Honest Lies
How I learned that no one knows anything.
The study of memory is a fascinating scientific topic with a long rich history, full of coked-out psychologists and misguided lobotomies, that I'm not going to explore here. Instead, I'm going to cherry-pick one of my favourite modern group psychological phenomena.
The Mandela Effect
A weirdly large, totally unrelated group of people from all over the world realized in 2013, when the former South African President Nelson Mandela died, that they had all misremembered him dying in prison in the 80s.
This phenomenon was investigated by psychologists, professional and armchair alike, who figured out exactly how crappy everyone's memory is.
I don't know anything
The Mandela Effect can be applied to any widely held belief about an event, cartoon, logo, character, whatever, that is actually untrue. I found that when I looked into different examples, my own memory (and the memories of folks I tested) would definitively tell me that it was spelled Looney Toons, and not Looney Tunes. Looney Tunes doesn't even make sense, because there's not a lot of musical performances in the series, but that's what it is.
I could almost see books that I'd held in my hands throughout elementary school detailing the adventures of The Berenstein Bears, who actually never existed. Instead, The Berenstain Bears are who I must've been adventuring with.
Forrest Gump is one of my favourite movies, but I only recently realized that he never says "Life is like a box of chocolates," instead opting for, "Life was like a box of chocolates."
Darth Vader never says, "Luke, I am your father"
The Queen in Snow White never says "Mirror, mirror on the wall."
Hannibal Lector never says "Hello, Clarice."
I can't even eat my breakfast in peace, because The Raisin Bran mascot never wore sunglasses. I can't clean my house because I don't know if it's Febreeze or Febreze.
Society has some 'splaining to do (something Ricky never asked of Lucy) as to how these things happen.
What does it mean?
The first thing you're going to find, when you search for The Mandela Effect, is a group of people that believe their Mandela'd up memories are representative of reality, and that we're just noticing ourselves jumping between alternate universes.
I think these large-scale false memories are just a creative way to bring up something psychologists have been telling us about for decades, and its implications on the accuracy of eye-witness testimony. Memories are not to be trusted, yet we rely on them for all sorts of legal proceedings, that carry an enormous amount of consequence for the parties involved. Even large-scale heavily-examined crimes with video footage in wide circulation are subject to this phenomenon (how many people were in JFK's car? Four? Six?).
It's fun to think about while relaxing with a Coca-Cola and KitKat bar, wondering if their logos are supposed to have a hyphen in them or not.
In conclusion, no one knows anything.