Do you remember a short-lived 90s cartoon called Street Sharks? It basically a TeenageMutant Ninja Turtles rip-off about crime-fighting mutant sharks. It wasn’t very good. It also briefly re-entered the public conscious earlier this year when footage of a very young Vin Diesel selling the spin-off action figures was unearthed online.
The show has four main sharks named Ripster, Jab, Streex and Big Slammu. If you do actually remember it, you might recall there was also a girl shark called Roxie. Only you would be completely wrong, and she never existed, and you won’t be able to trust your own brain anyway. On geek.com, journalist Jordan Minor has written about how he somewhat accidentally created a parallel universe of Street Sharks episodes which people refuse to believe don’t exist.
Minor explains:
Years ago, maybe around 2003 when I was in middle school, I stumbled across the site TVTome.com. It was a user-edited wiki for TV shows. To be an editor for the big, popular shows you had to prove why you were qualified. After all, creating the official record of what happened on The Big Bang Theory was an important responsibility. But for some forgotten garbage show like Street Sharks, the screening process was nonexistent. Sensing an opportunity for nonsense, I became the Street Sharks editor and filled its page with lies. I made up characters, voice actors, episodes, plot descriptions, everything.
A decade ago, that was just a teenager goofing off for their own entertainment. But then as the internet grew, so did the web of lies:
Sometime later, TVTome got bought and integrated into the much bigger CBS Interactive website TV.com. Thanks to that expanded platform, all of my lies rapidly began infecting the rest of the internet. Most sites since have mostly purged themselves of my misinformation, but for years, IMDB, Amazon, and numerous smaller sites were unintentionally hosting my creative writing.
But it wasn’t just that people were treating his lies as fact, it went much further than that. People became convinced that they actually saw the fake episodes as kids, and have fond memories of them. Even though they never happened.
Here’s the synopsis Minor wrote for the fake episode introducing girl shark ‘Roxie’ (who never existed):
And here are people talking about how the remember watching Roxie as a kid:
He also made up that Henry Winkler (aka The Fonz) was on the show, and that even ended up on Netflix
You can read his whole confession here, and be amazed how fragile the human memory is.
