strtotime fails for valid date

Question

i am doing a project where i need to output date of orders. and i do the following inside a for loop

<?php echo date('M d, Y g:i A',strtotime($order['Order']['created']));?>

for some strange reason, sttotime returns false. (Dec 31, 1969 7:00 PM appears instead.)

i made sure $order['Order']['created'] is not empty and is valid.

even stranger, that exact same piece of code works fine on the other page, only different is that, that one is not in a loop. but that cant be the reason right?

i set timezone to America/New_York and $order['Order']['created'] is mysql timestamp.

var_dump on said variable

string(27) "2010-06-16 20:12:51" 

oh. $%#$ me. i was sanitizing output. it must have messed up the dashes and colons.