Company Logos, Mascots, and the Mandela Effect

Company Logos, Mascots, and the Mandela Effect
Brent Swancer 
March 6, 2019

How well do you really know the world you see? Is reality as you think it to be, or is there something a bit off to what you see when you look around you? For many people there have been odd anomalies of things appearing different than they remember, some deep sense that something is not right, and that details and facts they thought they knew before are just plain wrong. This can be extremely unnerving to those who experience it, and it is a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Mandela Effect, a sort of mass misremembering of facts that people thought they knew, but which have turned out to be wrong or completely nonexistent. It extends to all facets of the world from movies, to history, to even geography, and here we will take a look at logos and mascots for companies that seem to be shockingly out of place and alien-looking to those who remember differently.

One example of the Mandela Effect materializing in company brands and logos is spellings or punctuation that seem very off, bizarre, or just downright wrong for those who remember them much differently than they are. This can be seen in a wide range of products across the board. A popular one is the beloved children’s cereal Froot Loops. What, do you think I misspelled that? That’s the point. What many, many people remember as being spelled “Fruit Loops” has never been spelled that way, but rather with “Froot.” It is especially jarring as it doesn’t even seem to make sense, as it is fruit flavored cereal so should be “fruit,” right? Wrong, apparently. At least in this reality.

Also a very out of place and off spelling for many people is that of the logo for the popular cartoons “Looney Tunes,” which a lot of people remember as “Looney Toons.” Again, this seems to make more sense because they are cartoons. What are Looney “Tunes” anyway? Why would it be spelled that way? The same can be said about the air freshener brand “Febreze,” which many will insist should be spelled “Febreeze,” which makes more sense for an air freshening product but is wrong, and it has never been spelled that way. The correction fluid “White-Out” is also not spelled that way, as many believe it should be, but is rather “Wite- Out,” which looks very out of place for these individuals.


The list is long with this one. Many of you may own a pair of the popular shoe brand that you may remember as Sketchers, but are you sure that is how it is spelled? In reality it is “Skechers,” with no “t.” Go ahead and check the label, I’ll wait. Speaking of shoes, there seems to be a large number of people who clearly and unmistakably remember the brand Adidas being spelled with two “d”s to spell “Addidas,” and it can be quite a jolt to those who have this particular memory discrepancy, as one Reddit commenter says on a Mandela Effect forum:

Hi I am from Mexico, it is very interesting, never commented before on this forum because I do not share most things you claim to have. But now I see this publication I am surprised because not long ago I had a discussion with my brother about this brand name. The time I saw it was called adidas gave me shaking chills and met the mandela effect. For me it has always been “addidas” and it’s frustrating being the only one who remembers it well and nobody believes you.

Food and drink brands have a lot of this going on. Do you remember the popular brand Oscar Meyer? You can probably even sing the catchy jingle in your head right now, which even spells the name out, “my baloney has a last name it’s M-E-Y-E-R.” But no, it is actually spelled “Oscar Mayer,” with an “a,” a small but very irritating difference for those who remember it differently and have that wrong song stuck in their heads right now. Instead of baloney, you might be in the mood for chicken, and go down to the chicken restaurant chain that you remember as “Chic-Fil-A,” only to find that it is now spelled “Chick-Fil-A.” How about a burger at MacDonald’s? Although you’ll find that it is actually spelled “McDonald’s,” as it always has been. Or maybe you’ll stay in and have a good old fashioned bowl of Cup O’ Noodles, only that’s not what they are called at all is it? Look at the package and they are now just spelled Cup Noodles. Make a sandwich instead? Maybe a peanut butter sandwich with “Jiffy” peanut butter? Too bad there is no Jiffy peanut butter, only “Jif.”

The bottom one is correct
For desert you might want some candy such as, they are called “Pixie Stix” right? No, I’m afraid not, they are “Pixy Sticks.” Want a Kit-Kat? Only there is no hyphen there where a lot of people remember there being one before, and it is now KitKat. Some cereal then? How about some Rice Krispies, not “Rice Krispy” as you may remember? After all of this spelling bizarreness you may just want to sit back and have a drink, and reach for the trusty bottle of Johnny Walker whiskey. Too bad “Johnny Walker” does not exist and never has, but you can have a bottle of “Johnnie Walker,” which is its actual spelling and always has been. OK, let’s lay off the alcohol and just have a Coke Zero, but that doesn’t exist either, as it is and always has been “Coca-Cola Zero.” It’s enough to make want to get out of here and take a vacation to relax your addled mind, just don’t try to take “Alaskan Airlines,” because it doesn’t exist, except as “Alaska Airlines.”

