Mr. Monopoly, the mascot of the board game Monopoly, has never worn a monocle.
Monopoly mascot Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle in any standard Monopoly game produced in the United States or elsewhere. However …
… Banknotes included in at least one edition of Monopoly Junior, a version of the game adapted for younger children, did show Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle. Additionally, in 2016 the official Monopoly Facebook account posted a copyrighted image of a monocled Mr. Monopoly.
Asked to describe Mr. Monopoly, the mascot of the classic board game Monopoly, people often mention features such as his white mustache, his top hat, and his monocle. However, a glance at both current and classic editions of the game reveals the character with no eyewear whatsoever. For years, internet users explained this confusion by identifying Mr. Monopoly’s monocle as an example of the Mandela effect, a term defined in its simplest terms as a “collective misremembering of a fact or event.”
In August 2024, for example, an X user listed (archived) the monocle as No. 11 in a thread of “the most insane Mandela Effect examples that will blow your mind.”
(X user @timecaptales)
Of the 57 comments and roughly 100 quote-posts the post about Mr. Monopoly had received at the time of this writing, many (archived) expressed disbelief in (archived) or denial of (archived) the post’s claim. In a quote-post, one X user wrote (archived): “This is literally a lie.”
The claim that Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle has appeared (archived) in numerous blog posts (archived), articles (archived) and even scholarly research. A 2022 paper (archived) published in the journal Psychological Science described an experiment in which researchers tested subjects on their ability to identify the correct versions of different mascots and logos associated with the Mandela effect, including Mr. Monopoly. In that paper, the authors wrote:
For example, people report having a strong recollection that the Monopoly Man, mascot for the board game Monopoly, wears a monocle. To their surprise, he does not nor has he ever.
But is it actually true that Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle? Monopoly is a game with a long history and many official editions, and Hasbro, which currently produces and sells the game, has licensed the Mr. Monopoly character for various commercial uses, such as McDonalds’ long-running Monopoly-themed promotional game.
In an attempt to answer the question once and for all, we spoke with a Monopoly historian and combed through archives of historical Monopoly sets. We also examined three pieces of evidence that internet users have offered as evidence that Mr. Monopoly actually has worn a monocle.
In short, we found that Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle in any edition of the standard Monopoly game produced in the United States or elsewhere. However, we also identified two images of Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle that could reasonably be described as official. For this reason, we have determined that the claim that Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle contains a mixture of true and false information.
Mr. Monopoly
Phil Orbanes, a former senior vice president for Parker Brothers and a Monopoly historian who has written multiple books on the game, explained the history of the Mr. Monopoly character in an email. Orbanes said that when Parker Brothers acquired and first marketed Monopoly in 1935, the game had no mascot.
Later the same year, Parker Brothers hired two illustrators to revamp the game’s visual appeal. For a time, this resulted in two different versions of the game: one featuring simple thematic illustrations by an artist whose identity remains unknown, and the other featuring caricatures drawn by the Boston-based artist Dan Fox.
Fox’s illustrations proved popular enough that they became a permanent fixture of the game, and in 1946 the character was for the first time given a name: Rich Uncle Pennybags. Although he originally appeared only on Monopoly’s Chance and Community Chest cards, starting in the 1980s the character began to be featured prominently on the front of Monopoly sets, popping out of the O in the middle of the game’s name.
According to Orbanes, as Rich Uncle Pennybags’ profile grew, Parker Brothers’ attorneys “were meticulous in adhering to his appearance as used for decades” both in the original game and in the many officially licensed adaptations produced by other companies.
As Orbanes described in detail in his 2007 book “Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game — and How It Got That Way,” Parker Brothers ceased to be an independent company in 1968, when it was purchased by General Mills. It was subsequently acquired by Tonka, in 1987, and then by Hasbro in 1991. Seven years later, in 1998, Hasbro merged Parker Brothers with another subsidiary, Milton Bradley, to form Hasbro Games.
Under Hasbro, some aspects of the character evolved. For example, in the late 1990s, Hasbro changed his name to Mr. Monopoly after “extensive research” revealed that “many people already referred to him by this nickname,” according to Orbanes.
Hasbro also changed the character’s visual appearance around 2008, when they replaced Fox’s line drawings with a rendering of a computer-illustrated 3D model of the mascot on the standard game’s box, on Community Chest and Chance cards, and in promotional materials related to the game.
Despite this change, Orbanes said, “no image of Rich Uncle Pennybags used on Monopoly or Monopoly Jr. in the U.S. had a monocle.”
