In 2009, an anonymous user posted a curious question on the now-defunct Yahoo! Answers website: “Does anyone remember a movie from the ‘90s in which Sinbad, the comedian, played a genie?”
No one did, and that likely had something to do with the fact that no such film exists. However, within a few years, other people started popping up with stories about seeing the movie, sharing plot details, and claiming that it was called Shazaam.
The stories got so much attention that Sinbad himself felt the need to address them:
Have you noticed no one my age has seen this so called Sinbad Genie movie, only you people who were kids in the 90's. The young mind !
— Sinbad (@sinbadbad) September 7, 2016
Despite getting a denial straight from the horse’s mouth, many still swear that they remember watching Shazaam at some point in the ‘90s. A lot of them also seem to recall that it revolved around Sinbad granting wishes to two young children who accidentally summoned him. But how can all these people have the same false memory? There has to be a good reason for that, no?
Well, for those who don’t believe in the Mandela Effect or the possibility that the film studio that supposedly made Shazaam somehow managed to round up every single VHS copy that would’ve been floating around out there, there are a couple of reasonable explanations.
For starters, there was the 1996 movie Kazaam, starring Shaquille O’Neal. The film tells the story of a young boy who—you guessed it—accidentally summons a genie (as played by Shaq). Later on, the boy attempts to make a wish involving his father, much like the kids in Shazaam did. Here’s the kicker: a preview for Kazaam was apparently included on VHS releases of Sinbad’s 1996 comedy First Kid. You can check out the trailer for Kazaam right here:
But that’s not all. As Sinbad helpfully pointed out in 2016, he did play a genie once back in the ‘90s, though it was for a 1994 TNT marathon that he hosted featuring movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger:
With all that in mind, it’s easy to see how things like this, especially when seen at a young age, can lead to confusion down the road. There are, of course, still people who insist that Shazaam was a real movie and that they aren’t mixing it up with anything else, but at press time, nothing has surfaced to indicate that that’s true.
For now, the closest you’ll be able to get to seeing the mythical Shazaam is this 2017 April Fool’s Day video Sinbad did for CollegeHumor:
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