The Mandela Effect

[LizzieMaine]

Misremembered movie lines are a subject unto itself. Johnny Weissmuller never said "Me Tarzan. You Jane." Jimmy Cagney never said "You dirty rat!" He also never said "Top of the world, Ma!" What we remember are decades' worth of stage impressionists doing their celebrity schtik.

Popular culture owes an awful lot to Frank Gorshin and Rich Little. "Judy, Judy, Judy!"

Edward G. Robinson never said "Where's your god now, Moses? Nyahh!" But only because Cecil B. DeMille had no sense of humor at all.

 

[MisterCairo]

I am surprised no one has mentioned the infamous "Luke , I am your father"! rather than "No. I am your father." which was a response to Vader's statement and Luke's response- "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father. Luke: He told me enough. He told me you killed him."

 

[ChiTownScion]

Popular culture owes an awful lot to Frank Gorshin and Rich Little. "Judy, Judy, Judy!"

Edward G. Robinson never said "Where's your god now, Moses? Nyahh!" But only because Cecil B. DeMille had no sense of humor at all.

Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya) never said: "We don' need no steeking badges!"


Rick (Humphrey Bogart) never said, "Play it again, Sam."


And even Voltaire never said (nor wrote), "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it."


People get this stuff wrong a lot of times.

 

[Edward]

As memory serves, that line was in the forward to the first published volume by Voltaire, and was the publisher's summary of something he'd written at greater length. I have a half rememberee botion, as I type this, that something similar happened with "Give me liberty or give me death" and Ben Franklin.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Sinclair Lewis never said "When fascism comes to America it will come carrying the cross and wrapped in the flag," and there doesn't seem to be any positive documentation as to who, exactly, said it first. It seems to have arisen spontaneously at some point in the late 1930s, and has the status of a "famous quote" that was never actually said by anyone famous.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Horace Greeley never said, "Go West, young man." That was John Barsone Lane Soule.

Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake."

And Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula never said, "I want to suck your blood."

 

[ChiTownScion]

Regarding things that certain people swear that they saw- but never happened, EVER:

A child guest on any one of the many locally incarnated Bozo the Clown shows losing at a game at one point, then uttering an expletive, being gently rebuked by Bozo for said vulgarity... and then telling Bozo to "cram it" --- in many varying forms.


I've met people from at least half a dozen cities who have sworn that they saw it take place... or someone that they know saw it take place. But it never really happened.


https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cram-it-clown/

 

[Haversack]

Sam Clemens never said: "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco".

And there is no evidence in any of his writings that John Ruskin ever said:
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."

 

[cm289]

I have a memory of seeing a version of Star Wars in ‘77 that included a scene near the beginning of Biggs leaving for the Imperial Academy and telling Luke of his plans to jump ship and join the rebellion.

To my knowledge, no version of this Star Wars was ever actually released, so my memory was probably a combination of reading it in the Marvel Comics adaption and seeing still shots of Luke and Biggs together. It’s a pretty vivid memory, though[emoji848]

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[LizzieMaine]

Darth Vader never said "Join the dark side, Luke!" Even though my kid brother constantly made his Darth Vader action figure say it.

 

[Frunobulax]

As memory serves, that line was in the forward to the first published volume by Voltaire, and was the publisher's summary of something he'd written at greater length. I have a half rememberee botion, as I type this, that something similar happened with "Give me liberty or give me death" and Ben Franklin.

That's because Patrick Henry said it.


Sent directly from my mind to yours.

 

[Henryan]

"Darth Vader never said "Join the dark side, Luke!" Even though my kid brother constantly made his Darth Vader action figure say it."

Oh, wait! He didn't?

 

[Edward]

Horace Greeley never said, "Go West, young man." That was John Barsone Lane Soule.

Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake."

And Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula never said, "I want to suck your blood."

Dracula is often misquoted as having said "The children of the night, what sweet music they make!" Stoker actually wrote "The children of the night, what music they make!"

What always amuses me is that Stoker, who was Irish, never set foot in Transylvania, but instead absorbed a huge amount of information from travel guides for Romania.

 

[Zombie_61]

...I'm still not certain if Spielberg is gaslighting us on the first Star Wars movie (I swear the version I saw did not say, "A New Hope" in the opening scroll).

