What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: the Fruit of the Loom Logo
I didn’t talk about the “Mandela effect” in this column because it’s stupid. People think they saw the movie Shazaam , where Sinbad played a genie, because there was a movie, Kazaam , where Shaq played a genie. People remembered Nelson Mandela’s funeral before it happened because they half-watched the coverage of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison a few years ago and remembered it. There is no alternate universe to explain all of this.
However, it is easy to explain away other people’s fake memories. When it comes to my memories, things get weird. I remember things that I would bet my life on that are shared by thousands/millions of other people, yet all available evidence says they are false. I know Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s co-host, didn’t appear in the Publisher’s Clearing House Super Bowl ad, but I still remember the ad and can describe the van, the house, and the bunch of balloons Ed brought with him. the check is ridiculously large. I know that in the James Bond movie Moonraker there is no shot of Joe’s love interest Dolly smiling at him and revealing that she has braces. But I remember it.
There are explanations for both Moonraker and Ed McMahon, but personally accepting them over what I know I remember is difficult. However, I can’t argue with the facts:
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Publisher’s Clearing House commercials existed, but McMahon did not star. He was a representative of a competing, lesser-known company. That’s why I confuse his advertising with theirs .
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Dolly doesn’t wear braces, but if you look at the scene , she clearly should be there . This is where our collective memory corrected the Moonraker producers’ mistake.
But there is a Fruit of the Loom logo.
The Enduring Mystery of Fruit of the Loom’s Mandela Effect Logo
That lingerie retailer Fruit of the Loom’s logo, which once featured a cornucopia, is as close to a universal Mandela effect as I’ve seen. Almost everyone seems to remember this, but the company claims it never happened. As the Snopes article makes clear, there is no evidence that this alternative logo ever existed. There are photographs (which can easily be faked) and a supposed trademark application, but upon closer inspection they fall apart.
Unlike most Mandela effects, the Fruit of the Loom logo was actually explored. Overall, this University of Chicago study shows that people are simply bad at remembering logos, but the study can’t find any reason why people tend to misremember logos in certain ways. I suspect some of these are similar to Moonraker , people are replacing the “better” design – the Monopoly man should wear a monocle to match his “old fashioned rich guy” personality – but why would we collectively put a cornucopia of fruit on our underwear ? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cornucopia in real life, so I don’t associate it with fruit. When the researchers showed study participants the Fruit of the Loom logo with a sign behind the fruit (plates and fruit are something we’ve all seen associated), they still largely considered the cornucopia to be a legitimate Fruit of the Loom sign.
Lingerie logos and butterfly effect
I doubt we’re seeing an example of a parallel universe similar to ours, except the lingerie company’s logo is different. I think we’re seeing something close to a butterfly effect. Something happened, maybe some tiny thing, at some point in time, and it resonated through the complex interconnected systems that make up our collective memory, and managed to create a strong enough signal that most people associate a cornucopia with a fetus loom. logo. But no one has ever determined what this something is. It sounds crazy, but there is at least one similar example where the cause was found and identified.
Letter colors and synesthesia
Research shows that about 3% of the population suffers from synesthesia, a phenomenon in which stimuli are perceived in more than one way at the same time. Synesthetes may taste mint when they hear the word “gender” or know what the color yellow sounds like. Certain types of connections are more common than others, and the most commonly reported is grapheme-color synesthesia, the association of colors with letters and numbers. In 2012 , MIT scientist Nathan Wiethoft studied this form of synesthesia and found that a higher-than-average number of participants were grouped with the same color and number, and the results were even more striking for people of a certain age.
(Before we continue, what color is the letter E?)
When viewed as a single data point, there is no “that’s stupid” explanation for why different people pair the same letters with the same colors. You could explain this by theorizing about the collective unconscious or an as-yet-undocumented connection between different senses, but there’s also a more down-to-earth theory: Fisher-Price magnetic letters.
Back in the early 1970s, Fisher-Price released its first set of magnetized alphabet letters. It became very popular. The letter E was blue, and this was the connection made by about 15% of participants born between 1970 and 1985. (This is a little more complicated, since some researchers have failed to make similar connections in other cultures, but for the sake of argument, that’s what I’m going to get at.)
So the toy’s release in the early 1970s defined generations of people’s ideas about what color different letters were and helped explain aspects of synesthesia that no one could explain for over 40 years. Same thing, I suppose, with the cornucopia. There were some, perhaps completely unrelated, cultural stimuli that were commonly experienced when using the cornucopia, perhaps they associated it with tasks, but we collectively forgot about it and now we are left with only echoes.
I associate cornucopia with Thanksgiving. This seems to be the only time they’re a “thing,” and Thanksgiving is exactly when Fruit of the Loom can release commercials aimed at Christmas shoppers. So maybe that’s where the connection comes from. Or maybe it’s something completely different.