Hacker Cinema
Kazaam
1996 · Film · 94 min
Directed by Paul Michael Glaser
When Max fools a gang of local toughs, he finds himself in big trouble. Fleeing from the thugs, Max runs into an old warehouse and bumps into a boom box. By doing that, he manages to release Kazaam, a genie who has been held captive for thousands of years.
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11 comments on Hacker News
Shaq played a genie in the movie Kazaam :D
This gets me thinking of a recent example I was going "down the rabbit hole" reading about, which is the supposed existence and subsequent coverup of a mid-90's movie starring Sinbad and a kid, possibly Jonathan Brandis.
Long story short, the comedian Sinbad hosted a Sinbad the Sailor movie (or movies) on some cable channel, and for the skit he was dressed in clothes similar to those a stereotypical genie might wear. IIRC there was one segment where a kid came on board his ship, and very well could have been Jonathan Brandis trying to cross-promote a show he was also on.
But "the internet" took this memory, combined with a vague similarity to the old Shazzan cartoon, and a vaguer similarity of that to the movie Kazaam, and decided there was a movie called "Shazam" starring Sinbad which explained everyone's vague memory of these sketches. I myself had this vague memory, so at first I found the idea of such a movie very plausible. Searching for evidence, however, turns up nothing, and then you find two prevailing schools of thought: One, that there was a movie, but it was so bad it tanked Sinbad's career, and because of that and/or Jonathan Brandis's death was completely removed from circulation and scrubbed from internet references. Or two, that the movie was real and pretty good, but only existed in a parallel universe, and some of us mysteriously got our consciousness transplanted from bodies in that universe to identical ones in this universe which has merely a few banal differences like that.
The second is not too unlike a lot of internet philosophy discussions, but the first is a good example of a conspiracy theory. The idea of a movie being so bad it's scrapped and all copies destroyed isn't too far fetched, so it takes a little bit of research to uncover a complete lack of any corroborating evidence, and the denial of those involved, to see that the theory falls apart.
When facing doubts about your own memory and experience, it can be tempting to accept an explanation that a prominent group in the community is giving you rather than doing your own research and forming your own opinions. I would not be surprised if it were a naturally evolved mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaam
You mean this movie?
Well it's important to know what was actually said and who said it. If, by and large, journalists did not actually advocate for displaced workers to code their way out of unemployment, then harassing them with #learntocode is unjustified.
I've wasted the entire morning looking for sources of this by now. Like you, I sort of remembered hearing that message over the years. But now that I'm looking, I'm not actually finding many examples where news outlets are seriously suggesting this.
Have you ever thought you knew something, but end up misremembering it? There are lots of people who swear they remember a movie called Shazzam staring Sinbad as a genie, but there is no such movie. There was a movie called Kazaam staring Shaquille O'Neal, and Sinbad once dressed up in similar garb when hosting a movie showing. But people conflated the two things.
I think that's whats going on. And if so, we should not be harassing journalists who had nothing to do with this.
I think I have a valid argument for this theory besides people mistaking this with Shaquille O'Neal's 'Kazaam'. In an episode of Nickelodeon's 'All That', Sinbad once played the father of Ishboo (played by Kenan Thompson) 'Sinboo'. And I recall his clothing being very similar to that of a Genie. Can enough people be mistakenly conflating their childhood memories of Sinboo and Kazaam and creating 'Shazaam'..?
It's very strange how memory works.
The first few paragraphs I thought - "yes, I remember this". But once I got farther into it, I realized it was definitely Shaq's Kazaam that I was misremembering.
However--I would never have thought it was Sinbad at all, if the article had not suggested it first.
I'm not sure if that says more about the nature of memory, or the power of suggestion.
Perhaps fading memory combined with strong and 'seemingly accurate' suggestion is quite a powerful thing. There are tons of examples of this.
For example, was that old Tom Cruise movie called "Interview with A Vampire" or "Interview with THE Vampire"? Like 'Shazaam', many people say that at some point the movie title changed. But there's no evidence of that at all.
Perhaps my all time favorite story about the strangeness of memory is more relevant than ever. Borges' story, "Shakespeare's Memory". Read aloud for the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-podcast-hisham-matar-reads-jorge-luis-borges
Basically, a writer is magically given Shakespeare's memories. "But he soon discovers that memory is a slippery thing, 'not a summation, it is a chaos of vague possibilities.'"
The greatest labyrinth of all might just be the mind.
Probably. But some people are acknowledging both films, and remembering that when they saw the Kazaam publicity that it looked like a crappy rip off of Shazaam.
I have no truck at all with this being mystical or a conspiracy, but I'm enjoying the idea of it.
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure why people make such a big deal out of it, muchless why it's a front page article here. When I read the first few lines of the article I figured it was referring to the movie with Shaq, then realized I remembered the name wrong when I saw the image for "Kazaam". It wasn't exactly earth shattering that I misremembered something that was a minor part of my childhood.
Same with the Berenstain Bear books - I'm pretty sure I remembered it as Berenstein as well, but I guess I was wrong, or just mispronounced it as a kid and it stuck. While I remember having read all the books multiple times, it's not like they were that important.
The impact that this has and the amount of discussion it generates is very confusing to me. If it's all in good fun and jest, then no worries I suppose, but if misremembering or simply making a mistake with facts is this mind blowing to people, I'm really curious how they handle more important incorrect facts they hold dearly. Maybe it's a function of my education hammering home the fact that what I knew yesterday might not be true to day (science and technology is like this), but making a mistake like this isn't that earth shattering to me. There's a lot of data out there to remember and of varying priority - a kids movie about a genie and the name of a book I read when I was 4 isn't quite that important to me now as it was when I was 4.
I'm sure most of this is just people having fun with a really widely held mis-memory, but I really hope people don't take it too seriously.
edit: changed opening to include my confusion why this hit front page.
Went through the article thinking "god, I do remember this movie" until I got to the Kazaam part. Kazaam fits fine into my vague memory.
It was always the Berenstein bears though, get out of my universe!
Edit - If anyone wants a good sci-fi novel, the revelation space series touches on the mandela effect a bit.
While reading the article I kept thinking, yea I remember this movie, I can picture the box art. Then it reveals the Kazaam box art and I thought, oh no it's Kazaam I'm thinking of.
The movie is kazaam