Just for a change, today's Shuker In MovieLand is not a movie (or TV show) review, but is instead a recollection of a movie mystery that has persistently perplexed me ever since I experienced it back in childhood during the late 1960s. So I've decided to document it here, in case any of my blog's readers can assist me in finally solving it.
Almost exactly five years ago to the day, on 22 November 2019, I experienced a potential Mandela Effect moment (click here for another, very famous/infamous movie-related example (Kazaam) featuring this mysterious phenomenon – and also featuring a genie!!) – i.e. discovering that I was totally unable to locate something that until now I had always been absolutely certain had definitely existed.
It concerns Walt Disney's 1940 movie masterpiece Fantasia, a multi-directorial fusion of classical music and classic animation.
Back in the late 1960s, when I was 8 or 9 years old, Fantasia was shown in my little English home town's exceedingly small one-screen cinema, but for one day only, and which, to my great frustration, just so happened to be a school day. Happily, however, knowing how much I (as a massive Disney animation fan) had always wanted to see this film and that this might well be my only chance to do so for some years (back in those far-distant pre-video/DVD/internet times, Disney movies were only viewable every so many years when they were periodically re-released by Disney to cinemas), Mom made sure that we went to see it that evening, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially as I'd read so much about it down through the years as a child.
All of this therefore made one aspect particularly puzzling for me. The cinema in question (now long gone) had a very large vertical display window looking out onto the street in which a publicity poster would always be placed in order to advertise to passers-by the movie being shown at that particular time. I can still well remember the official Disney-supplied publicity poster for Fantasia that had been placed there on that single day when this movie was being shown at this cinema.
It consisted of a dark background (a deep midnight blue, as I recall) edged by a collection of characters from this movie's several individual segments, including Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, various nature entities from The Nutcracker, some mythological creatures from Pastoral, assorted balletic animals from Dance of the Hours...and (about halfway down the poster's right-hand edge) a blue genie!
Needless to say, as a well-informed Disney fan I knew full well that no genie, blue or otherwise, featured anywhere in Fantasia, a fact amply reinforced by the unequivocal non-appearance of any such entity in this movie's screening that I watched at cinema that evening, so its inclusion in the poster always perplexed me – and even more so when, over 20 years later, I viewed the 1992 animated Disney movie Aladdin and realised to my great surprise that the Robin-Williams-voiced blue genie featuring in it bore more than a passing resemblance to that out-of-place version I'd always remembered so clearly from that late-1960s Fantasia cinema poster!
And so it was that on 22 November 2019, when for some unknown reason the memory of this curious movie poster from my young days long ago popped into my head once again, I decided to track it down online, as I would like to have a picture of it on file, if only as a fondly-recalled memento of my childhood. But could I find it? Not a chance!
I did find two different Fantasia posters that both recalled to various extents the one that I had seen back in the 196os – one of them opens this current blog post of mine, and the other one closes it – except of course that neither of them contains the elusive blue genie.
So then, when viewing this poster on that fateful evening in the late 1960s when I watched the movie at the cinema, did I momentarily enter a parallel dimension in which such a poster truly existed? This is the dramatic explanation that the Mandela Effect proposes in cases like this.
The less radical alternative explanation is that I only thought I'd seen a genie on that poster. The problem with this notion, however, is that as a keen birdwatcher from the earliest of ages, my powers of accurate observation were already well-trained by then, so I would not have mistaken some other character on that poster for a genie, especially as I already knew all of them, being very familiar with this film from reading so much about it beforehand, as already noted here. Moreover, there is no other character in Fantasia that looks anything remotely like a genie anyway.
Consequently, my mystery of the seemingly non-existent yet tenaciously-remembered Fantasia genie remains unresolved. So, does anyone else who was a child of the 1960s recall seeing a genie-containing Fantasia poster? Or has anyone ever encountered a picture of such a poster online? If so, I'd love to see your comments below!
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
