Kazaam
Shaquille O'Neal as a 5,000-year-old rapping genie who bursts out of a boombox to grant a kid three wishes — a legendary flop at the height of Shaq's do-everything mid-'90s fame. It's now most famous for a movie that doesn't exist: the "Shazaam" Mandela Effect.
Kazaam premiered July 17, 1996, directed by Paul Michael Glaser, with basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal as Kazaam, a 5,000-year-old genie freed from a magic boombox by a troubled 12-year-old named Max and obligated to grant him three wishes. It arrived amid Shaq's mid-'90s multimedia blitz — rap albums, a video game, and a movie career all at once — and it flopped hard, grossing about $19 million and drawing some of the worst reviews of the decade (a 5% score on Rotten Tomatoes).
Kazaam's second life is genuinely strange. It sits at the center of the "Shazaam" Mandela Effect — a widespread false memory of a 1990s movie in which comedian Sinbad, not Shaq, played a genie. That film never existed. Sinbad has repeatedly denied ever making it, and one leading explanation traces the mix-up to a 1994 TV appearance where he introduced a movie on TNT dressed in a genie costume. Somehow a mediocre Shaq vehicle became the anchor for one of the internet's favorite examples of collective misremembering.
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