Winston wrote: ↑January 14th, 2024, 2:45 am
@MrMan
That's a good analysis. What you said would make sense within the bookends, assuming the Mandela Effect was impossible. It's the only logical explanation I guess, within the bookends of reality that is. However, keep in mind that no one has ever heard of American Family. But everyone has heard of PCH. Did you see those 9 min of residuals above, where everyone connected Ed McMahon to PCH? There were a lot of clips. Everyone can't be that wrong. It's too unlikely.
Also check out this clip of Johnny Carson handing David Letterman a million dollar check. As he's doing so, he says that he's doing it on behalf of Ed McMahon, who couldn't make it to the show. Then when he turns the big check toward the camera, you can clearly see "Publisher's Clearing House" on it! That's a huge residual! Keep in mind that Johnny Carson knew Ed McMahon and they were friends, so it's unlikely that he would get him mixed up with PCH if he only worked for American Family. Think about it.
Sure they can be wrong. Who knows all the deals celebrities have on the side?
The thing is, when I read your post, I thought that can't be right. Ed McMahon was the Publisher's Clearing House guy. But then I saw the American Family Publisher commercial and I remembered the details. (Btw I read some psychological research that women tend to remember tiny details and men do not until they are prompted, unless its giving directions of how to go there. There is an exception for that. Women tend to remember clothing also.)
When my memory was triggered, I remember Ed McMahon actually being with AFP, and I remembered one of the commercials, and him saying 'American Family Publishers.' If you will notice, the first commercial does not emphasize the brand name. PCH already had people filling out envelopes and buying magazines to win the prize so they didn't have to put dozens of stamps all over to place to enter the sweepstakes. The 1984 commercial says something like 'the first ten million dollar prize.' The casual viewer just assumes with PCH. Why? Because we don't care that much about it. PCH was famous for delivering big checks to people's doors, and now we thought Ed McMahon was doing it. In the 1985 commercial, Ed emphasizes the APH brand. My guess is they intentionally wanted to be mistaken for PCH and wanted people looking for Ed McMahon's face.
What writer for comedy is going to check whether Ed McMahon was working for another company or not? Like the general populace, they had gotten the impression from the pre-1985 commercials that Ed McMahon was giving away checks for that big company that gives away the multi-million dollar prizes.
And yes he went door to door. The PCH guy was mistaken when he said that ed McMahon did not. I suppose he could have lied, but he probably just didn't know. And Ed McMahon may have just done that for photo ops, but one year he promised to be the guy. If they only gave out two prizes, one 10 million, and the other for 1 million, then Ed McMahon delivering checks would not have been a big deal.
It's also a brilliant marketing strategy-- let people think you are that other company, sell your stuff, and don't emphasize your brand name until you get market share. Also, getting a well-known celebrity who probably doesn't have much to do (laugh at Johnny's jokes, and be the straight man for a gag or two when Carson does something funny twice a year-- seems like he didn't do bits much anymore as it got into the 1980's) to be your spokesman, offering him a cut, and use his celebrity power to launch a money-making campaign. It reminds me of a sales office I worked for back when I was in college where they once sold stuff and the buyers thought they were with another company.
Also, the PCH envelope was yellow/manila and had a lot of stamps in it, and the AFP envelope was white and had Ed McMahon's face. I remember each of those envelopes in real life. Did you ever actually see or hold the envelopes?
The white envelope was in the other clip mentioned previously. This one shows the PCH envelope.
At this time, they were doing $10 million, too.
Again, after seeing the commercial, I remember it, and I remember Ed McMahon saying American Family Publishers.
Carson gives a pretend check to Letterman, from a different company from what his co-host gave away. PCH was more famous and associated more in people's minds than AFP. Would Carson have even have paid attention to what Ed McMahon did? Comedians are concerned with whether their bits get laughs or applause, not with accuracy. There was also no world wide web to check facts back then.
Also check out the comments below the video. Everyone swears that they saw Ed McMahon giving out checks to people's homes for 1 million dollars. They remember it because it was on TV all the time in the early 80s and got very annoying after a while. That's why people remember it, because it was on TV too often and annoyed the heck out of people. Don't you remember it too? Were you in the US in the 80s?
I was in the US. I went to high school in the late 1980's. I would guess the Ed McMahon commercials were in the late 1980's. There was one from 1985. That could have been the first one with him in it, but it was for a competitor. He did give out checks for American Family Publishers.
I definitely remember seeing it too. People also said they got junk mail from PCH with Ed McMahon's photo on it saying that if they returned the winning number, they could win 10 million dollars. I remember that too. Do you? Think for a while and see if you can remember it too.
Look at the videos and look at the two envelopes. I don't know if I ever did the AFP sweepstakes entry. I did the PCH. I remember the yellow envelope. I remember the white Ed McMahon envelope from the late 1980s. We probably got both and entered both.
Like you said, you found the commercials annoying. You probably tried to zone out and ignore the commercial, not remember the details. There is too much important stuff in life to remember. The details of a sweepstakes are important to those magazine company people, but not to an elementary school student or a teenager. Lots and lots of people share misconceptions and have vague memories of details that were unimportant to us, and that's normal. And we can also not pay attention to odd spellings and if we guess the spelling, our minds filled in extra letters to conform with patterns in our mind. It's the same mechanism that stereotyping comes from-- our minds simplying huge amounts of information to make it possible to function normally.
Thousands of people sharing the same oversimplification and misrememberings is a simpler explanation, according to Occam's razor, than the Mandela Effect. But the ME explanation is set up to be unfalsifiable. Those who believe in it can just claim that in 'your reality' there were two sweepstakes and in mine there was only one.
In reality, TV mistates facts all the time, not just comedians making jokes and describing fictional situations as a part of a bit, but actual newscasters. You could could create all kinds of 'evidence' for the Mandela Effect.
I suspect, though, that in the future 'Mandela Effect' will be defined as a sociological and psychological phenomenon of large numbers of people remembering the same facts wrong.
I think mass media further enables this. Because one celebrity can mistate facts and millions watch it. Also, a lot of these so-called Mandella Effects are strange spellings that our minds, trained with standard spelling, would reinterpret to simplyfy information, or other mental simplifications like that. We have a lot of people with minds sociologically trained the same way (spelling) and our minds function similarly, making short-cuts since we are all human.
Also, I notice this Mandela Effect theory emerged some time into an era where Post Modernist philosophy has taken foot, a philosophical mindset which emphasizes people having different perspectives or even 'realities.' Under Modernism, rational thought was supposed to lead many individuals to the same conclusion. Post-modernism just aligns with and allows for an explanation like the Mandela Effect, along with ideas from comic books and science fiction about mutli-verses, with even some physicists embracing the possibility, with no scientific evidence at all, possibly as an excuse to mathematically dismiss an argument for intelligent design of the universe.