That was a later addition. Specifically, it first appeared on the Spring 1981 rerelease print (after Empire had already come out), and then subsequently was the version which appeared on all home video (and likely television) showings...

When Star Wars was first released in May of 1977 there would have been no reason to add the "Episode IV: A New Hope" subtitle because at the time it was a "one shot" movie. It was only after it was deemed a success beyond anyone's wildest dreams that at least one sequel was approved, and at some point after that someone (probably George Lucas) decided "Star Wars" should be the name of the overall franchise rather than the title of a single movie, and that the episode numbers and subtitles should be added as a method of identifying each specific movie within the franchise.

Friends and people I've chatted with online recall seeing versions of the theatrical release with the "Episode IV: A New Hope" subtitle added even before Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was released, but I didn't see that until I attended a screening of Lucas' not-so-Special Edition version of the movie more than 20 years later.

I have a memory of seeing a version of Star Wars in ‘77 that included a scene near the beginning of Biggs leaving for the Imperial Academy and telling Luke of his plans to jump ship and join the rebellion.

To my knowledge, no version of this Star Wars was ever actually released, so my memory was probably a combination of reading it in the Marvel Comics adaption and seeing still shots of Luke and Biggs together. It’s a pretty vivid memory, though[emoji848]

I have no idea how true this is, but I've read at least a few different "original theatrical" versions of Star Wars (before the Episode IV: A New Hope stuff) were released initially because The Suits at 20th Century Fox were still uncertain about whether or not specific scenes/sequences should remain in the movie; that Biggs Darklighter sequence being one of them. It (and other "test" scenes") was ultimately removed and new prints were sent to the theaters, but some fans like yourself remember seeing it in the movie at least once.

I didn't have that experience with Star Wars, but I did with Young Frankenstein. I saw it with friends the weekend it opened, and in that first screening there was a brief moment during the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in which Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) notices Igor's (Marty Feldman) *hump is missing. When he asks him about it Igor, who is wearing a tuxedo in the scene, indignantly replies, "Never with tails." When I saw that movie a week later with a different group of friends, that scene was missing. And it was missing every time I saw the movie after that. Over the years I asked a number of people about it, but no one remembered it. When the movie was released in 1998 in a DVD set that included deleted scenes, I thought I'd finally have my answer. Nope, not there. I was sincerely beginning to wonder if I had imagined it (my friends and I had been drinking the night we first saw it), or somehow incorporated it into my memories of the movie based on something I'd read. Then they re-released the movie on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2014, and that scene was included in one of the bonus features on the Blu-Ray. Finally, 40 years later, the answer to my question! I hadn't imagined it, it did exist! Okay, so it's not exactly life-changing, but it did make me feel better.

*A little trivia for Young Frankenstein fans: Marty Feldman came up with the "moving hump" gag. Without telling anyone, he had been moving it from one side to the other for several days before someone noticed; everyone thought it was so funny that it was added to the script.

 

[tonyb]

The dewy-eyed bride mentioned today that there are cockroaches in her office, and that the building management is being rather casual in addressing the problem.

I asked her if she remembered the TV commercials for Black Flag Roach Motels featuring one Muhammad Ali. She did not, she said, which was no real surprise, seeing how she's 18 years my junior and would have been quite young when those ads aired.

So I looked it up online, to show her one of those commercials, only to find that the roach-trap commercials featuring Muhammad Ali were NOT for the Black Flag product but rather for D-Con.

 

[Zombie_61]

...So I looked it up online, to show her one of those commercials, only to find that the roach-trap commercials featuring Muhammad Ali were NOT for the Black Flag product but rather for D-Con.

"I don't want you livin' with roaches...D-Con kills bugs where they begin." A good friend and I immediately noticed his slightly slurred speech and assumed it was caused by blows to the head during his boxing career; only three or four years later it was announced that Mr. Ali had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Syndrome.

 

[EngProf]

When Star Wars was first released in May of 1977 there would have been no reason to add the "Episode IV: A New Hope" subtitle because at the time it was a "one shot" movie. It was only after it was deemed a success beyond anyone's wildest dreams that at least one sequel was approved, and at some point after that someone (probably George Lucas) decided "Star Wars" should be the name of the overall franchise rather than the title of a single movie, and that the episode numbers and subtitles should be added as a method of identifying each specific movie within the franchise.