Hasbro has not responded to multiple requests to comment on the matter. We will update this story if the company replies.
However, in keeping with Orbanes’ statements, Snopes was unable to find any image of Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle in any of the dozens of Monopoly games and related merchandise in the online collections of the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
We also examined the sets of photos of historical Monopoly sets hosted by the comprehensive fan websites Rich Uncle Pennybags and World of Monopoly, and likewise found no examples of standard Monopoly games, merchandise or ads featuring a monocled Mr. Monopoly.
A Google search of the terms “Monopoly” and “monocle” limited to the r/MandelaEffect subreddit — which, with around 359,000 members, is the largest publicly visible online community dedicated to the phenomenon — returned around 800 results dating as far back as 2016 (archived). None of the results included or linked to evidence of any standard Monopoly game, merchandise, or ad showing Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle.
As is typical for alleged examples of the Mandela effect, however, the lack of hard evidence has not stopped internet users from claiming that Mr. Monopoly really did once wear a monocle — at least in some reality.
Evidence for the Monocle
Snopes is unable to either prove or disprove the existence of parallel dimensions or multiple realities, both of which theorists have proposed as explanations for the collective misremembering of Mr. Monopoly’s monocle and other “glitches” popularly identified as Mandela effect examples. As we noted in our Snopestionary entry for the phenomenon:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this sort of speculation — it’s fun, in fact — but it yields no practical explanation or testable hypotheses. Nor is it necessary. We don’t have to conduct thought experiments about the ultimate nature of reality to explain why we misremember things — or even why we misremember some of the same things the same way.
However, as we have found on multiple previous occasions, the spread of Mandela effect claims online is often driven, at least in part, by the circulation of alleged pieces of evidence that can be assessed using practical fact-checking methods.
In the specific case of Mr. Monopoly’s monocle, we focused on three pieces of alleged evidence for the claim that internet users have described as “residue,” which one Reddit user has defined (archived) as “supporting evidence [for a Mandela effect] that can’t be easily dismissed as a spelling mistake, common misconception, or somebody perpetuating their own misremembering.”
Below, we’ve unpacked three pieces of “residue” that internet users have suggested disprove the widespread claim that Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle.
‘Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls’
One frequently cited “residue” of Mr. Monopoly’s monocle was a scene from the 1995 film “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.” In the clip, which is embedded below, Jim Carrey, portraying the titular Ace Ventura, confronts a fur-wearing woman and her companion, a monocled bald man identified in the film’s credits as “Skinny Husband.” Asked to identify himself, Ventura responds: “Ace Ventura, pet detective. And you must be the Monopoly guy.”
In addition to Carrey’s line, the official novelization of the movie, which was also released in 1995, described the character as resembling “the little guy from the Monopoly game.”
Since Mr. Monopoly’s monocle first emerged as a topic of online debate around 2016, the scene has been frequently cited as a piece of alleged evidence that Mr. Monopoly wore a monocle.
For example, a February 2020 r/MandelaEffect post (archived) titled “Ace Ventura when nature calls” read:
So the monopoly man is the Mandela effect that’s one of the more mind blowing for me, as I spent countless hours playing this game and fighting over the characters at my grandparents house when I was a kid. We are watching ace Ventura tonight and in a party scene he keeps referring to a bald man in a black suit and a monocle as the monopoly character!!! Just further confirmation that the monocle timeline is the cool one 🙂
Similarly, an X user responding (archived) to the August 2024 post mentioned at the beginning of this story wrote:
Ace Ventura clearly says “and you must be the Monoply [sic] Guy” when referring to the short man WITH the monocle. Game. Set. Match.
As a piece of evidence, however, the scene is also easily dismissed. In discussions of the scene on r/MandelaEffect, commenters have frequently pointed out that there are in fact multiple discrepancies between the “Ace Ventura” character’s appearance and that of Mr. Monopoly. For example, the film character did not wear a top hat — part of Mr. Monopoly’s standard outfit since the character’s creation in the 1930s.
In a 2017 comment (archived), one r/MandelaEffect member summed up the arguments against taking the “Ace Ventura” scene as evidence Mr. Monopoly ever officially wore a monocle:
I have no idea why people put so much stock in that one movie detail as some sort of residue of a ME because it gets several other details wrong. Where’s the dude’s cane? His hat? Why is he wearing the wrong style jacket? Why is he wearing the wrong tie color? Where’s his thinning hair on the side of his head?
