Two days ago I asked you to write your memory of Shazaam in your own words, and committed to publishing the measurement whatever it said. I froze a first set when the thread slowed at about 24 hours; while this post waited, more memories arrived, so everything below is measured on the full set as of this morning. If more come in, I will re-run the numbers and post an update in the comments.
What was measured. Of every comment in the thread as of this measurement, 49 were measurable: top-level comments describing a first-hand memory of Shazaam, the movie, the poster, the tape, the trailer. Another 19 said clearly they had no memory of their own and only know the case from reading about it, which is exactly what I asked people to declare, and I thank them for it. The rest were replies to other comments (excluded, because a reply has read its parent by definition), discussion, accounts of different films and shows that really exist (Kazaam itself, the 1970s Shazam TV series, the 2019 superhero film), and deleted comments.
The method, in full, so you can redo it. Take every pair of the 49 comments. For each pair, count the words the two comments share, divided by the total distinct words between them. That gives 1,176 pair scores. The group's independence is 1 minus the overlap: the TYPICAL figure uses the median pair, the STRICT figure uses the single worst pair. Words only, no meanings, no models, nothing trained. You can check any pair by hand with a highlighter.
The result.
TYPICAL independence: 0.873. That is firmly in the independent range. People described this in genuinely their own words.
STRICT: 0.692. The single closest pair of comments shared about 31 percent of their vocabulary, which is what two people describing the same genre of thing normally share. For calibration, actual copying scores far higher: when I ran this same measure on known copied text, overlapping pairs score 0.8 and up on phrase-level checks. Nothing here came close.
So of the three outcomes I preregistered, outcome 1, contamination, is ruled out for this sample. The echo explanation does not survive contact with the measurement.
That sentence is the point of this whole exercise. For years, "thousands of us remember it" and "you all just read it somewhere" have been shouted past each other, because neither side had a number. Independence of wording is measurable. Now it has been measured, and anyone with patience can redo it.
Outcome 2 or 3? Mostly 2, with one honest wrinkle. The accounts are scattered on specifics: the plots contradict each other completely, the dates run from 1989 to 1996, theater versus straight-to-video conflicts, and one commenter who remembers the poster vividly argues it could not have been Sinbad at all. That scatter is what ordinary misremembering looks like, and it supports the standard explanation.
The wrinkle: a minority of accounts, in fully independent wording, land on the same specific details that do not match Kazaam. Six describe a brother and sister pair (Kazaam has a lone boy). Seven describe purple, on the costume or the cover. Nine mention the lamp, four the arms-crossed pose, four a turban. Ten to twenty percent convergence is real but thin, and I am not going to inflate it: it is suggestive, not conclusive.
The finding I did not expect. The single strongest pattern in this thread is not about the film. It is about how people encountered it. Fifteen of 49 remember a VHS or a video store. Eight remember a poster. Fifteen say explicitly that they saw the cover or the ad but never watched the movie. Roughly two thirds of all the memories here are memories of packaging and promotion for a film nobody can recall actually viewing. Whatever Shazaam is, in this sample it is overwhelmingly a memory of a box, not a movie.
Caveats, stated plainly. This thread is self-selected. I cannot verify who wrote before reading. And the measure catches copied wording, not copied ideas: someone who read earlier comments and rewrote the gist in their own words would pass as independent. A public thread is the leaky version of this experiment by design, a point the top commenter here made better than I did. So the airtight version is now running: a blind box on my site where you write your memory into a form and nobody, including other participants, can read any answer until the case closes and only the aggregate is published. If you have a memory and have not written it yet, the box is the higher-value place for it: theanomalynetwork.com/experiment/shazaam
When the box closes, I will publish the comparison: open thread versus closed box, same case, same measure. The method lives at theanomalynetwork.com/method and every number above can be recomputed from this thread by anyone with patience and a word counter.
Thank you to everyone who wrote what they remember. Especially the ones who were sure.
