This thread now has me believing that Tom Hanks was a classmate of Luke Skywalker.
Get it? Big / Biggs … conflate some memories, add a few years, make a few public references that get picked up by Twitter followers and bingo, it’s a widely-believed historical fact.
Biko was also the subject of the movie “Cry Freedom,” with Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington. It was the first Oscar nomination for the latter, actually, and Biko’s deatn in prison is the central event of the story. I don’t think there was a movie about Nelson Mandela until some time after that, so that might have contributed to the confusion.
For years and years I kept “remembering” that I had seen an alternative version of The Wizard of Oz in which, instead of the wizard towards the end convincing the tin man, lion, and scarecrow that they just need a testimonial watch, a diploma, and a medal, the wizard feeds the lion “a bowl of courage”, stuffs the scarecrow’s head with pins and needles which poke out when he concentrates, and does something else for the tin man.
Turns out I was remembering the book, not the movie.
Well, obviously nobody remembers hearing that Nelson Mandela died in prison, and nobody remembers hearing that people remember hearing that Nelson Mandela died in prison, but people remembering hearing that people remember hearing that people remember hearing that he died in prison? I can sort of see that.
There have been a few threads on this board alone talking about a scene in The Empire Strikes Back where a snowspeeder kamikaze-crashes into an AT-AT. I believed it myself for a long time. Best I can figure is, I and everyone else mentally crossed the snowspeeder/AT-AT scene with the scene from Return of the Jedi where an A-wing crashes into the bridge of the super star destroyer.
I’d have hoped that a movie about Steve Biko would have been remembered as a movie about Steve Biko though!
I’m curious now about how pockets of cultural misinformation may be concentrated. Do I find the Mandela mistake so stunning because I’m British and the media dealt with his life differently here, or simply because I’m me and the immediate influences in my life meant I never heard the inaccurate reports of his demise? It feels like most Brits never had the opportunity to make that particular mistake - the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Concert in London was like another Live Aid - but I obviously have no actual survey data.
I was very surprised though to find anyone thought he was long dead, and the sources which talk about it being a commonly held belief seem to be overwhelmingly American…but as I say, this is just my experience. For now though, that’s what I’m working with!
Of course, I now wonder what my countrymen and I all think we remember which would bewilder other nations…
I believe that, like the Biggs scene from Star Wars, the kamikaze snowspeeder was described in the novelization of Empire Strikes Back, and people are transforming their memory of reading it into a memory of having seen it. But I no longer own a copy of the Empire novelization, and I can’t check to confirm it. So even that may be a false memory!
I once argued tooth and nail that the song The Promise was by the band Erasure. I was absolutely positive I was right. Nope. It was a one hit wonder called When in Rome.
I remember reading a entertainment article that made it sound like there were two Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone movies being produced. One in American and one in British.
Am I the only one who remembers that the early estimated casualties for 9/11 were at least 50,000?
My grandmother made a sausage and rice dish who’s name I don’t remember. The only thing I’m sure of is it wasn’t Jambalaya. She also made something she called taco salad that consisted mostly of beans. I’ve never seen another taco salad like it.
The fake advertising campaign for a product that doesn’t exist was the plot of an episode of Duck Tales. The campaign is so successful that Scrooge McDuck buys up the company, which still didn’t even have a product, leaving the creator of the campaign forced to come up with a product to match it (I think it ended up being chewing gum).
I wouldn’t swear that that’s the origin, though: They could have been re-using a plot from something else.
I thought he was dead for awhile, too. He nearly died back in 1992, which probably explains it. He had a really bad day. From his wiki:
Heck, there are people today who still believe the hijackers entered the U.S. through Canada or had been safely based in Canada. Compared to that, an overestimate of casualties (I’d wager you could only approach 50,000 casualties if the Towers had not been evacuated at all) is pretty minor.
But Dylan was injured in a motorcycle crash and virtually disappeared for more than a year. It wasn’t all that silly to think he had died.
McCartney? Okay, that was silly.
I think the earliest casualty estimates for the World Trade Center attacks were just the number of people who worked in the WTC. Of course, better estimates were very quickly produced, but there’s always misinformation in the immediate wake of an event like that.
I got my own lesson in fallible memories when I learned that a book episode describing a certain guard that was especially loathed by the prisoners was NOT from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but from Elie Wiesel’s Night.
I have a very good memory. But if presented with facts contradicting my brain I don’t go around claiming a super-secret movie print was shown at just my theater, or reality was altered by the Illuminati. (I guess it’s a corollary of the Dunning–Kruger effect.)
Touché. I so nearly went with Trump dying in the 80s.
I remember Valerie Harper dying years ago. Nope – she’s just been sick on and off for the past decade.
Is there an inverse Mandela effect…instead of everybody remembering something that didn’t happen, everybody forgot something that did?
Does anybody remember when American Motors and Howard Johnson’s Restaurants went out of business?
You remember these all over the place in the 70s…and then…?
Every scene where the dialogue mentions the Philosopher’s Stone was recorded a second time with them saying Sorcerer’s Stone. And aside from the title, those were the only differences. DVDs too. Not sure if they still maintain that, seems like the kind of thing where they ought to quietly change it back to Philosopher’s Stone everywhere.