Brian Resnick in Vox:
Last week, New Statesman published a feature about a community of Reddit users who are fans of a movie from the 1990s starring the comedian Sinbad. The movie is called Shazaam, and Sinbad plays a bumbling genie who adventures with two small kids.
The piece, however, is not about millennials’ unending enthusiasm for ’90s nostalgia. It’s much, much weirder: It turns out that the movie Shazaam never existed, and yet many of the people New Statesmen writer Amelia Tait spoke to could not be convinced otherwise.
Even Sinbad himself denies the movie exists.
The New Statesmen piece explores a fascinating question: How could so many people share the same false memory of the same fake movie?
First off: It’s not that these people are confusing Shazaam for Kazaam, the very real movie starring Shaquille O’Neal as a genie. They think the two movies were released around the same time (like the asteroid apocalypse movies Armageddon and Deep Impact, which both premiered in 1998).
More here.