FANTASIA AND THE MANDELA EFFECT? RECALLING A PERPLEXING MOVIE MYSTERY FROM MY CHILDHOOD

 

The first of two publicity posters for Fantasia that remind me of the mystifying enie-containing example that I am certain I saw back in the late 1960s (© Walt Disney Productions/RKO Radio Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

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.

 

My two official Walt Disney figurines of Hyacinth the Hippo, one of the incongruous ballet dancers featured in the hilarious Dance of the Hours segment (which also happens to be my favourite segment) from Fantasia; the left-hand figurine actually pirouettes when you wind her up! (figurines © Walt Disney Studios / photo (© Dr Karl Shuker)

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!

 

The blue genie from Disney's 1992 animated movie Aladdin (© John Musker/Ron Clements/Walt Disney Feature Animation/Buena Vista Pictures Distribition – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

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.

 

The second of two publicity posters for Fantasia that remind me of the mystifying enie-containing example that I am certain I saw back in the late 1960s (© Walt Disney Productions/RKO Radio Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

ALADDIN AND THE DEATH LAMP

 

Publicity poster for Aladdin and the Death Lamp (© Mario Azzopardi/Chesler-Perlmutter Productions/Vesuvius Productions/Sony Pictures Television/SyFy Channel – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

What sound does a genie playing the drums make? An awful djinn! Moving swiftly on(!), my film watch on 27 September 2022 was the 2012 SyFy fantasy/horror movie Aladdin and the Death Lamp.

Directed by Mario Azzopardi, and released as a TV movie in 2012 by SyFy Channel, Aladdin and the Death Lamp provides the viewer with an action-packed storyline, albeit one that plays very fast and loose with the familiar 1001 Nights version that we all know so well today.

Basically, it's all about the desperate search by Aladdin (played by martial arts practitioner Darren Shahlavi) and three companions (one of whom, the wise village elder/magician Khalil, is played by Eugene Clark) for a magical ring that will prevent all the djinns currently imprisoned in Hell to be released.

However, this is something that Aladdin's deadly rival, an avaricious, unscrupulous market trader named Sharira (George Ghali), is hell-bent (so to speak!) in achieving, being under the dangerous delusion that he could actually bend these immensely-powerful supernatural beings to his puny will once he'd released them. Yeah, right! (For a much more detailed coverage of the lengthy, convoluted plot, please click here.)

What is so memorable about this movie, at least for me, is that instead of including the nowadays-standardised friendly, slapstick, whimsical Robin Williamsian genie, it features a ferocious demonic djinn of the kind present in traditional Arabian lore – one that cunningly twists its bestowing of the wishes demanded of it by its lamp's owner into nightmarish responses that bring the wisher terror and death instead of joy and fulfillment.

Inevitably, therefore, a fair amount of blood/gore scenes are present too, albeit brief in tenure, making this movie by far the darkest treatment of the Aladdin saga that I have viewed. Despite its limited budget, moreover, its CGI djinn is impressively crafted as a kind of caliginous reptilian smoke entity, which works very effectively, but its CGI tiger (into which the djinn briefly transforms in order to kill evil market trader Sharira's luckless servant and absorb his soul) rather less so.

Nonetheless, Aladdin and the Death Lamp is a bold and largely successful attempt to take the Aladdin storyline down what for it is the previously-untravelled path of a horror movie, yet which is actually closer atmospherically to the original tale than are any of the other major cinematic Aladdin versions out there. Well worth a watch!

And if you'd like to pay a brief visit to the djinn-haunted realm of Aladdin and the Death Lamp, be sure to click here to view on YouTube the dramatic scene marking the djinn's ominous first appearance when Aladdin rubs its lamp and thereby inadvertently releases it.

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.

 

KAZAAM - AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF SHAZAAM, THE MISSING MOVIE

Full cover of my official VHS videocassette of Kazaam (© Paul Michael Glaser/Touchstone Pictures/Interscope Communications/PolyGram Filmed Entertainment/Buena Vista Pictures Distribution – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

My frequent visits lately to my mini-vault of little-known/forgotten 1980s/1990s fantasy movies in VHS videocassette format saw me on 1 May 2020 watching Kazaam.

Directed, co-produced, and written by none other than Paul Michael Glaser (Dave Starsky in TV's popular cop show Starsky and Hutch), and released in 1996 by Buena Vista Pictures, a distribution company within Walt Disney Studios, this fantasy/comedy movie stars NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal, but not as a basketball player. Instead, he is a 5,000-year-old genie named Kazaam who is accidentally released from his boombox (his original bottle broke so he took up residence inside a discarded boombox, as genies do...) by Max, a 12-year-old Brooklyn boy (played by Francis Capra, who went on to have a long, continuing career in films and TV).

Not surprisingly, Max is somewhat startled to discover that Kazaam will now grant him any three wishes that he wants, as long as they do not involve making anyone fall in love with him or bringing anyone back from the dead. Incidentally, I recall Robin Williams's genie issuing the same conditions to Disney's Aladdin some years later – they clearly belong to the same trade union...

Lots of slapstick madcap rap and claptrap ensue (not really claptrap, but it scanned nicely with slapstick madcap rap...), in which Kazaam stakes out a successful sideline as a club rapper, while being trailed by a crook named Malik who realizes that Kazaam is a genie. Consequently, Malik draws up a dastardly plan to ensnare Kazaam, in order to make the genie grant him three wishes, but Malik's nefarious scheme does not turn out the way that he had anticipated, that's for sure! All very zany, not to be taken even remotely seriously, and, being Shaquille O'Neal, Kazaam manages to slam dunk Malik with consummate ease. Not that I would expect anything less, even if others may have forgiven him had he been a little out of practice after 5,000 years.

As for Kazaam's musical abilities, conversely: let's just put it this way, a genie that tries his hand at rapping is likely to make an awful djinn... (sorry, couldn't resist!!).

Click here and here to see a couple of hilarious trailers showcasing Kazaam's less than predictable powers in this unequivocally 1990s fun film. Sadly, however, despite its nostalgic charm and its very likeable, still-popular star, Kazaam has not stood the test of time. Indeed, it may well have been long forgotten by now, were it not for a truly extraordinary, tenacious mystery intimately associated with this particular movie.

For Kazaam is the film that apparently inspired an infamous example of the Mandela Effect, i.e. a phenomenon whereby people claim to have seen something that not only can no longer be found but in reality seemingly never existed to begin with. In this instance, the claim concerns a supposed early 1990s movie available in videocassette format and entitled Shazaam, starring American comedian/actor Sinbad as the eponymous genie who grants wishes to two young children. Numerous people over the years have vehemently claimed to have seen this mysterious movie, even to have rented it from video shops, and can describe in detail various scenes from it – scenes that, incidentally, do not correspond with any that are contained in Kazaam.

Yet no-one has ever produced a copy of Shazaam for official public scrutiny, and some bewildered movie buffs have even suggested that its ostensible disappearance from our world might actually be evidence for the existence of parallel universes! They speculate that people who claim to have viewed Shazaam may have unknowingly crossed over from a parallel universe in which this movie really does exist into our universe in which it does not exist. Sceptics, conversely, opine rather more conservatively that this entire cinematic conundrum stems from nothing more mystifying than false memories of the similarly-titled and themed Kazaam. Click here and here for a couple of detailed articles concerning this fascinating, ongoing controversy from the film world. But if by any chance you do happen to own a copy of Shazaam, please let me review it!

And to view a complete 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!