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:
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:
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.
