Hollywood History is back, baby! It’s Rio de Janeiro, 1979. James Bond is literally going into outer space in Moonraker, and the most famous henchman in franchise history, Jaws, is suddenly stopped dead in his tracks… by a girl. Dolly. Pint-sized, pig-tailed, bespectacled, and, if thousands of moviegoers are to be believed, sporting metal braces.
The two characters… ahem… bond over their metal mouths, and the rest is history.
Except maybe it isn’t. Because, ladies and gentlemen, this is potentially one of the most famous occurrences of the Mandela Effect in history.
Free Mandela!
The Mandela effect is officially a psychological condition, named after people who “vividly remember” Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s when, in reality, he lived until 2013. It’s the phenomenon where large groups of people share the same false memory. Ghosts in the brain? Parallel universes? Or just humans being bad at remembering stuff? Take your pick.
Other famous, entertainment-related occurrences of the Mandela Effect include Berenstein Bears vs. Berenstain Bears, where everyone insists it was spelled with an e, but it wasn’t. There is Looney Toons vs. Looney Tunes, when it was always Tunes but many insist Toons. There is also the famous Star Wars line “Luke, I am your father” when Vader actually said “No, I am your father.”
However, even if not a huge Bond geek like Wrenage or myself, the debate over Dolly’s braces trumps all of these as it is just so… weird. Almost conspiratorial.
What we remember is that millions of theater goers recall a specific moment in Moonraker: Jaws cracks a metal grin (as one does), and eight-year-old you laughs like a little lunatic because Dolly beams back with a similarly metal-clad mouth.
Two metal mouths! It’s romantic comedy gold. You could even take it further. Without her braces, that whole romantic subplot makes no sense. Why would hulking Jaws fall for a tiny woman instantly unless they bonded over having dental hardware in common? It’s like a fetish, but classier.
Here’s where it gets really weird. The widely released versions of Moonraker on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray all show Dolly without braces in that scene. By all visible recent evidence, she’s brace-free.
Bond’s official channels insist Dolly never wore braces. The actress who played Dolly, Blanche Ravalec, says she never wore braces in the film. So, case closed… right? Wrong!
A 1979 contemporary film review written by a professional movie reviewer explicitly notes Dolly having:
“…about as much hardware in her mouth as [Jaws] does.”
Curious and curiouser, a YouTuber named RustyG57 (via the excellent MI6 Community) had an original VHS recording from a very early release and uploaded the “Jaws Meets Dolly” scene. It appears to clearly show Dolly having braces.
One note of caution here. If you ever watch a VHS now, after decades of being completely spoiled by Blu-Ray and 4K in UHD, one thing that stands out is just how unbelievably awful the picture quality is. Are these “braces” actually just phantom shadows exacerbated by the terrible VHS playback? Take a closer look…
I dunno, this really looks like braces to me. Look at the linking lines on the right-hand side, and the general design that matches many standard forms of braces.
So that’s us with what we think is a clear memory of the braces, a narrative reason in the story – because it made them connect – and now what looks like video evidence. This is alongside a movie reviewer from the time, specifically calling out the existence of the braces.
But remember, no braces exist in any other known version of the movie across various formats. The producers insist there are no braces. The actress herself says she never wore them.
But… Why?
So what could possibly be happening here?
Is it all a massive cover-up? Perhaps the dainty, youthful appearance of Dolly, with braces that are usually associated with quite young girls, was held to have a whiff of “Epstein” about it before anyone even knew about super-mega-rich-turbo-noncery on private islands, and the decision was made to edit them out and deny all knowledge of them going forward.
“Braces? What braces? No… we would never have done anything so inappropriate!”
Or perhaps this whole thing went a little crazy after they turned on that Large Hadron Collider, and we have all fallen through spacetime from a reality where Dolly had braces, into one where she didn’t. Take that, Professor Stephen Hawking!
Related to this, maybe this all adds credence to Simulation Theory, the idea that we are all living in a computer simulation made by higher beings, and we don’t realise it. A piece of code slipped through QA for Node 7, where there were braces. Over in Node 23A there were no braces. Damn testers!
Or maybem just maybe, we must consider that this is all correct; there never were any braces, and 90% of the cinema-going audience just underwent some kind of mass delusion, creating the braces (and therefore Dolly’s connection with Jaws) in their own heads. We really have just spent 46 years Mandela-ing ourselves.
There’s something strangely human about this idea. We want narratives that make sense. We want poetic symmetry. We want two metal mouths finding love against all odds in a spy movie about space lasers. And we want to tell our friends about it at parties while simultaneously resenting them for having a better memory than us.
And if that’s the legacy of Dolly’s braces – teaching us that memory is fallible, reality is weird, and Bond movies are even weirder – then maybe that’s… kinda beautiful?
