I had the opposite of this once: I thought a movie did not have an ending that it actually did.
I read the novel The Lost Weekend multiple times. Then I saw the movie. For years afterwards, I was convinced that the film ended with Don saying “I wonder how many others there are like me?” and the camera pulling back, out the window, and craning up to an aerial view of NYC. “Whaddaya mean, he sits down at the typewriter and pounds out a whole novel?” Finally, it was on cable, and son-of-a-gun, it does end with him pounding out a novel, “For Helen.” But I think in that case, I didn’t remember that ending because I didn’t want to remember that bullshit ending. Phooey on the Hays Office.
This may have been pointed out already (I’m not going to search the entire thread) but I feel there’s a pretty obvious explanation for the Mandela Effect; people are confusing Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko. Both men were South African anti-apartheid activists who were imprisoned. But Biko was killed in prison while Mandela survived his imprisonment. And people that falsely remember Mandela’s death often think he died in the eighties. While Biko died in 1977, there was a movie about him, Cry Freedom, released in 1987.
Out of interest, how many on here actually (falsely) remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison?
Before this thread I’d never heard of it, and no-one I know has experienced it. Might be my reading but the wiki entry seems to stop short of calling it a thing -
I am also one of those who, yes, actually saw the additional clip at the end of this movie with Josh and his friend in the classroom. I was an adult at the time. I, as well as my husband, saw it in the theater and was wholly disappointed when renting it only to have the scene missing. I had never heard of the movie “14 going on 30” prior to reading about it on this board so that cannot be a factor in what I remember. As far a mass hallucinations go, count me in on this one.
What theatre, and when?
Edited to add: The other movie can certainly be a factor even if you’ve never heard of it-all it would take is to see the tail end of it while flipping through channels and assuming it was part of the movie “Big”.
Yeah, the scene never existed. I know. It seems like it did, but it didn’t. I hadn’t heard of 14 going on 30 either, but the ending to that is what we’re remember.
14 Going on 30 showed on the ABC network in the U.S. on March 6, 1988. Big opened in movie theaters in the U.S. on June 3, 1988. I suspect that some people were watching TV on March 6th, fell asleep in front of the TV, and woke up to see just the last scene of the film, which ended at 11:00 PM. I suspect that their memory is not of watching the whole film but of seeing just the last scene from it. They then saw Big when it opened later that year. Years later, they conflated the two movies in their minds.
Is it? I mean, these are people who are already either conflating memories of two different events or (as I suggested upthread last year) are “remembering” an ending that they just imagined. I think it’s interesting that people can feel certain they accurately remember things that that never really happened, but there’s nothing special about an inaccurate memory set in a movie theater.
It’s better than that. Not only is there no reason not to think this is not just an example of it, there is a plethora of evidence that NO SCENE EVER EXISTED or was filmed at the end of Big.
This is turning into atheism, agnosticism, and theism. A theist believes in God(thinks there is an alternative ending to Big). An agnostic isn’t sure(thinks there isn’t, but there could be), and an atheist believes there is no God(the ending doesn’t exist).
I believe in God when it comes to theology. For the Big ending, though, I’m a “Alternative Ending Atheist”. Not even agnostic. There is NO ending where the lady became young again.
“I remember seeing the alternate ending to BIG in the theater.”
“You’re confused, Mom; that was some different actors, on television.”
“But I remember seeing it. And I will tell people that I remember it.”
“I remember seeing Jesus walk on water, out at sea.”
“You’re confused, Mom; that was Uncle Dave, when the lake froze over.”
“But I remember seeing it. And I will tell people that I remember it.”
Couple things about that. The way people “remembered” the episode and told the story, at least as I’ve heard it, was different in a few notable places. As I heard it, it was a black couple and it was “up the butt, Bob!” And it’s rather remarkable that a number of people from whom I’ve heard the story have told it that way. Instead, what happened was it was a white couple and the answer was a simple “in the ass?”
Also, evidence of that surfaced way back in 2000, pre-You Tube days. You’d think in the 18 years since, with everything and anything on the internet these days, somebody would have found evidence of it. Some of the claims are that it was shown routinely in the UK or that it was on the New Zealand VHS release. If either of those were true, surely it would have surfaced by now.
Like people swearing it was spelled “Berenstein Bears” in their childhood, or there was a Sinbad movie called Shazaam, or that “Sex And the City” is called or was called “Sex In the City” at one time, or that Curious George is illustrated with a tail (there’s no drawings of him in any of the Curious George books, so far as I know, with a tail), etc. False memories are weird.
The problem is that nobody heard it when it aired because those shows weren’t broadcast live, and the phrase, whatever it really was and whoever really said it, would never have passed the censors. If that segment aired at all during the original run, then the most anyone could ever have heard was possibly “BLEEP the BLEEP”. If you are going to claim to have heard something, try to make it something that actually could have been said.
they should just fucking film it already. Hell, a 3-minute short on Youtube would get enough views to monetize it up the wazoo, if this thread is any indication.