SHAZAAM: A MULTIVERSE MOVIE MYSTERY
An example of the Mandela Effect from the world of movies is the non-existent Shazaam film that many people swear blind they’ve seen (this was before 2019’s Shazam superhero movie). Over many years, online posters have shared their memories of a 1990s movie that starred American comedian Sinbad as an incompetent genie who grants wishes to a pair of children. Among those recalling this film was a man who worked in a video store in the 1990s who ordered the tapes then watched them several times to check for tape damage; according to him, he’d seen the non-existent Shazaam multiple times. Talking to the New Statesman (not exactly a fortean publication), one viewer who fondly recalled Shazaam exclaimed: “It feels like part of my childhood has now been stolen from me. How does a movie simply vanish from our history?”
Of course, that movie never existed in the first place. One distraught viewer who simply couldn’t believe the film didn’t exist posted a $1,000 bounty online for anyone who could find it. Others offered detailed sceneby-scene recollections of the movie, down to the climax taking place at a pool party. From about 2009, hundreds of posters to a Reddit thread shared their memories of Shazaam
– were they all deluded? Sinbad – comedian David Adkins – even had to deny appearing in such a movie, only adding to some people’s idea that there are greater, darker forces at work. “It’s a conspiracy,” declared one Reddit user. “I swear this movie exists.” In 2015, the Berenstain/Berenstein
Bears story broke, provoking a rush of Mandela Effect articles and a boom in Shazaam recollections. This helped turn up a 1996 movie called Kazaam (note the double ‘a’) that starred basketball player Shaquille O’Neal (billed as ‘Shaq’ on the video cover) as a genie. Mystery solved, right? Everyone had misremembered this movie, substituting Sinbad for Shaq. However, those who insist they remember Shazaam also recall Kazaam, with many even claiming they remembered it as being a rip-off of their mysteriously missing movie. One explanation here is that ‘the Internet’ is becoming a replacement for reality: if it can’t be found online, it simply doesn’t exist.