FEELING THE FORCE: STAR WARS AND THE MANDELA EFFECT

There are at least two distinct Mandela Effects concerned with the pop culture behemoth that is the Star Wars franchise. There’s a famous moment (everyone knows it) from The Empire Strikes Back where bad guy Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) reveals his relationship to the hero, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). It’s a famous quote we all remember: “Luke, I am your father!” Except – as video evidence attests – the actual line as delivered in the film is: “No, I am your father.” The ‘Luke’ version of the quote actually turns up in ‘Jazzman’, a 1995 episode of

The Simpsons dealing with the death of Lisa’s musical hero Bleeding Gums Murphy. This suggests that The Simpsons’ writers remembered it wrongly, and that their version worked its way into everyone else’s memories... However, even James Earl Jones has recalled the line incorrectly on television.

This next one I experienced myself, thus confirming to my own satisfaction that the Mandela Effect is a real thing. For years people believed that Star Wars protocol droid (“I am fluent in over six million forms of communication”) C-3PO was gold all-over (his nickname – given to him by Han Solo – was ‘Goldenrod’, after all). C-3PO’s image did not change during the original trilogy of movies (1977-1983), and the action figures available always depicted him as all gold. It came as a shock to many, then, when sometime in the early-2000s it became clear that C-3PO had a silver right leg – and, what’s more, had always had one. For many years I edited Star Wars Insider, the official Lucasfilm magazine, and despite needing to know everything about Star Wars, inside and out, I’d never noticed. It only became clear to me when on the set of Episode II: Attack of the Clones in Australia where I was told it had always been the case. A little research in the Lucasfilm photo archives soon proved it to be true: C-3PO always had a silver right leg, even in the earliest photos from the 1976 shoot in the Tunisian desert, and I’d never noticed. In 2015, The Force Awakens seemed to be trolling fans with the revelation that C-3PO now had a red arm, and the dialogue: “It is I, C-3PO! You probably don’t recognise me because of the red arm.” Just for the record, C-3PO did not have a red arm prior to The Force Awakens , and it was back to gold for the final scene.