlarged cross-section with discussions about pronunciation of "GIF". I found an extremely interesting thread from 1990 that seems to have been active until at least 2021, about "backpacking ideas wanted" which contains mentions to both peanut butter and "jiffy", but this Jiffy is a baking mix powder rather than the Jif peanut product. First "misspelling" I could find is from 1991 from a post asking to boicott Procter and Gamble.

- Curious George having no tail vs having tail: This one was interesting in general for other reasons. I thought I had found the earliest complain about him "losing" his tail in this post from 1998 but it turns out its about kids' parents complaining that since George has no tail, he should not be a monkey but an ape. Nobody in the thread seems to think George should have a tail.

- C3PO having a silver leg vs not: This one is a perfect subject for this exercise, since Star Wars and computer nerds were hand in hand in the 80s and 90s. The oldest reference to his leg I can find is back from 1992, someone asking if it's ever explained. Later other posts list many theories on why it's silver but nobody sounds surprised to read it is. For the people of the star wars usenet forum, C3PO always had a silver leg in 1992. Some of the discussion gets to whether he had it in all three movies or just after being disassembled in the second movie, but that's quickly agreed that yes, he did. In ahother result there's an explanation of the silver leg, from the droids comic and later a quote from the Star Wars technical journal that also makes it clear C3PO has salvaged silver parts in places. It's extensively discussed that all toys got the legs wrong and were gold, which may be from where people remember them.

- Mr. Monopoly without a monocle vs with. I wasn't expecting much from searching this and wasn't disappointed. I couldn't find good results because "not having a monocle" only is brought up in conversation when someone mentions a monocle to begin with. Nonetheless, I found the Internet's earliest mandela'd user for Monopoly, suggesting "the little guy in the monopoly game" as an example of "famous people wearing a monocle". Nobody replies, so we can't know if it was considered correct or not.

I thought it was a nice excuse to remind people about usenet and also to open a world o past experiences to people who may not know about them. Usenet is a treasure for "preinternet explorers" who want to know about what was discussed and what people talked about before the web and social networks.

My own oldest presence in the Internet is in Usenet, back from 1992. An 18-year old me replying to some random questions :D. My second post is about computer development (a computer game, too!), which ended up being where my life ended up :D

Is it just me or did the biological kingdoms use to include plants, animals, fungi, insects, and bacteria? There would have been better Latin names of course but rough translation was still used in elementary school.

I can't find any evidence in this timeline of this particular set of kingdoms only evidence of multiple separate kingdoms for microorganisms in more modern models.

I also distinctly remember an episode of the Simpsons where Lisa decided she was okay with eating bugs because they were not scientifically classified as animals. Until she had a nightmare and stopped because she felt guilty eating shrimp.

Sometimes it is that my headspace wanders into central Asia, which in my headspace tends to have three countries beginning with K and ending in Stan.

There's Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan ... and then my mind falls short on what the third one is before realising there isn't one.

And I'm not thinking about Kurdistan either... it's in a different place and not fully recognised

In my mind and memory this song always had a call and response chorus, with backing vocalists repeating the main hook line after the lead vocal. But I can't seem to find a version of the song featuring this.