It’s more likely that this was just a joke that no one put too much thought into because if it makes people laugh it doesn’t have to be accurate.
Ultimately, the “Ace Ventura” clip does not hold much water as evidence that Mr. Monopoly used to wear a monocle. Rather, the scene can be explained by the film’s costumers misremembering, or simply not bothering to replicate, the precise details of Mr. Monopoly’s classic character design.
2016 Facebook Post
Another frequently cited piece of evidence for Mr. Monopoly’s monocle was an image the official Monopoly Facebook account posted (archived) in May 2016:
In the image, a digital illustration of Mr. Monopoly holds a monocle to his left eye and points at the viewer. Text superimposed on the image read: “I SEE YOU.” A notice in the lower left corner of the image identified Hasbro as the owner of the image’s copyright. A caption accompanying the image said: “I’m not above accessorizing with my mighty monocle.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the comments on the image focused on the Mandela Effect.
For example, one commenter wrote (archived):
They know what’s going on but they’ll never tell the truth, they prefer to say it’s the Mandela effect.
I saw with my own eyes that what they call the Mandela effect is something big that they are hiding from us, many of us have witnessed it.
I don’t care what anyone says I played Monopoly with my family religiously every week before game consoles, internet, and good TV shows hit my area as a child. The entire family would gather around and we could be on one game off and on for a week straight. He always had a monocle. Everyone in my family would tell you the same thing. There’s no way that everyone around me knows he had a monocle. And the craziest thing is we have the same old vintage Monopoly board at our house and there he sits years later with no monocle adorned.
In fact, the earliest securely dated r/MandelaEffect post (archived) to focus on Mr. Monopoly’s monocle apparently referenced this exact image. That post, from November 2016, began:
Im 100% sure that he had a monocle, he used to hold it in his hand and lean over with it.
He even this thing where’d he held his monocle and it read “I see you”.
Snopes reached out to the administrators of the Monopoly page on Facebook to ask why this image was created and posted in 2016. They directed us to Hasbro’s corporate public-relations team, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment. If they do respond, we will update this story.
Even without comment from Hasbro, however, the most plausible explanation for the image is that Hasbro’s social media team created and posted it as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of online discussions about the existence of Mr. Monopoly’s monocle, which appear to have emerged over the previous months. A February 2016 blog post on Alternate Memories, a website devoted to cataloging perceived examples of the Mandela effect, said: “Since this Mandela Effect first came up in 2016 it’s become one of the better known ones.”
(Alternate Memories, which appeared to have been last updated in 2021, was difficult to navigate at the time of this writing due to expired links and graphics, but archived versions are available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.)
Because the official Monopoly Facebook account posted the image of the monocled Mr. Monopoly shortly after the apparent beginning of widespread online discussion of Mr. Monopoly’s monocle as an example of the Mandela Effect, the image is not a strong piece of evidence that Mr. Monopoly genuinely used to wear a monocle. Instead, the image appears more likely to have been Hasbro’s attempt to humorously engage with an emerging online trend connected to the brand.
However, because it was Hasbro, the company that holds the copyright to Monopoly as well as its mascot, that created and shared the image, the image could reasonably be described as official — or at least officially sanctioned. Although the image is not part of a Monopoly game, it is an authentic image of Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle, copyright and all.
Monocled Orange Banknotes
A third piece of alleged evidence consists of what multiple Redditors and TikTokers have claimed are authentic Monopoly banknotes featuring a monocled Mr. Monopoly. One February 2021 post about these banknotes had received around 2,200 upvotes at the time of this writing, making it the fifth-most-upvoted post of all time on the r/MandelaEffect subreddit. That post (archived) read:
Idk if this has been posted before, but there actually exists an official Monopoly man with a monocle. Here is said monocle This is on the (Dutch) junior Monopoly
The post linked (archived) to the image embedded below, which showed a hand holding up an orange banknote with an image of a monocle-wearing Mr. Monopoly in the center.
(Reddit)
Following that 2021 post, multiple individuals reported identical finds, sometimes including links to eBay auctions for sets claiming to include the banknotes, as in a 2023 r/MandelaEffect post (archived) that linked to a German eBay listing for a Monopoly Junior set. One image included in the listing showed the same orange banknotes featuring a monocled Mr. Monopoly.
