Recently I was listening to Pain Killer Already, or PKA, and they were talking about Mandela Effects. To me this has always been an interesting subject. Not because of the timeline shit. No. It’s because there are some that are real while not being real at the same time. What do I mean? Well, I’ll tell you the one I know for sure and how I found it out much later in life.
What is the Mandela Effect? It is the belief that something from your past has changed because you changed timelines. The reason it is named this is because many people thought Mandela died in prison. However, he never did. Instead a majority of people misremembered something. So, the conclusion is that we changed timelines. Not that something in pop culture said this and people replaced the truth with this. You can see this when people would parrot stuff said on Friends or Big Bang Theory, no matter how wrong it was. Sometimes we let TV and movies change how we see things. If it isn’t obvious I do not believe in the Mandela Effect. I find some of them interesting, especially the ones I fall victim to. However, I want to know why I fell victim to them. Why is it I remember this stuff wrong? Well, let’s go over that.
The one we will be talking about is Pikachu’s tail. This one is that in the original timeline Pikachu had a brown tip on his tail. However, Pikachu never has. People will say he’s never changed his design, but he has. Pikachu used to be fat and I miss fat Pikachu! You can look at the old Red and Blue to see this. They slimmed him up for the show. So, if his tail was never brown how is it real? Fakes. People don’t realise but back in the day fakes were way more common. You could go to Macy’s or Walmart and easily get a fake T-Shirt. In fact, Walmart even stocked fake DS and GBA games too. Which is a reason why they lost some promotion deals with Nintendo.
Back in the day stores didn’t really care. They just wanted a product to sell for as cheap as possible. They didn’t care where they got it because a lot of these companies had no grounds to fight. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company couldn’t take on big chains like Walmart, Target, and Macy’s. If either Nintendo or the Pokemon company stopped sending stuff to these stores then it would hurt them more than the stores. The stores would just keep getting fakes and continue to profit off of Nintendo and Pokemon Company’s IP. Walmart already had an issue of selling fake Pokemon cards, and will still stock some fake ones as of 2018. Walmart didn’t give a fuck. Walmart was going to make its money with or without Nintendo.
I remember having a Pikachu t-shirt with a number 00 on the back and Pikachu going over it like a jersey. This shirt had a bunch of lightning and a Pikachu with a brown tipped tail. My family would buy me the cheapest clothes they could. We were poor. My parents were doing their best. Without realising it they bought me a fake. My family would also buy stuff from a local flea market that is still notorious for selling fakes. It’s highly likely that is where we got the shirt. Then one Christmas I got a stuffed Pikachu. It didn’t have a brown tipped tail. This is why I’ve always had conflicting memories on this subject. Sometimes clothes and stickers I had would have the brown tipped tail. Then any official merch my family could get had a full yellow tail.
Now, how do I know for sure this is a thing? When I moved to China a few years ago one of my co-workers was obsessed with Pikachu. She had tons of Pikachu stuff at her desk. However, her cellphone case had a brown tipped tail. I thought this was so weird. Then I looked at some of her trinkets. Some had all yellow and some didn’t. This brought back the memories of my shirt and realising that my family tended to buy stuff from the previously mentioned flea market. Going around Beijing I would see some shops selling Pokemon gear. You could immediately tell the fakes because Pikachu had a brown tipped tail. This had lead me to realise that Pikachu has never officially had a brown tipped tail. However, people made fakes with it. Which people bought not realising they were buying fakes.
You may think, sure this answers the Pikachu one but what about the rest!? Well, how easy is it to buy a fake children’s book? How easy is it to buy a fake board game? What about fake products in general? We all make jokes about how someone didn’t buy a real brand and instead bought a fake. We know it happens and we know it happens a lot. In junior high kids used to say “You didn’t buy a Fubu you bought a Fudu!” Later in life it was, “That’s no Gucci bag. That’s a Guchi.” Stuff like that. We all know it. Kids stuff is very easy to make knock offs for and is a market full of fakes. How many of us have laughed at obviously fake Marvel toys and clothes? Of course the same thing happened to Pokemon. Of course the same thing happened to Monopoly.
Another story to add to this is we had a grocery store called Food Lion when I was growing up. Food Lion was closed for selling bad products, as in food that made you sick. Food Lion only sold food. You would go to buy Fruit by the Foot and it would be packaged like it was real Fruit by the Foot but instead had a different name, spelled wrong. I remember buying this too as a kid. It tasted fucking awful. However, at Walmart the Fruit by the Foot tasted great. I have no evidence this happened to Froot Loops. However, I can definitely see it because of how much fake food I’ve bought.
Lastly, Shazam is a super hero. Not a movie Sinbad starred in. Also, remember when everyone thought Sinbad was dead? Mandela Effects are bullshit but some of them are real because there were fakes. Which this makes debunking some of them hard. A lot of them are just people misremembering something and then a few of them turn out to be real because of fakes.