No, not controversial. It’s just a Mandela effect. Lots of people mixed up another movie’s ending with this one and falsely remember a nonexistent ending to the movie.
To be fair, I should get to be the teacher in the new one’s ending.
Oh.
So, Hanks, doesn’t, like, join Hamas, or get into something funky with Patrick Swayze/Micheal Douglas?
I need some sort of loud alarm or shock set up when this thread gets bumped.
No that’s real life.
OMG! It’s back!
Let’s just go make the alternate ending and put an end to this.
There does seem to be a lot of pent-up demand.
I’m in. Do we use CGI or puppets or what?
Animated by John Kricfalusi, and directed by Quentin Tarantino.
With rotating alternate endings in the theaters like Clue. And when it comes out on Blu-ray it will have a completely different ending and the rest will all be destroyed.
Going out “IMF” style-self destructs after one play.
Has anyone coming into this thread insisting they had seen an alternate ending ever admitted to seeing 14 Going On 30? That, along with the sheer stubborn certainty, make this thread peculiar.
The post-credit shot should be Nelson Mandela on his prison deathbed reading the Berenstein Bears.
Okay, because of this, I rewatched Big, for the first time since it was new-to-cable, and there’s no way that phantom ending would have fit. It is a really sad film! It’s remembered for the walking piano and the Silly String, but those are the few comedic moments in an otherwise poignant film. What really grabbed me this time around was Mrs. Baskin thinking her son had been kidnapped. Also, notice that even when Josh looks like an adult, people still don’t listen to him? His mom didn’t register anything the “strange man” was telling her, and when he outed himself, so to speak, to Susan, she thought he was talking in metaphor. This is one of those films like Close Encounters that comes off way different depending on which side of 21 you’re on.
Anyway. As the rest of it plays out, Susan turning up in Josh’s classroom, saying “Tee-hee, it’s me!” and both of them laughing gleefully just would not have been an option. Plus which, there is no classroom scene anywhere else in the film (gym class, but not a classroom with desks). To give a sense of things coming full circle, young-Susan would have had to appear in a setting the audience was familiar with. It hadn’t been heading that way. It didn’t happen.
I have seen its ending, but I really did not think I’d ever seen the movie. I must have seen the ending on TV and thought Big was ending.
:shrugs:
I saw this thread for the first time today, and I read all 12 pages. Oh, the gamut of emotions. The confusion, the clarification, the humor, the rage. Very entertaining for about 8 pages. And I don’t even care for Big. I’ve seen it twice (one when young, once as a adult), and while it wasn’t bad, I didn’t find it memorable. I don’t remember the actual end scene at all (though I did have a concept that he went back to being a kid and she grew up). Still read pages of people discussing it. But memory is always a funny and unreliable thing.
FTR, I did think I remembered Berenstein Bears from my elementary school library, though I didn’t read them as much as my sister (I seem to recall a mom-is-pregnant and losing her lap one and one where the boy bites his nails). I thought I pronounced it either “Steen” or “Stein.” Then I saw it really had an “a” and though “hmm, must have misremembered.”
The big Mandela effects that I hear about are:
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Nelson Mandela died in the 1980’s - I never had this false memory.
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Alternate ending to Big - Uh, yes, I obviously had this false memory.
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Berenstain being Berenstein - Yes, I thought it was “stein” as well.
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Sinbad made a genie movie - I sort of remembered that. It doesn’t exist outside the joke video Funny or Die made, but I did kind of remember it. Was clearly thinking of Shaq’s genie movie.
Are there any prominent examples you guys think of?
The wikipedia section on “collective false memory” lists only one additional example, and it’s one experienced by Italians:
There’s a famous portrait of Henry VIII holding a big turkey leg. I think we’ve all ‘seen’ it at one time or another.
While there’s no way to be sure, I could believe that some of the people who “remember” the alternate ending to Big really have not seen 14 Going on 30. I suspect that some people imagined the alternate ending because they expected or wanted Josh and Susan to wind up together and later misremembered “I thought it was going to end this way” as “it ended this way”.
I saw The Blair Witch Project in the campus theater when I was in college, a few months after the original theatrical release. After the campus screening a friend of mine said that there must be two different versions of the movie, because when she’d seen it in the regular movie theater there was a scene at the end where you clearly see the witch herself, a hideous old woman. I thought this seemed unlikely, as everything I’d heard about the movie indicated that it was unclear whether the witch existed at all. My friend kept insisting that she really had seen the witch when she first saw the movie. I don’t think she was mixing it up with another movie. I think she’d simply imagined a scary witch and misremembered this as being something actually shown in the movie.
According to the IMDb, alternate endings toThe Blair Witch Project were shot, but none involved a visible witch. There was a planned scene earlier in the movie where a mysterious figure in a white dress would be seen in the distance, but the actor holding the camera didn’t turn in the right direction at the right time so this was never captured on video.
My theory, that back when BIG was made some did report on the Italian movie Da Grandereleased a year earlier than BIG. Making the movie BIG to be actually a remake or everyone back then was copying each other.
So clips of that movie were talked about then, or reported on more recent times that showed an ending that had the woman turn into a little girl in the school where the kid was going.
(In that movie the love interest that in the end turned into a little girl was a teacher of the boy. One good thing that was changed in the movie BIG)It could be that some saw references to that movie (originally as examples of how Hollywood really has no new ideas) and even without watching Da Grande some people ended “remembering” about an ending that was not in BIG or more recently saw clips about the Da Grande ending with little context on a TV report or on the internet.
Another Mandela effect I admit to experiencing involves The Matrix.
I did believe Morpheus, during his first meeting with Neo, says, “What if I told you…” something, something.
He never says that line and I admit I was surprised he did not say that line. Memes have made me here it in his voice.