Friends and people I've chatted with online recall seeing versions of the theatrical release with the "Episode IV: A New Hope" subtitle added even before Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was released, but I didn't see that until I attended a screening of Lucas' not-so-Special Edition version of the movie more than 20 years later.

I have no idea how true this is, but I've read at least a few different "original theatrical" versions of Star Wars (before the Episode IV: A New Hope stuff) were released initially because The Suits at 20th Century Fox were still uncertain about whether or not specific scenes/sequences should remain in the movie; that Biggs Darklighter sequence being one of them. It (and other "test" scenes") was ultimately removed and new prints were sent to the theaters, but some fans like yourself remember seeing it in the movie at least once.

I didn't have that experience with Star Wars, but I did with Young Frankenstein. I saw it with friends the weekend it opened, and in that first screening there was a brief moment during the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in which Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) notices Igor's (Marty Feldman) *hump is missing. When he asks him about it Igor, who is wearing a tuxedo in the scene, indignantly replies, "Never with tails." When I saw that movie a week later with a different group of friends, that scene was missing. And it was missing every time I saw the movie after that. Over the years I asked a number of people about it, but no one remembered it. When the movie was released in 1998 in a DVD set that included deleted scenes, I thought I'd finally have my answer. Nope, not there. I was sincerely beginning to wonder if I had imagined it (my friends and I had been drinking the night we first saw it), or somehow incorporated it into my memories of the movie based on something I'd read. Then they re-released the movie on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2014, and that scene was included in one of the bonus features on the Blu-Ray. Finally, 40 years later, the answer to my question! I hadn't imagined it, it did exist! Okay, so it's not exactly life-changing, but it did make me feel better.

*A little trivia for Young Frankenstein fans: Marty Feldman came up with the "moving hump" gag. Without telling anyone, he had been moving it from one side to the other for several days before someone noticed; everyone thought it was so funny that it was added to the script.

Speaking of "Young Frankenstein", I thought for years that Kenneth Mars' embedding of the darts in his (The Inspector's) wooden arm while playing darts with Gene Wilder was done for comic effect. I saw "Son of Frankenstein" for the first time in a long time this past weekend and saw that Lionel Atwill did exactly the same thing in the real movie.
In fact, I was slightly surprised to realize that most of "Young Frankenstein" was a parody of "Son of Frankenstein", not the first "Frankenstein".
The big door-knockers, Igor/Eyegor playing a horn, etc. were all there. So much so that I was getting "YF" flashbacks and laughing out loud at a lot of the serious scenes.
However, this may be just poor memory and not truly the Mandela Effect of remembering things that didn't really happen.

Movies can be so easily manipulated by their directors and the movie moguls, as mentioned above, that they would have to be a special case of the Mandela effect.
A person who saw the first version of "E.T." would remember the FBI agents having shotguns and those who saw the later politically-correct version would see the agents with walkie-talkies. Same movie - in principle, but two different realities and memories...
("South Park" did a great parody of this by doing their own version of "Saving Private Ryan" with all the soldier's rifles on D-Day replaced with walkie-talkies.)

 

[Edward]

When Star Wars was first released in May of 1977 there would have been no reason to add the "Episode IV: A New Hope" subtitle because at the time it was a "one shot" movie. It was only after it was deemed a success beyond anyone's wildest dreams that at least one sequel was approved, and at some point after that someone (probably George Lucas) decided "Star Wars" should be the name of the overall franchise rather than the title of a single movie, and that the episode numbers and subtitles should be added as a method of identifying each specific movie within the franchise.

Friends and people I've chatted with online recall seeing versions of the theatrical release with the "Episode IV: A New Hope" subtitle added even before Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was released, but I didn't see that until I attended a screening of Lucas' not-so-Special Edition version of the movie more than 20 years later.

Interesting - the official story is that the "Episode IV" schtick only was attached after Empire was out and some new prints were run up so that cinema could show the two films together. There are records of Lucas considering calling Empire Star Wars Part II or otherwise adding the '2' in, so clearly the idea of the original being a part 4 - even if it was the first or only one ever to be made- was not a thing until later on. Who really knows, though - Lucas seems to change his mind so often over the years, yet always insist that whatever he thinks today was always the case, and that he's never changed his mind (last time I paid him any attention, he was still claiming that Greedo was always supposed to shoot first and that anything else was a mistake / misunderstanding....).