Some internet users posted have videos of themselves unboxing European Monopoly Junior sets from the mid-1990s that they had sought out and ordered online. One example, posted (archived) to TikTok in December 2023, had received around 385,000 likes and 3 million views at the time of this writing. In that video, the poster described spending “too much time and too much money” before unboxing the set to show another example of the same orange banknote with Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle:
Within a month, a number of similar (archived) TikTok posts (archived) showing unboxings of sets containing the same banknote appeared.
Whether on Reddit or on TikTok, online claims of orange banknotes showing a monocle-sporting Mr. Monopoly have had some common features.
First, the posts identified the notes in question as coming from sets of Monopoly Junior, a version of the game adapted for young children that first hit the market in the early 1990s.
Second, the Monopoly Junior sets containing the monocled notes have typically been identified as originating from Europe — specifically the Netherlands, France and the U.K.
Third and finally, the European Monopoly Junior sets containing the notes all appear to have been manufactured and sold in the mid-1990s.
A number of internet users have noted these three commonalities, which have led some to theorize that the orange notes were counterfeits. For example, in a February 2024 comment (archived) on a post about the Mr. Monopoly’s monocle Mandela effect, one Reddit user wrote:
I’m starting to get very concerned there’s somebody using eBay or online collection groups to scam people into paying four times what this game is actually worth to trick the monocle man Fans.
However, the banknotes do in fact appear to be genuine, and their existence can be explained by the corporate history behind Monopoly Junior.
Orbanes, the Monopoly historian and former Parker Brothers employee, explained that Monopoly Junior was originally developed by Seven Towns, a British game company. Seven Towns then licensed the game to Parker Brothers — at the time, a subsidiary of Tonka — for production and distribution in the United States. At the same time, Seven Towns struck a separate agreement with the British game company Waddingtons for manufacture and distribution in the U.K. and some European markets.
According to Orbanes, “It is quite likely Waddingtons added the monocle to the game’s paper money.”
Waddingtons, which had acquired the U.K. rights to produce and manufacture its own version of the standard Monopoly game in 1935, was not subject to the same strict rules imposed on Mr. Monopoly’s appearance in the U.S. until after Hasbro acquired the company’s games division in 1994. At that point, Hasbro, which had acquired Parker Brothers from Tonka in 1991, already controlled Monopoly and its official spinoffs in the U.S. market.
In the years following Hasbro’s acquisition of both Parker Brothers and Waddingtons, Orbanes said, the company “set up a global Monopoly marketing team and standardized the look of the game worldwide.”
Upon being shown an image of one of the monocled banknotes, Orbanes confirmed that it “appears authentic” for a banknote included in a European version of Monopoly Junior manufactured prior to Hasbro’s global standardization push.
To summarize, the orange banknotes featuring an illustration of a monocled Mr. Monopoly that internet users have reported finding in certain versions of Monopoly Junior appear to be genuine banknotes from a time when graphic designers working on the game in Europe were not yet subject to the same rules about Mr. Monopoly’s appearance that their American counterparts had to follow.
That said, the monocled notes appear to have been included only in specific versions of Monopoly Junior. There is no evidence that any edition of the standard version of the game, even those produced in Europe, ever included them.
Did Mr. Monopoly Ever Wear a Monocle?
Ultimately, the claim that Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle is a mixture of true and false information — something that has likely contributed to the persistence of online interest in this particular example of the Mandela effect.
Based on our conversation with Orbanes in addition to our own research into large collections of Monopoly games, it is true that Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle in any official or licensed edition of the standard U.S. version of Monopoly, the classic board game.
However, the wording of the most common form of the claim that has circulated online is not so specific, and we located two depictions of Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle that could reasonably be described as official.
First, versions of Monopoly Junior that were manufactured and sold in Europe in the 1990s do appear to have authentically included banknotes showing a monocled Mr. Monopoly. Monopoly Junior is not the same board game as the classic Monopoly, but it has been an official part of the Monopoly franchise since its introduction in the early 1990s, and Hasbro currently produces and sells both Monopoly and Monopoly Junior in both the U.S. and Europe.
As such, these banknotes appear to be proof that at least one official game in the Monopoly franchise did depict Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle — at least in sets manufactured and sold in Europe for a period of time in the mid-1990s.
Second, the official Monopoly Facebook page did share an image, copyrighted by Hasbro, that depicted a monocled Mr. Monopoly in 2016. Although this image was not part of a board game, it could reasonably be described as an official depiction of the character because the same company that produces and sells the game created and shared the image.
For these reasons, Snopes has rated the claim a mixture of true and false information.