Mostly the folks from New Zealand.
What amazes me is that the alternate ending of Big ran in a country with the population of Chicago, 1,000 miles away from Australia, and an 18-hour flight from the U.S. - and apparently nowhere else, except for AuldWolf’s house.
I wonder what this mythological alternate print of “Big” would go for at auction?
It’s one thing to make a mistake. It’s another to persist despite overwhelming counter evidence. That’s not something that everybody does. (I hope.)
Just read the whole remarkable thread.
What strikes me is the vehemence and outrage with which some people resist the suggestion that their memory from decades in the past might be faulty, even when presented with overwhelming contrary evidence. It underlines how many innocent people must have been convicted of crimes based on faulty eyewitness testimony.
It’s true. I know it is crazy, but I still can see myself in the family room watching Big and seeing the final non-existent scene. The memory is real, even though it…well, isn’t.
Ayup. I run into pig-headed people like this every day. And what’s really sad is that I don’t run into that many people every day.
I just had something like this happen to me on Monday. With Anthony Bourdain’s passing, a friend of mine sent me a link to an excerpt form Kitchen Confidential. I tell my friend, oh yeah, I remember reading that in the late 90s. I remembered who it was that first told me about it (a coworker at a cafe I worked at, who was going to culinary school at the time.) I can picture us working, standing behind the counter, talking shit, and him telling me about the whole “don’t order fish on Mondays” and other tidbits from the book. This would have been in 1997. That was the last year I worked at the cafe, and I moved to Europe in 1998 to 2003.
Except the book came out in 2000. So I did some digging, because this was a temporal mindfuck for me, and thought, wait, there was also that New York Times or New Yorker article or something that came out before. Maybe that’s what he was talking about. Still no dice. That was 1999. I simply cannot reconcile these memories. I swear it was in 1997 when I learned about Kitchen Confidential or that New Yorker article. I have no memories of learning about it or reading it when I was living abroad (which is when it came out.) My memory is that I was still in college, still living in the US, and still working at the cafe, and have a strong memory of this conversation.
But, given the facts, there’s no way it could have happened as I remember it. It’s really disconcerting, but c’est la mémoire.
It’s quite a shock the first time you face incontrovertible evidence that your mind is capable of making false memories.
I worked for eight years at a rural place in California and for most of that time believed that there was a road across the street that took you to “the place that sells strawberries”. One day I mentioned the road and got strange looks. There was no such road.
I actually just had my “Big alternate ending” experience a couple weeks ago.
We were at a store and I saw a copy of “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” my FAVORITE childhood book. (For a while it was an everyday kind of book). I flipped through it and remarked to my wife, “Oh this is a shortened version, they don’t all make it back up in the end.”
“What are you talking about, they don’t make it back up?”
I was sure that in the original version, all the letters go back up in the tree. I look it up in Wikipedia:
Okay, I must have had an extended version. Thankfully, my mom saves everything. So I stopped by for a visit and dug up the old copy. Sure enough, it ended with A going back up the tree. And this isn’t even a “maybe my mom made up a new ending for me” issue. I remember SEEING all the letters back up top in the end.
OK I am willing to believe the explanation is faulty memory. (I have been a defender of the alternate ending exists theory)
But here’s the thing, I have a very specific memory of not only this scene but a conversation with my friends I was watching the movie with ABOUT the scene. I was watching the movie for the first time, plus I was just a dumb kid, so I recall that I did not get that it was Susan when the new girl sat down in the front of the class. My friend’s sister had to explain it to me and we all laughed about what an idiot I was and then had a conversation about how cute it would be for them to be in school together and be boyfriend and girlfriend and yada yada yada. So that’s ALL false memory?? Possible?! Or maybe we were watching a completely different movie?? (I highly doubt that, since I know I watched Big with them, I can remember where we were sitting and the time of day when we had this conversation, and that other movie is not familiar to me AT ALL)
So I’m willing to chalk it up to false memory but it is VERY hard to explain, for me. The alternate universe is almost more plausible…
This sounds like you actually remembered the movie correctly (you didn’t remember Susan coming into the class, you just remembered scenes in “Big” that took place in the school and involved a girl who wasn’t Susan), and your friends convinced you that you were mistaken.
In my memory, the conversation I mentioned happened right after the scene in question. And there is no classroom scene at all in the end of the movie, as I see it today.
I accept that it is a faulty memory, but boy is it weird.
Might that have actually been the end of Explorers, just before the last dream?
And, alas, that’s what we all discover eventually. Life is weird. Your logical reasoning isn’t as good as you think, your perceptions of the world aren’t as good as you think, and your memory isn’t as good as you think. Welcome to life.
RIP Penny Marshall Penny Marshall dead at 75, best known as TV's Laverne and director of 'Big,' 'A League of Their Own' – New York Daily News
RIP Laverne Defazio and Myrna Turner (The Odd Couple). She had quite a career. Her brother Garry passed a couple of years ago.
Oddly, I was thinking about this thread as I watched BIG last night.
My inquiring mind needs to know: did Susan (technically) commit Statutory Rape when she slept with Josh?
Probably? I remember one of my lawyer brothers on vacation from law school explaining that statutory rape was an ‘absolute liability’ crime - you could have a certified letter from the Pope that the girl was over age, but if she wasn’t, you were toast.
Magical transformation would seem to fall into that same area.
I must be the only person in the world who’s memory is faulty in a different way. I not only don’t remember the alternate ending, I don’t remember the actual ending either. Of course the last time I watched the movie was when it came out, and I was 11 years old at the time.
The alternate version was written by her brother.