I didn't have that experience with Star Wars, but I did with Young Frankenstein. I saw it with friends the weekend it opened, and in that first screening there was a brief moment during the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in which Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) notices Igor's (Marty Feldman) *hump is missing. When he asks him about it Igor, who is wearing a tuxedo in the scene, indignantly replies, "Never with tails." When I saw that movie a week later with a different group of friends, that scene was missing. And it was missing every time I saw the movie after that. Over the years I asked a number of people about it, but no one remembered it. When the movie was released in 1998 in a DVD set that included deleted scenes, I thought I'd finally have my answer. Nope, not there. I was sincerely beginning to wonder if I had imagined it (my friends and I had been drinking the night we first saw it), or somehow incorporated it into my memories of the movie based on something I'd read. Then they re-released the movie on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2014, and that scene was included in one of the bonus features on the Blu-Ray. Finally, 40 years later, the answer to my question! I hadn't imagined it, it did exist! Okay, so it's not exactly life-changing, but it did make me feel better.

"Never with tails" has got to be one of the best cut lines in Hollywood history.

*A little trivia for Young Frankenstein fans: Marty Feldman came up with the "moving hump" gag. Without telling anyone, he had been moving it from one side to the other for several days before someone noticed; everyone thought it was so funny that it was added to the script.

Wonderful performer, truly funny man. I adored Gene Wilder and al the others, but Feldman really is the lynchpin that makes it all perfect.... Did you get a chance to see the stage version? Very well done, if not as strong as The Producers.. Fascinating especially to see how it was reimagined for the stage, bearing in mind that it had to be in colour (Brooks had to fight the studio and even threaten to walk, I believe, to get them to agree to let him shoot in B&W), and other elements of the original format - which was, after all, a satire on movies - wouldn't transfer.

Speaking of "Young Frankenstein", I thought for years that Kenneth Mars' embedding of the darts in his (The Inspector's) wooden arm while playing darts with Gene Wilder was done for comic effect. I saw "Son of Frankenstein" for the first time in a long time this past weekend and saw that Lionel Atwill did exactly the same thing in the real movie.
In fact, I was slightly surprised to realize that most of "Young Frankenstein" was a parody of "Son of Frankenstein", not the first "Frankenstein".
The big door-knockers, Igor/Eyegor playing a horn, etc. were all there. So much so that I was getting "YF" flashbacks and laughing out loud at a lot of the serious scenes.

IT's always fun to watch something like that if you'd not been aware of specific details that way. A few years ago, I MC'ed a double bill screening of Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire; many in the audience had seen the latter before but not the former the whole way through - it was interesting to see people realise how much of the original they'd seen in clips, or taken off elsewhere over the years (I still maintain the Thriller dance was a take off of a very specific moment in the film), and then to see the smiles of recognition at the scenes recreated in Shadow.

Movies can be so easily manipulated by their directors and the movie moguls, as mentioned above, that they would have to be a special case of the Mandela effect.
A person who saw the first version of "E.T." would remember the FBI agents having shotguns and those who saw the later politically-correct version would see the agents with walkie-talkies. Same movie - in principle, but two different realities and memories...
("South Park" did a great parody of this by doing their own version of "Saving Private Ryan" with all the soldier's rifles on D-Day replaced with walkie-talkies.)

I've always avoided the reduxed ET after what I've heard about it - you can't encourage that sort of thing. I remember the South Park Kids also going on a mission to save Raiders from George Lucas giving it the 'New Hope' treatment, which was fun.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

As memory serves, that line was in the forward to the first published volume by Voltaire, and was the publisher's summary of something he'd written at greater length. I have a half rememberee botion, as I type this, that something similar happened with "Give me liberty or give me death" and Ben Franklin.

The "give me liberty ..." was Patrick Henry.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

Misremembered movie lines are a subject unto itself. Johnny Weissmuller never said "Me Tarzan. You Jane." Jimmy Cagney never said "You dirty rat!" He also never said "Top of the world, Ma!" What we remember are decades' worth of stage impressionists doing their celebrity schtik.

In the climactic scene of "White Heat", he says, "Made it Ma! Top of the world!" So, not so very far off.