How many did they imagine she had?
That’s a strange thing to say about your mother’s breasts.
This is me, seeing what you did there. Bravo.
For comparison’s sake, I remembered thee being a lot more nudity in Boogie Nights, Crimes of Passion and 5 1/2 Weeks than there actually was. I doubt any of these had a total of more than two minutes total. I also vividly recall seeing young Sally Struthers’ breasts in Five Easy Pieces but can find no evidence this was true. Could they have released a second, more demure version of the movie since?
Here’s a possibility where the confusion arose. Four years after doing Can’t Buy Me Love, Peterson did a made-for-TV movie called Posing (aka I Posed for Playboy). It was about three women who posed nude for Playboy.
Peterson was one of the three main characters - she played a college student who did a pictorial.
Being as this was a network TV movie, there was no actual nudity. But there was a scene where Peterson got undressed on camera but in a manner that didn’t show anything beyond her back and shoulders.
Amanda Peterson was the female lead in Can’t Buy Me Love, but the actress in question is Darcy DeMoss.
I can understand people misremembering things, but I have to say that this was one of my favourite movies as a kid and I REMEMBER black and blue seeing this movie on a rental VHS (no, I don’t own the movie on tape) back in the 80’s as a teenager. Hand on heart, and NO, IT WASN"T ANOTHER MOVIE, but Darcy does get those glorious breasts of hers out. I swear that section of the tape was probably worn down, but this was definitely a scene that at one stage, a version on rental video in Australia. Now the sensorship board may have been more lenient here in the land of Oz, and this may be the reason there is differences to US and AU based opinions, but here in Australia, back when I was a kid, the version I saw, had the scene uncut!
Just sent her a message on FB. Lets see if she replies.
Conflation is the biggest issue in these Mandella Effect situations. I would guess that you have seen movies with actual boobs, and remember that this was a particular racy scene, and mix the two together in you brain.
That seems to be the issues with others. Someone pointed out that some other prominent Civil Rights guy died instead of Mandella. We all remember the -stein names. The “alternate” ending of Big is in another age regression movie. Common misquotes like “Beam me up, Scotty” or “Luke, I am your father” tend to come from parodies or descriptions that get repeated as if they were the real thing.
And, of course, those instances where they intentionally make people misremember things, they intentionally use conflation, putting Bugs Bunny into pictures at Disney, mixing up what the pictures with their own memories. Or having someone claim something about a fake thief, and the mix up what they heard and what they actually saw.
We tend to assume that the quality of our memories are proportional to our confidence, but this is just not always the case.
Why would they film a scene that could only be released in Australia?
Maybe people are confusing Can’t Buy Me Love with the similar movie Just One of the Guys, which did feature a brief topless scene.
So, how’s Nelson Mandela doing in your world? And Abe Vigoda? Abe Lincoln? Prime Minister Abe? Abe Froman? Is he still the sausage king of Chicago?
The movie is on Netflix. I just watched the relevant scene (for research), and the camera never pans down. No nudity whatsoever.
What’s really crazy is that Ronald’s annoying younger brother is played by a pre-teen Seth Green. Did not expect that.
It may be the version Tartaris viewed may have been an incorrect Open Matte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte used to make a movie fill the aspect ratio of pre-widescreen TVs.
In a nutshell, most film isn’t widescreen, more square than rectangle. Sometimes to make the movie fit a non-widescreen TV, the full height of the film is scanned, exposing areas (no pun intended) above and below what was ever intended to be seen. This is why you sometimes see boom mikes or things on the ground or table that obviously aren’t supposed to be in the scene.
A prime example is Blow Up (1966). When the movie first came out on videotape, the scene where Vanessa Redgrave exposes herself to David Hemmings, her breasts are clearly seen when they shouldn’t have been. When it was released on Laserdisc (both letterboxed and full screen), the letterbox version was correctly matted to stop a few inches below her shoulders and the full screen version was matted to an inch or so below that, but not fully exposing her as the videotape did.
In the theater, what you see on the screen is controlled by what is known as an Aperture Plate. Back when movies were on film, the images were in two different formats–flat, and CinemaScope. Scope movies optically compressed the image on the film, and when it was projected, a special lens was used after a regular lens to uncompress it. Done correctly, the scope picture was 2.35 times wider than it was high. Flat movies, on the other hand did not compress the image, and depending on what lens was in the projector and what Aperture Plate was in the projector could be 1.33 to 1 on the screen up to 1.85 to 1. HDTV is 16 to 9, or close to 1.85 to 1.This is why scope movies on HDTV’s are either squished, cropped or have bars on the top and bottom of the image.
Now, sometimes the flat movies are shot in such a way that a mask is used in camera or when the print was produced that ALL you got was the 1.85 image. Other times they skipped that step, and interesting things happened 
Remember National Lampoon’s Vacation? Beverly D’Angelo was wearing panties in the shower.
Porkys was far more interesting.
The Best of Times was very interesting with the Aperture Plate out–not only did Mr. Boom Microphone show up on top, but when Kurt Russel had Robin Williams up against the lockers, a production assistant showed up in the bottom of the expanded frame swamping Robin’s intact glasses for a pair that Kurt supposedly broke.
Nowadays, all this stuff is gone, and the movies arrive on a hard drive.
I remember in the 60’s and 70’s, sometimes the movie would extend off the screen unto the curtains. Sometimes it was because the curtains weren’t fully retracted and other times the movie just wasn’t properly framed on the screen.