The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon, or better a series of related phenomena, in which people remember things that (let us speak with the utmost charity) seem not to have happened. The term was coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who in 2009 was surprised to learn that Nelson Mandela was still alive since she clearly remembered him dying in the 1980s during his imprisonment by the apartheid government. Broome is quick to draw a distinction between the Mandela Effect and simple false memories: “If it’s a false memory,” she writes, “it’s not the Mandela Effect; it’s a false memory.” This is tautological, but okay. By definition, a Mandela effect is only a Mandela effect if it really happened, if reality was really changed, even if the way we know that reality was changed was that (some of) our memories no longer correspond to reality.
The most famous Mandela Effect is also the least interesting. Did you know it’s spelled “Berenstain Bears” and not “Berenstein Bears?” There are people who will kill you with rocks for suggesting that they remember it being “Berenstein” because that’s by far the more common spelling and not because they shifted timelines, or the simulation glitched, or some great and terrible They changed it. (There does not appear to be a community consensus on what exactly causes the Mandela Effect, though parallel universes are a common theory). All Mandela effects are like this. There are never sizeable groups of people who recall a great conflict in the 1970s between a resurgent Iroquois Confederacy and the city-states of Nova Scotia. Everyone who has slipped between timelines, who has in body or consciousness defied the great rushing strands of the omniverse, has come from a realm perfectly identical to ours except that cigarette was spelled with two gs.
Between the Mandela Effect subreddit, its sister sub /r/retconned, and posts on withered legacy boards like 4chan’s /x/, an entire mythology and jargon has grown up: a schematics of cosmic shift. A “flip flop,” for example, is when some element of reality changes but then changes back. Quick — picture Rodin’s The Thinker. Where is the statue’s hand placed? Are you picturing it? It’s on his chin. But much of the ME community swears it at some point changed to being on his forehead before changing back to being on his chin again. Whether the cereal is spelled “Fruit Loops” or “Froot Loops” has also allegedly flip-flopped several times. In an attempt to catch this dimensional alteration in the act, and hypothesizing that an ME could affect text but not physical objects, one guy taped plates to his wall.
Anyway, all of this is boringly insane. No, the bookstore was never called “Barnes and Nobles;” you are misremembering. You can’t remember if it was spelled Loony Toons or Loony Tunes because the last time you watched it you were six years old. It’s the same thing with the bears.
Sometimes we can figure out the explanations behind these mismatches. I mentioned that “-stain” is an uncommon suffix for a last name while “-stein” is pretty common; it’s therefore easier to remember the latter than the former. I have a very clear memory of Christopher Lloyd dying when I was a child. It’s unusually vivid; I remember being in the car on a cloudy day, with a family friend driving, and hearing the news on the radio. I was thus shocked to learn years later that Christopher Lloyd is very much alive. Christopher Lloyd, though, was in the 1999 remake of My Favorite Martian, which I and no one else liked as a kid. Ray Walston, the actor in the original My Favorite Martian, actually did die when I was young. It’s more probable, on balance, that I heard “the guy from My Favorite Martian died” and thought it referred to Christopher Lloyd than that I changed universe sometime in the early 2000s. Probably all ME’s are thus explicable.1
Except.
Except for the Fruit of the Loom thing.
I want you, without consulting Google or your underwear, to picture the Fruit of the Loom logo. Yes, the clothing brand. Do it now. Please. If you’re so inclined, write down the salient features that spring to mind. Recall it in as much detail as possible. It is imperative that you not scroll down until you have done this.
I’m serious. Think of the logo.
…
Have you thought of the logo?
…
Does it have a fucking cornucopia in it?
This is not a rhetorical question. I am begging you to tell me, in the comments, if you remember a cornucopia in this logo. Because this — this profoundly stupid thing — is where the ME gets upsetting for me personally. I remember the cornucopia. I remember the cornucopia. A lot of other people also claim to remember the cornucopia. There is no cornucopia. There has never been a cornucopia.