No hyphen
It seems odd that so many people can be so surprised by these spellings being different than what they are sure they remember for popular brands they see all of the time, but there are whole forums of people baffled by this, and it is a recurring phenomenon across a wide range of people from all walks of life. Adding to the weirdness are those company logos that are spelled right, but which look very strange and awkward when looked at now. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the logo for the car manufacturer Ford, which looks incredibly weird and much different than it does in the memory of a very large number of people. The strange detail lies in the little squiggle on the “F,” which looks completely out of place and jarring to these people, although that has been the logo since 1914.

The real logo as it exists is the bottom one
Car companies seem to get this a lot, because there is also the logo for the manufacturer Volkswagen, (not Volkswagon, sorry), which looks very strange with its V and W separated by a line, a detail that is really grating for people who remember it differently and look at it now. The company Volvo also has a logo that looks very anomalous to people who don’t remember it ever having that arrow sticking out of the side of it.

The one on the left is the real logo
The Japanese car maker Mazda also has a logo with its own oddity, as many people remember the “Z” as being solid, not with the separation the logo displays. This one is perplexing in that a lot of the people who have noticed this discrepancy claim it is a recent change, with one Reddit commenter saying:

So apparently the MAZDA logo’s Z has always been separated and not solid. Unbelivable, I swear since I discovered the Mandela Effect I made it an effort to keep track of logos especially car logos. My family had a MAZDA for MANY years and it never looked like that. This must have been recent because I do not recall this being an ME when I discovered the Mandela Effect. I even looked at MAZDA a few times recently and thinking “Ok, the MAZDA logo is still the same.” But now the Z is not solid anymore. Also I wonder why are car logos the most targeted for the Mandela Effect?

It’s not only car logos, though. Another logo that most people must surely feel they are familiar with is the one for the world renowned drink Coca Cola, only for a lot of people there is a troubling detail there now, in that there is a hyphen between the words Coca-Cola that they are sure was either never there before or in a different place. Even odder still are those who insist it should be spelled “Coke-Cola.” The logo for the fast food chain “Subway” is equally confounding for Mandela Effect sufferers, as a large portion of people don’t remember that arrow coming out of the bottom of the “S.” Two that have recently been discussed a lot on Mandela Effect forums are the logos for the store Target and the office supply chain Staples. Many people envision the Target logo as having more rings than it actually does, insisting that it looks decidedly strange the way it is.

Volvo- the one on the top is correct. Coca-Cola- the one on the bottom is the right one
For Staples, a persistent memory is that the “L” has always been just a normal “L,” but recently a number of vocal people have found it shocking that the L actually is stylized to look like a bent open paper clip. It is enough to seriously unsettle some people who are sure it was not like that before, and one commenter on Reddit says:

I drove by Staples today and noticed the paperclip on the sign and made a mental note of it. I’ve been doing this for the last few months so that I can catch reality alterations quickly when they happen. This afternoon it was the paperclip. After reading this thread – I got in my car and drove back to the Staples and it has now altered here. So this just happened within the last few hours. After you’ve been researching this as long as I have you begin to see the pattern. This is a fake artificial reality and we’re getting the hell out of here.

The real logo is the one on the bottom
And now we come to yet another Mandela Effect oddity of the corporate world, and that is mind-boggling changes that seem to have happened to well-known, often beloved company mascots. Let’s start with one of the biggest companies in the world, Disney. Everyone knows their most famous mascot and character, Mickey Mouse, right? Can you imagine right now what he looks like and what he’s wearing? Do you envision him with suspenders on, which many people do? Well, if so, you might be surprised to learn that he does not wear suspenders at all. This comes as quite a shock to people who claim that this was one of his most iconic features, but in reality never existed.

No suspenders
Also with Disney is the opening logo reveal for many of their animated movies, which features Tinkerbell. A lot of you reading this right now can probably picture that intro quite clearly. Tinkerbell flies across the screen and writes out the word “Disney” with her magic wand before finally dotting the “i.” It is an iconic intro that people love, but the problem is that it does not exist. Go back and watch all of those intros if you don’t believe it. Although there are a few versions of intros that do feature Tinkerbell, in not a single one of them does she ever write out the word “Disney” with her wand.
Other famous mascots have changes that are no less perplexing for the people who notice them. For instance, can you picture Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger with his Frosted Flakes? What color is his nose? It is black right? Because tigers have black noses? Actually, look now and you’ll find his nose is very noticeably blue.

The real Tony the Tiger is the one on the right
How about the Monopoly Man from the game Monopoly? Does he wear a monocle? The answer is, no he does not, and never has. The mascot for the Laughing Cow dairy company is a red cow that many people remember as having a gold ring through the nose, yet the character has no ring. Pokemon’s famous mascot Pikachu is also different than what most people think, as he does not have the black tip on his tail that many insist should be there.

