There’s a scene in Moonraker where Jaws steps out of his escape pod after escaping from the shuttle and he meets a cute girl. I remember this girl wearing braces. This is apparently not true. This wouldn’t bother me so much but the scene doesn’t even make sense if she’s not wearing braces. So am I now living in an alternate reality or did I just misrember because her wearing braces makes the scene funnier?
This has been mentioned extensively in several other threads on the Mandela effect.
ninja’d! And with my own post, to boot!
arrgh!
It’s not just you
Maybe it should be renamed the Moonraker effect.
I think this is the first one that has got me. I too thought the blonde girl had braces.
Maybe I’m conflating it with “Better of Dead”. In that movie the girl does have braces. Ricky Smith (played by Dan Schneider) walks off with her. As it was an homage to the Moonraker scene and I’ve seen “Better of Dead” dozens of times and Moonraker maybe twice.
(Bolding mine)
My take on it is that it was an ironic meta-joke, or an attempt at one, at least. The scene was setting up the ‘obvious’ joke that, after Jaws smiled and showed his grill, the girl would smile and show a full set of braces. The fact that she had a normal pearly-white smile subverted expectations. Set-up and misdirect.
Yet the expectation of the ‘obvious’ joke was so strong that the ‘obvious’ joke is what got implanted in a lot of peoples’ minds.
ETA (To the OP): Here, somebody fixed it for ya:
I’ve always felt like there’s an element to the Mandela Effect where your brain fills in the parts that it feels like should be there, even if in reality, they’re not actually there.
For example, in Moonraker, Dolly (Jaws’ girlfriend) has a very specific look- braids, round glasses, and a sort of nerdy look. Most of the time, it’s completed by braces, but in this time it’s not. So when we think back, our memories aren’t so exact, and we remember something along the lines of nerdy girl of Template A, and it turns out that Template A has braces.
Or when we remember a line from a movie or book; we don’t necessarily remember the actual line, but rather the meaning and then we fit the language around it in a lot of cases. So we get “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore”, instead of “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” because we remember the message and a rough framework, but we then put the actual words that fit the message into our “memory” as we recall it.
I have a feeling that if we figure it out, we’ll have a really good handle on how memories are stored and retrieved as well.
Except, (as I mentioned in the other Mandela threads) I “noticed” the braces the first time I watched the movie. I commented to myself how clever that was. It wasn’t a false memory, it was apparently a false present.
That’s how false memories work. You “remember” yourself noticing that, because at the time that is what it seemed like should happen. When you remember something you are actually just remembering the last time you remembered it, like a copy of a copy of a copy.
Yep, as with the misremembered line ‘Luke, I am your father’. The actual line is ‘No, I am your father’. But the first version describes or encapsulates the meaning of the moment better in one sentence.
Same with ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’. Holmes never said that actual line, at least not in the books, but he said ‘it’s elementary’ and called Watson ‘my dear Watson’ plenty of times, so combining them together kind of puts the essence of Sherlock Holmes into one succinct phrase.
Here is a 14-minute Kurzgesagt video on how your memory works. The big takeaway: Memory is plastic. It changes a bit each time you bring it up.
This seems to be a recent example of a Mandela Effect. I clearly remember Samantha wiggling her nose on Bewitched. But apparently she never actually did!
