“Mandela Effect Phenomenon”

Rating: 7/10

Director and Writer: Robert Kiviat

Style: Documentary

Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwjXuTs5Ycg

Review by Mike Szymanski

OK, this is going to blow your mind.

Remember spreading Jiffy Peanut Butter on your sandwich? Or your grandmother putting on Depends diapers?

How about the evil queen in Snow White saying, “Mirror Mirror on the wall”?

Or remember Forrest Gump saying “Life is like a box of chocolate” and Darth Vader saying “Luke, I am your father.”

Guess what?! None of that is true.

Jiffy Peanut Butter never existed. It’s Jiff, and always has been Jiff.

Never Depends, always Depend.

The quotes are “Magic Mirror on the wall” and “Life was like a box of chocolates” and “No, I am your father.”

Yeah, you’re disagreeing and already looking it up. Our collective memory has played tricks on us, and many of us remember things in different ways. Or did things change and we remember correctly?

Director and writer Robert Kiviat collected tons of examples in pop culture called the Mandela Effect. It’s coined that way because when people heard that the former president of South Africa passed away in 2013 of a respiratory infection, millions were sure that they remember Mandela had died in prison decades before and were baffled by the news.

Kiviat is known for doing mind-blowing documentaries you may have already squirmed over when you watch, such as “Aliens Autopsy: Fact of Fiction?” “Prophecies of the Millennium” and “Ghosts Caught on Tape: Fact or Fiction?”

But this one is his most disturbing! He collects these cultural touchstones that are universally remembered differently by the population.

Finish this song: “My baloney has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R, my baloney has a second name it’s M-”

It’s A, not E. It’s Oscar Mayer, not Meyer. I know, you’re saying that’s complete baloney because you remember it as Oscar Meyer hot dogs and baloney. Never was.

Unfortunately, only two main experts are used in this documentary, other than Kiviat himself. It would be great to have more experts talking about this weird phenom.

Journalist Mark Laflamme and researcher Jacob Israel, a podcaster who has studied these collective memory losses, are the talking-head experts. Also sprinkled in their interviews are quotes from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about different timelines and simulation worlds.

The phenomenon of mis-remembering common things is bothersome enough, but when the experts discuss how the world is re-setting or re-correcting itself, it sort of lost me. Like Neo in “The Matrix” or different timelines in time travel, these explanations seem to indicate slight changes in memories and how the reality changed.

Or is it a supernatural force editing our history? Some of their theories still have me scratching my head.

Tom Hanks misquotes himself in later spoofs of his Academy Award-winning performance as Forrest Gump and says “Life is a box of chocolates” even though in the movie he clearly says “Life was a box of chocolates.”

Actor James Earl Jones, who voices Darth Vader, also spoofs his most famous line as “Luke, I am your father” even though the line in the movie actually says “No, I am your father.” In references of his famous line like in “Two and a Half Men” Jones says the line as “Luke I am your father.”

Everyone seems to recall that Freddie Mercury caps off his iconic song by singing “We are the champions… of the world” at the end. Well, no, listen to it (not the live version, where he does sing that last line) but in the recording he ends with only “We are the champions.”

Excerpts from the Bible are used to explain this, and there is a lot brought up about the CERN large hadron collider causing these time adjustments and faulty memories.

In a personal confusion that has me baffled, I truly remember the scene in “Moonraker” where the evil silver-toothed Jaws smiles down at a girl named Dolly and she smiles back with braces on her teeth. Now, they’re saying that never happened! No version exists of that — anymore.

Rewinds of the movie now shows that the young girl doesn’t have braces, which makes no sense. And, the Moonraker actors recreated the scene years later for a commercial and the girl has braces on.

It’s “Sex and the City” not “Sex in the City” and it’s “Skechers” without a T in it, and “Froot Loops” no fruit.

People seem to recall tanks actually roll over the sole protestor standing in front of a tank at Tiananmen Square during civil protests, but that didn’t happen.

Sally Field (no s at the end of her name), when she won her second Oscar did NOT say “You like me, you really like me.” She instead said, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now you like me.”

It seems like Tom Hanks is involved in a lot of this Mandela Effect shenanigans. He delivers in “Apollo 13” the remembered line “Houston, we have a problem” when it actually is “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

And then, the opening song of “Mister Roger’s Neighborhood,” where Hanks played the lead character in a movie version has everyone recalling “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood” when actually it is “It’s a beautiful day in thisneighborhood.”

You may feel like you are in your own Twilight Zone. You’ve remembered things you were sure about but then it turns out you recalled it wrong.

Kevin Costner was haunted by a voice in “Field of Dreams” saying, “If you build it he will come” not “they.”

In “Jaws” it wasn’t “We’re going to need a bigger boat,” but “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”

Now, aren’t you confused?

“The Mandela Effect Phenomenon” is released July 9 on all digital platforms.