The ‘Gangrela Effect’

[RedTwoster]

Inspired by @Chris B's thread in off-topic, when I realised one of my two examples of the Mandela Effect was wrestling-related, there must be more of that kind of thing. 

I'm sure you'll all know what it is, but on the off chance you don't, the Mandela Effect is where a large group of people all share the same false memory of something - think "Luke, I am your father" or Captain Pugwash being filled with characters who have dirty names. 

There must be examples of this in wrestling, can you think of any? Feel free to apply the idea on a more personal level too. 

The big one that I've learned recently is to do with Kurt Angle - I'd thought that WWE, during his original run with the company, called his finisher the "Angle Lock", before TNA ran with the standard "Ankle Lock" name for copyright reasons. 

But watching older shows back that doesn't seem to be the case...it always seems to have been the Ankle Lock, and I was completely wrong. 

I'd be very pleased if someone was able to point me to examples that prove that I was indeed right about this and it was known as the Angle Lock at some point, but as best as I can tell...Mandela Effect. 

Edited 4 hours ago by RedTwoster
Changed the thread title because Arch asked/demanded nicely

[Jazzy G]

I think they may have tried to run with it briefly? Like how it used to be called the Olympic Slam before they decided Angle Slam would be a better name, or probably when the IOC committee started getting really letigious. See The Beer International Non-Profit Non-Governmental Sporting Quad Yearly Event by the Lancashire Hotpots for more information

https://www.sthelensstar.co.uk/news/14708188.folk-band-lancashire-hotpots-ordered-to-take-olympics-out-of-song-title/

 

 

[Mr_Danger]

I definitely had a phase of thinking it was the Angle Lock but assumed I had gotten it mixed up with Angle Slam.

[BomberPat]

not a Mandela Effect as it's a single false memory of mine that nobody in the world would share, but I talked in the Debut to Departure thread about a false memory I had of the 1996 Royal Rumble. For years I had a memory of a Rumble match featuring two identical twin sumo wrestlers; I could picture one getting eliminated, waiting on the ramp as the second entered, them realising that the referee would be unable to tell them apart to know which had been eliminated, and both (re)entering the match together, going on to dominate. This didn't happen. The closest I can figure is that the Headhunters were the identical twins, but they were in and out in seconds, but that I had somehow conflated them with Yokozuna, who did have a longer and more dominant run in the match. It's a combination of watching wrestling with almost zero context - my parents and older brothers hated it, so I'd just catch what I could on TV when I could, weeks or months apart, usually just highlight shows with no real understanding of who any of the wrestlers were - and probably only half paying attention, on a grainy CRT TV, and then the memory just warping and shifting in my brain, because I rarely had cause to actually think about it.

My brother and I used to play at wrestling on the top of our bunkbed, until one time he shoulder tackled me and I fell off the top bunk, landing on the Manta Force spaceship on the way down, and that put an abrupt stop to it. We'd play as characters we invented, drawing pictures of them and giving them names - they were all blatant rip-offs of WWF gimmicks, or characters from Mortal Kombat or Streets of Rage, and somewhere in there we made up this twin sumo wrestler tag team; so I thought I was ripping off something I had seen in the WWF, but it was inadvertently an original creation!


In terms of actual Mandela Effect shared false memories, the ultimate one has to be people insisting that Kane wore green at least once when tagging with X-Pac, right?

[Vegeta]

Always seen to remember gangrel being European champion, apparntley never happened.

Edited 12 hours ago by Vegeta
Titus bramble

[HLSXN]

That Shawn superkicked Marty straight through the barbershop window?

[The Reverend]

I always thought that the Powers of Pain had been WWF Tag Team Champs. 

 

[RedTwoster]

7 minutes ago, HLSXN said:

That Shawn superkicked Marty straight through the barbershop window?

That definitely counts because I thought that's exactly what happened. I didn't watch wrestling at the time, but I'd seen the clip and after watching it again, right now, my memory of it was way off. 

Another one that comes to mind - again through watching wrestling's past in clip form - was that it was JR who said "That's gotta be Kane!" when it was actually Vince McMahon. The weirdest part for me is the memory of JR saying that is so fucking vivid for me, it really raises questions as to what I misremember in general life, that I can't use YouTube to verify. 

[Justin Breeding]

For years I was convinced that Curt Hennig’s surname was “Henning”, well into the late ‘90s when I’d “smartened up” in my fandom, so to speak. Likely the first time I’d clocked the correct “Hennig” spelling was when playing WCW/nWo Revenge, and like a tit I assumed the developers had missed an “n” so I edited it to the wrong name, the one I’d been convinced I’d been reading in mags, seeing on TV graphics etc as “Henning”.

You be the judge of whether this is true Mandela effect or just me being an unobservant late-teen.

[The King of Old School]

14 minutes ago, Justin Breeding said:

For years I was convinced that Curt Hennig’s surname was “Henning”, well into the late ‘90s when I’d “smartened up” in my fandom, so to speak. Likely the first time I’d clocked the correct “Hennig” spelling was when playing WCW/nWo Revenge, and like a tit I assumed the developers had missed an “n” so I edited it to the wrong name, the one I’d been convinced I’d been reading in mags, seeing on TV graphics etc as “Henning”.

You be the judge of whether this is true Mandela effect or just me being an unobservant late-teen.

Yep I definitely fell into this trap at some point.

2 hours ago, HLSXN said:

That Shawn superkicked Marty straight through the barbershop window?

This one too.

[The Gaffer]

It goes "MAKE SOME NOISE! (X-Pac)" and not "mmmMMLLLLX-PAAAAC! (X-Pac)" 

[gmoney]

The wrestling move name thing probably comes from wrestling games I'd imagine. They always gave finishers names that didn't actually exist. 

Edited 8 hours ago by gmoney

[RedTwoster]

7 minutes ago, gmoney said:

The wrestling move name thing probably comes from wrestling games I'd imagine. They always gave finishers names that didn't actually exist. 

You're spot on! A bit of digging and I've found out that in Smackdown Shut Your Mouth, his finisher was indeed listed as the "Angle Lock". I played hours of this game when I was a child, before I even watched wrestling on TV, I'd have seen his finisher in the game before I ever saw Kurt Angle on TV and given that "Angle" and "Ankle" sound so similar, it's little wonder that I'd have heard it as the former. 

The videogame is to blame for this!

Edited 8 hours ago by RedTwoster

[Roy]

I think the most prominent Mandela effect I've seen recently is the infamous Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart tug-of-war over the WWF championship photo from 1993. There are people convinced they have seen it and that it was printed, but there's yet to be any proof that was the case. I think it persists because Bret is clear on when/where the photo took place, and there were WWF magazines of the period that depicted Hogan v Hart as a dream match, but nothing with a contempraneous photo of the two fighting over the belt.

[Jazzy G]

2 hours ago, RedTwoster said:

You're spot on! A bit of digging and I've found out that in Smackdown Shut Your Mouth, his finisher was indeed listed as the "Angle Lock". I played hours of this game when I was a child, before I even watched wrestling on TV, I'd have seen his finisher in the game before I ever saw Kurt Angle on TV and given that "Angle" and "Ankle" sound so similar, it's little wonder that I'd have heard it as the former. 

The videogame is to blame for this!

Presuably to differentiate it from a more generic one you could give to your Ken Shamrock CAW. The Shamrock one in the first Smackdown started with an armbar and then transitioned into the ankle lock. It may also have been so you knew it was the one where the opponent almost makes the ropes to break the hold, only to get dragged back to the centre of the ring and the leg grapevined.