I love watching cartoons. It’s something I grew up with and, to this day, enjoy very much. Now, imagine my surprise when I first noticed the LooneyToons, the cartoon show that I’d been watching for so long wasn’t Looney Toons at all! It was Looney Tunes. My first thought was that they’d changed the name, because there was NO WAY that I’d be mistaken about a show that I’d watched my whole life… right? So, I googled it and to my utter shock; it had always been Looney Tunes and not Toons.
Another thing I noticed was that I wasn’t the only one with this misconception. There were others like me. This eventually led me to read up on the phenomenon that is called the Mandela Effect.
Mandela effect occurs when a large group of people believe an event occurred or remember it happening in a certain way when it did not. The name was conceived when Fiona Broome, a self-identified paranormal consultant, detailed how she remembered former South African President Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s in prison. She described remembering news coverage of his death and even a speech by his wife about his death. But none of that had happened, Nelson Mandela died in 2013. The cincher to this story is that she wasn’t the only one who ‘remembered’ this. She found many others with the exact memory as her, and this gave birth to the concept of “Mandela Effect”.
Here are some examples:
- The Flintstones?!
And here I thought Looney Tunes was the only cartoon title I read wrong. The surname of the modern Stone Age family had two Ts, Flintstones and not Flinstones!
- Snow White
“Mirror, mirror on the wall”, is what most people say when they’re pretending to be the witch step-mother of Snow White. But it’s actually “Magic mirror on the wall”.
- KitKat
No, there is no hyphen in KitKat. We were seeing it wrong!
- Skechers Vs. Sketchers
Even though I own a pair of Skechers sneakers, I didn’t realize that it was spelled without a “t”.
- Interview with the Vampire
I’ve read this book by Anne Rice. I recently found out it also has a film adaptation. But I, along with so many people in the world, always thought the title was “Interview with a Vampire”. In fact, if you google search this title, the very first suggestion will be “Interview with a Vampire” and not “the Vampire”.
