Overture! Curtain! Lights!
This is it, the night of nights!
Everyone knows the theme song to The Bugs Bunny Show, right?
Well, not so fast there buckaroo. Saturday morning cartoons haven’t really been a thing since the 1980’s, and the Bugs Bunny show left the airwaves in 2000 . . . 24 years ago for those scoring at home. So, anyone under 35 might have no clue what I’m talking about. (I know this for a fact, because I’ve met at least two of them this week.)
But I’m not here to talk about a collection of the greatest cartoons ever produced and how it started as a prime time show in 1960 before becoming a Saturday morning staple, running on network TV for 40 years. Nor am I going to bemoan the fact that “kids these days” don’t know what they’re missing.
What I really want to talk about is my brain.
For some reason, I absolutely, positively remembered that the theme song for the show was from a “real” musical. I swear that I saw it performed…maybe in a movie with Judy Garland…maybe by Ethel Merman… It was such a vivid memory that I spent a good chunk of Sunday afternoon trying to find it.
In the end, the closest I got was a reference to a 1939 musical called Stars in Your Eyes, which did have a song called This is It performed by Ethel Merman, but I cannot find a recording of it anywhere…and every other source says, “No, you idiot, the song was written by Mack David and Jerry Livingston specifically for the show.”
Now, this is not really an example of the Mandela Effect. For that to be true, there would have to be a lot of people misremembering the same thing. And I don’t think there are more than a couple dozen of you that could possibly share this specific delusion with me…right?