This fact leads us to our next key bit of ME lingo, which is “residue.” Residue is material evidence left behind when reality has been altered. If you had a postcard with a drawing of the Thinker with his hand on his forehead, that would be residue from before someone spilled coffee on the servers running the Matrix and caused it to shift back to his chin. The Fruit of the Loom logo has a weirdly high amount of such residue.
For example, do you remember the 2006 film The Ant Bully? Of course you don’t. But what if I told you it was of cosmological importance, because a throwaway joke in one frame shows a Fruit of the Loom parody with a cornucopia?
“Ah,” you will wisely say, “that is just a creative alteration made in order to avoid the terrible lawsuits of Big Underwear.” Perhaps. And yet consider the case of the 1973 album Flute of the Loom, whose title and logo are likewise a parody:
One poster on the ME subreddit went so far as to track down and bother the musician’s son, who explained that this was based on Fruit’s “original logo” from before they “quit using a cornucopia in their logo and switched to just using fruit by itself,” a thing that has never happened.
Snopes has done a full on deep dive into the matter, conclusively proving that FoL never had a cornucopia in its logo. In doing so they have missed the point. No one involved thinks the clothing company had some rare logo in the 60s that was subsequently changed; everyone believes that the occulted hand of the Demiurge has materially and retroactively altered the course of time. That’s why most of the “residue” is just parodies and, maybe more interestingly, people’s recollections and testimonies.
Altogether redditors have crawled through dozens or hundreds of newspaper articles, magazines, advertisements, and books. They’ve turned up a dozen or so instances of people describing the logo as having a cornucopia, or designing things based on the logo that themselves have cornucopias, or whatver. The oldest such account, as far as I can tell, is from 1962.
This is sort of weird, right? Not that everyone remembers the logo incorrectly, but that so many people remember it incorrectly in the same way. A 2022 study found that people tend to misremember even common icons of pop culture capitalism — everyone forgets that C-3P0 had a silvered leg in the original Star Wars trilogy, for example, and lots of people remember Pikachu having a black mark on his tail. One of the things they tested was the cornucopia. Even the researchers seemed to think it’s sort of weird that so many people remember the logo being wrong in the same specific way:
[Study participants] could have picked the correct Fruit of the Loom logo, the Fruit of the Loom logo with the cornucopia, or the Fruit of the Loom logo with a plate underneath it. The fact that they chose cornucopia over plate, when plates are more frequently associated with fruit, is evidence against the idea that it's just the schema theory explaining it [...] You would think that because all of us have our own individual experiences throughout our lives that we'd all have these idiosyncratic differences in our memories […] But surprisingly, we find that we tend to remember the same faces and pictures as each other. This consistency in our memories is really powerful, because this means that I can know how memorable certain pictures are, I could quantify it. I could even manipulate the memorability of an image.
In fairness, memories are fragile; even very vivid memories tend not to be especially accurate. Once you’ve heard about the Mandela effect cornucopia, you’re contaminated. It’ll be difficult or impossible, after that, to be sure whether you really remember the cornucopia or whether it’s a kind of planted recollection. And it’s unnerving to realize how unreliable your internal world-narrative can be.
I can only weakly attempt tot explain the cornucopia thing. Most if not all of the “residue” of the type provided in that reddit post (and the other examples I’ve listed) are American in origin. In the States, we have this:
Cornucopias are everywhere around Thanksgiving, especially when you’re a child. They are second only to hand turkeys and pilgrims as the most common symbol of eating too much and arguing with your relatives. “Americans are primed to associate images of two-dimensional produce with a cornucopia; the Fruit of the Loom logo is an image of two-dimensional produce; they are unconsciously conflating the underwear logo with Thanksgiving decorations.” This explanation relies on the assumption that most cornucopia-rememberers are American, for which I do not have a lot of evidence. Still, it has to be better than Marvel stuff, right?
Probably this is what happened with the foundational Mandela effect. Nelson Mandela did not die in prison, but anti-apartheid activisit Steve Biko famously did. So did some 67 other activists, not counting those like Solomon Mahlangu who were outight executed. Probably Broome is misremembering the deaths of one of these people.
Dang. I remember the cornucopia
Berenstein/Berenstain 's the one that's always gotten me