The one on the right is the real Monopoly Man
These are all just a few of the many examples of these anomalies out there, which I think perhaps represent more well-known brands and characters, but there are countless others, and all of them lead us to the question of just what is going on here? Why are so many people so completely certain that they remember these things so differently from the way they really are? Making it even more unusual is that sometimes these people notice the changes out of the blue, as if they have suddenly popped up, so why should this be? Why is it that some people remember things differently while others do not? It is important to point out that in most cases these are not just little errors that people write-off, but rather oddities that can really unsettle and disturb those who notice them, causing great stress, anxiety, and fear that they are losing their minds, even though they may be normally very intelligent, well-balanced individuals.
There are a few theories as to what these people could be experiencing, ranging from the fantastical to the more mundane. For Mandela Effect devotees and people who carefully follow these developments, this is all indicative of some sort of shift in reality being experienced by these people. One reason for this could be that those who experience these discrepancies may have shifted to a different, alternate reality or dimension that is almost identical to this one, but not quite, and the memories they have retained from their old one clash with the reality of the new one. Such a shift is also sometimes theorized as being possibly caused by the retroactive altering of reality or the creation of offshoot timelines, perhaps from the use of time travel or even some sort of quantum ripple caused by projects such as the Large Hadron Collider. The ones who remember correctly are the ones who have not shifted or been altered, or at least for some reason don’t remember the changes. There is also the idea that this could be evidence that we are living in a computer generated reality, and these changes are the result of tampering, reprogramming, or even bugs, “glitches in the Matrix,” so to speak.

This talk of parallel universes, time travel, and computer generated realities is all very fascinating, but could there be something else behind these cases? With changes of company logos, it obviously could in some cases be that the company has simply done just that, and changed their logo. This happens all of the time, and has already been used to explain Mandela Effects people have claimed to have experienced with the logos for Starbucks and Pepsi, both of which have been changed in recent years without the knowledge of the general populace. However, this does not explain the cases we have looked at here, with logos and spellings that have not been changed by the companies.
Psychologists who have looked at the Mandela Effect have suggested that these could be false memories caused by a phenomenon called “confabulation,” which is basically your brain mixing up memories in order to make sense of what it sees, and which can create new memories which the person can really believe to be true. It is basically memory defects and the filling in of blanks that you take to be real. For example, with “Froot Loops” your brain might assume that “Froot” should naturally be spelled “fruit.” It can’t stand that “Froot” spelling and so it convinces you that “Fruit Loops” is correct and you start to believe that that is the way it has always been and that you remember it that way. This would also work with many of the spellings we have looked at here. It can be seen in that granddaddy of all Mandela Effects, the large portion of people who think the beloved children’s characters “The Berenstain Bears” should be spelled “Berenstein Bears.” Since there are way more names spelled with “stein” at the end, your brain thinks that is the way it should be and you become convinced that that is the way you remember it. In this case this is all just a mental glitch.
Also is the idea that this is false memories created through what is called the “misinformation effect,” which is the molding of memories based on outside influences, especially for things that you never really looked at all that closely before. So for instance, although you may see these logos all of the time, how closely do you really study them? Look at it this way, how much do you really pay attention to most normal mundane things you see all of the time? Without looking can you say exactly what your husband, wife, significant other or best friend was wearing today? So if someone says, “She was wearing a black sweater, right?” and then another chimes in “Yeah, I saw her wearing that too!” you may start to remember them wearing that black sweater as well, even though it was actually a grey cardigan. In this case, these are memories being sort of created by a combination of many others claiming them, and the fact that you just never really took a good hard look at what these logos looked like in great detail in the first place.

This is all confounded by the concept of what is called “cognitive dissonance,” which means that you are more likely to hold onto a fond memory of the way things were and the way you misremember them than the actual reality. If you misremember the name of your favorite childhood cartoon as “Looney Toons,” then that is what it becomes for you, no matter what anyone else says. Add in a dash of confirmation bias, which would be your desire to seek out those who agree with you and value their input more than those who disagree, and you get whole forums and communities of people who misremember that show as “Looney Toons” and feed off their misunderstandings until they are absolutely certain that this is how it was spelled, graduating to tales of time travel and interdimensional shifts to try and make sense of it all.
Regardless of these attempts at rationalizing the Mandela Effect away, it is still rather odd that we are still left with large portions of the population who remember the same things wrong in the same way. Not only this, they are very often well-educated people who are often from different places or different ages or backgrounds, yet all they still strongly remember these anomalies that don’t line up with reality with the same details and are absolutely very adamant about that they remember correctly and that these memories are as clear as can be. They are completely sure that reality is not what it seems to be, and many of these people notice these anomalies on their own, with no coaching or influence from others, usually glad to see that others share their wrong memories and that they are not alone or crazy. Whether this is all caused by time travel, hopping through dimensions, computer generated realities, tampering with timelines, or just psychological tricks and mental glitches, the Mandela Effect is a fascinating phenomenon that is not likely to go away any time soon.

Thanks to: https://mysteriousuniverse.org