Actually the easiest explanation is that your memory is wrong. That’s the whole point of this research. You have a visual “picture” of that VHS case, and it said Berenstain on it. Then over the next 5, 10, 20, however-many-years later, you’ve absorbed from the culture that the spelling is Berenstein. When you now recall that memory, your brain actually changes the image you have so that you think it always said Berenstein.
I’m not saying this is for sure what happened to you, but this exact thing does happen to all of us every time we recall something. Human memory is garbage but we all think it’s nearly perfect.
Research like this is showing the effect is nearly immediate as well. You can modify a person’s memory through suggestion very soon after they learned something. If your memory is many years away from the event, well, the hard truth is that almost nothing you remember about the event is probably true. This is how we’re all wired, but most people refuse to accept it because we feel deeply that our memories are accurate.
I also wonder just how many of the Mandela Effect examples are a result not of our collective memories being wrong about particular cultural artifacts, but rather of the vastly smaller number of “Gatekeepers of History” on the internet themselves being incorrect. In the case of the issue I have with the Galaxy Quest f-bomb, I suspect that the people who are compiling the “authoritative” history of the circumstances around the film are simply bungling their research and passing off incomplete/incorrect narratives as truth. This process might explain a number of other examples of the ME, as well.
Example from the UK: many years ago, there was a kids’ cartoon called Captain Pugwash, about a bunch of incompetent but basically good-natured pirates.
Years later, discussion started on the interwebs: remember Captain Pugwash? Isn’t it funny that we never realised the characters’ names were dirty jokes? Master Bates, Seaman Staines, Roger the cabin boy (“roger” = “have sex with”, in somewhat antiquated British slang).
Except … that’s not what the characters were called, according to the creators. It was Master Mates, and Tom the cabin boy. I think they even successfully sued a newspaper that repeated the story.
Except it’s not. We still have the tape and the box at home, and it’s got my address on a label stuck on top of it so I’m not posting it, but it’s clear what it says.
And I’d wager in some of these cases people are seeing bootleg / copied products. Not all of them, mind you, but in some. I absolutely don’t trust my memory to be accurate. Not even half way. But I do know what the box says because mom doesn’t throw out anything.
Imagine you’re the artist, and you’re spending days on this album cover, sketching, trying out different ideas, spending some number of hours getting that curved flute to look just right. And you think to yourself, “yea, this scans, everyone’s going to get that I’m referencing that logo which is just an arrangement of assorted fruit and nothing else.”
I’d done some digging on the original Mandela Effect. I have some ties to Mandela not worth explaining but for those reasons it didn’t happen to me - I never got an impression he had died earlier; however, I did remember incidents and headlines that could lead a casual / headline only reader to have filed this in their mind as “nelson mandela is dead”:
Winnie Mandela was completely insane. They were divorced in 1996. She was subsequently embroiled in all kinds of problems. He was not at her side for any of the trouble she’d been in from 1996-2013.
Mandela himself became a sort of shell of his former self as the ANC used him, making him a fundraising figurehead. So possibly he had become a “there but not there” kind of person in old age.
There were disputes over Nelson Mandel’s estate many years before he passed away. Again, he wasn’t interviewed or quoted in articles to do with this. Headlines and even a quick read about this could easily lead one to believe that he had already died.
Well, can’t you put some masking tape on it? I’m not calling you a liar, I just think maybe if we can get that picture up, an interdimensional rift will open and we can all move onto a timeline that makes sense!
There are so many logos and other designs that are variations of the “bunch of fruit” theme. Often those are used in contexts where print quality can be crap: boxes and crates of fruit, cheap bags for fruit, that kind of thing. That’s where a similar style with limited, clearly distinct solid colors and prominent black outlines makes sense. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if there were one or more logos for other things out there that were close enough overall, except for an added cornucopia.
And here are search results for cornucopia, a ubiquitous image in the culture that is remarkably consistent, and very similar to the Fruit of the Loom logo. So it’s not surprising people would mentally insert a cornucopia into the logo image.
I am aware of the concept of gaslighting. My question, which I intended to imply in my comment, was what anyone has to gain by promoting the idea that a company’s logo was different in the past. Especially when art archives exist.
I think the goal of that would be gaslighting… not to speak for @the_borderer…
Most people aren’t willing to look past the first page of google search, much less consult an archive. They’ll just go to wikipedia and assume it’s correct (despite the very real problems with wikipedia…).
