According to the producers, Dan Castellaneta genuinely flubbed the line (and corrected himself), but it was such a “Homer” thing to say that they kept it in the final version.
Yeah, but…
The commercial had the two older kids not wanting to try the cereal, but still inquisitive about the cereal. So they clearly want to know how it tastes.
And they then pass it off to Mikey; he’s the guinea pig. Presumably, he’s too naive to say no to yucky food. But, in their enthusiasm, it certainly seems like they consider Mikey a willing participant.
Why would they give it to Mikey unless he would be eager to try it? If they think he hates everything, he’s more likely to refuse.
Then consider that, as kids, the older two don’t enunciate their words too well. It’s altogether reasonable to think they said “Let’s give it to Mikey. He’ll eat anything.”
(Although, in my opinion, it works better as “He’ll try anything)
They are still awaiting a response: does he spit it out? Give it back it back?
No! Mikey likes it! All is well (until he dies from mixing pop rocks and soda)
I was a kid. I didn’t really think it was that deep…until many decades later when I found a Mandela Effect firmly embedded in my brain!
To me it always sounded more like “he’ll eat anything!” They didn’t enunciate the “s” very well. Even when I first saw it, I was pretty sure that it was actually “he hates everything” since even as a little kid the “eat anything” version didn’t make any sense, but my mind refuses to play the “hates everything” version since it sounds so much like “eat anything”.
I think a lot of it is that the stereotype is blonde, glasses, pigtails and braces, and Jaws’ girlfriend had 3 of the 4, so our memories fill in with the braces by default.
The Looney Tunes frog is similar; I think “darling” actually fits better into the song than “honey” so we remember it that way.
My suspicion is that this is something telling about the way we remember things- maybe it’s not a fully-formed memory, but more of an outline or skeleton that we fill in as we remember it, and in cases like this, we fill in with what seems most plausible, even though it’s not actually what reality was.
Some of those are so minor- the spelling of Febreze, the Kit Kat logo, the spelling of Looney Tunes, the spelling of Froot Loops, the spelling of the Berenstain Bears- to me arent really Mandela effect. Mandela himself is a great example, along with the alternative ending to Big. Maybe Darth Vader saying “No, I am your father,” instead of “Luke, I am your father”.
There is also the existence of a 1990s movie entitled Shazaam starring the comedian Sinbadas a genie.
But I admit
I thought was the right version.
Not in the canon, altho some films- at least one- uses this.
I got that one wrong myself, when i was younger.
No surprise to me, but that’s because I was born in Johns Hopkins Hospital.
What surprised me was discovering that there is an historian and YouTuber named Johns Hopkins living in Baltimore today. Presumably a descendant.
Speaking of which, I was surprised to learn that Troy McClure of The Simpsons sometimes said “You may remember me,” when I only remembered him ever saying “You might remember me.”
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? was a series of educational videogames that eventually spawned a TV series.
I had (and still have) the impression that the character’s last name was Santiago in the early games, and had been changed to Sandiego for the TV series. (I never actually played the games, I just saw ads in magazines back then.) But the entire Internet seems to believe she was called Sandiego all along.
I think it’s more a case of the gag working much better if she did have braces, because Jaws has the metal teeth.
Yup.
You might also think, well, you got the names mixed up because Santiago is one of the locations in the game, but no. At least not in the original game.
Carmen Sandiego’s name was originally inspired by famous singer Carmen Miranda, but with the last name changed to be more localized to California, where developer Broderbund was located. (Though not near San Diego itself; Broderbund was in San Rafael located north in the Bay area.)
Fun fact… David Siefkin, the writer who came up with the name while the game was being developed, left Broderbund before the game was actually released. He left to join the US State Department as a diplomat, where he served for 27 years, mostly in Europe. I have no idea if he ever worked with Interpol though…
There are lots of Simpsons ones, like the removal of all of the episodes with Graggle (“it’s Gragglin’ time!'“).
For me, it’s the Hans Holbein painting of Henry VIII holding a turkey drumstick in his hand. There is, of course, a famous portrait of Henry VIII by Holbein, but no drumstick in that one; yet I have a reasonably firm mental visualisation of that.
I played the first game long before the TV Series and can confirm it was Carmen Sandiego from the beginning. I remember thinking that “Sandiego” was very weird as a Spanish surname.
The more common Mandela effects for Carmen Sandiego are that her last name was “San Diego” or that her coat and hat were yellow (they were red).
The Fruit of the Loom thing hit me hard.
As did the fact that there is no sherbert ice cream. It’s sherbet.
Joan Jett saw him dancin’ there by the record machine, not standing
But the biggest one is Stoufers Stove Top Stuffing (no such thing. Never was).
It’s as if half my life is a delusion. 
I feel strongly about the eponymous example. Because it basically shows that when a white lady mixes up a couple of black men, rather than tell her she’s wrong, society will entertain the possibility that maybe she’s from an alternate reality?
It’s literally appealing to a reality distortion field rather than just accepting that a white lady could be mixed up about a couple of black men. You know, racism.
“May” can be a big word. It pretty much ruined the Colby cheese of yesteryear. Back story: Colby Cheese was developed in Colby, Wisconsin. It starts out similar to cheddar but as anyone who has had real Colby knows, it doesn’t end up like cheddar. You can pull a slice apart into numerous pieces. It is not tightly bound like cheddar. You can look at Colby and see the many small voids in the body. Those voids are not made by bacterial action like Swiss cheese and are known in the cheese world as “mechanical voids”.
The regulations used to specify ”…SHALL contain mechanical voids…” But in the 1980s (?) the regulating board changed it to read, “MAY contain mechanical voids” That single word change allowed manufacturers to use their cheddar processing line and make ersatz Colby, saving them money.
It is now quite hard to find real Colby. You need to search for small, local dairies in Wisconsin.
Ironically, my example is meta, in that I mistook what the Mandela Effect even is. Every time I heard it, I thought it meant the mistakenly attributed quote by Marianne Williamson which circulated as Mandela’s. I only found out the real meaning of the term a few months ago.
I have a clear memory of the day in February 1990 when Mandela was released: I was listening to live radio coverage of it. The news lady on the radio got emotional and cried when she saw him walk out. It was difficult for me to accept that people could be massively unaware of that remarkable moment, the culmination of decades of striving.
A fair number of the examples on Reddit’s r/mandelaeffect are “I could have sworn this foreign/nonwhite person was speaking in a more stereotypical accent!” (E.g. Ringo Starr shouting “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”, not “me fingers.”)