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angerbot
Mar 23, 2004

plob
When I was growing up, all through elementary school we would watch movies and read books about the Berenstein Bears. I still even remember the theme song for the TV show, mostly, which wasn't a song so much as a guy in a gruff bear voice speaking in rhyming couplets. If you don't know who the Berenstein Bears are, they were nuclear family of anthropomorphic bears who lived in a tree out in Bear Country and had family-based situational comedy and taught life lessons. And Ma Bear always wore a blue shower cap.

These bears appeared in a series of children books by the married Stan and Jan Berenstein, that later became a TV series, that got beamed to 3rd grade classrooms all over the country. Anyone between the ages of 23-30, and maybe more, will know who the Berenstein Bears are. And they will remember the flashy cursive bubble-letters on the front of every single book and in the opening credits of the show. The bubble letters that spelled out "Berenstein Bears".

About a year ago, Jan Berenstein passed on, as had Stan some time before. And appearing in headlines across the internet, I saw "Jan Berenstain Dies at 88".

BerenstAin.

They misspelled her name. In her obituary. Gosh, that's really just morbidly embarrassing. "Berenstain" doesn't even make sense.
When I caught this, I decided to send a correction about the article title. Jan Berenstein's bears were a huge part of my childhood, I owe her at least this. Except when I went to the internet to find a source for the name change correction, it turns out everyone has misspelled their name. And everyone has always misspelled her name.

And then I saw the book covers. The ones in the squiggly bubble letters from the childhood. The ones I saw a hundred times a month from the formative ages of 5 to 9. The ones that every 20-something in the world will tell you read "Berenstein Bears".

Except they don't read "Berenstein". They read "Berenstain".

They all say it. At first I thought they had changed their name. Maybe anti-semitic pressure lead them to spell their name differently? And then maybe they doctored the images of the cover to turn the original "e" in to an "a". Except as I read, I learned about people equally as shocked as I am, who ran to their parents house and dug up their own copies of the books and saw, to their own great terror, that the physical book itself no longer says "BerenstEin", but in fact says "BerenstAin", but more horrifying still is that it has always said "BerenstAin".
Stop the lies!

Here's the thing. These books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of whom clearly and distinctly remember "BerenstEin", that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the "BerenstEin Bears" when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc.

In 1992 they were "stEin" in 1992, but in 2012 they were "stAin" in 1992.

Some explanations have been proposed. One person suggested a change due to time travel, similar to "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury. It's an interesting theory, and I admire it for its simplicity, but it is flawed. Time travel doesn't actually work that way, and if someone had "stepped on a butterfly", it would not impact the future because they had already stepped on the butterfly before they left for the past; history has to be consistent.

I would like to make a modest proposal: We are all living in our own parallel universe.

There is at least one other universe parallel to our own. I will distinguish the two by the stEin universe and the stAin universe, depending on the surname of the creators of the famous children's book. The stEin universe was the world we resided in during the 1990s. Sometime after we all stopped reading kids books, that is when we were shifted in to the stAin universe. There may be more differences than just the surname of the Berenst_ins, in fact there almost certainly are more differences, and we just need to find them.

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Windows 98
Nov 13, 2005

HTTP 400: Bad post
Oh

Kuato
Feb 25, 2005

"I CAN'T BELIEVE I ATE THE WHOLE THING"
Buglord
It was always Berenstain in this timeline, I also recall a poster Angerbot SD with a female judge avatar, maybe you and he switched places some time ago, not unlike the X-Files episode where alternate universe Doggett dies.

psyopmonkey
Nov 15, 2008

by Lowtax
I for one welcome our new bear overlords.

Megiddo
Apr 27, 2004

Unicorns bite, but their bites feel GOOD.
This is the darkest Berenst_in timeline

The Whole Internet
May 26, 2010

by FactsAreUseless
Sometimes I lose track of which parallel universe I'm in. Is this the one where there are five lights? Or is it the one where Nelson Mandela died in prison?

Hell Yeah
Dec 25, 2012

i like you angerbeet but this post is too long

SpeedGem
Sep 19, 2012

by Ralp

angerbot posted:

When I was growing up, all through elementary school we would watch movies and read books about the Berenstein Bears. I still even remember the theme song for the TV show, mostly, which wasn't a song so much as a guy in a gruff bear voice speaking in rhyming couplets. If you don't know who the Berenstein Bears are, they were nuclear family of anthropomorphic bears who lived in a tree out in Bear Country and had family-based situational comedy and taught life lessons. And Ma Bear always wore a blue shower cap.

These bears appeared in a series of children books by the married Stan and Jan Berenstein, that later became a TV series, that got beamed to 3rd grade classrooms all over the country. Anyone between the ages of 23-30, and maybe more, will know who the Berenstein Bears are. And they will remember the flashy cursive bubble-letters on the front of every single book and in the opening credits of the show. The bubble letters that spelled out "Berenstein Bears".

About a year ago, Jan Berenstein passed on, as had Stan some time before. And appearing in headlines across the internet, I saw "Jan Berenstain Dies at 88".

BerenstAin.

They misspelled her name. In her obituary. Gosh, that's really just morbidly embarrassing. "Berenstain" doesn't even make sense.
When I caught this, I decided to send a correction about the article title. Jan Berenstein's bears were a huge part of my childhood, I owe her at least this. Except when I went to the internet to find a source for the name change correction, it turns out everyone has misspelled their name. And everyone has always misspelled her name.

And then I saw the book covers. The ones in the squiggly bubble letters from the childhood. The ones I saw a hundred times a month from the formative ages of 5 to 9. The ones that every 20-something in the world will tell you read "Berenstein Bears".

Except they don't read "Berenstein". They read "Berenstain".

They all say it. At first I thought they had changed their name. Maybe anti-semitic pressure lead them to spell their name differently? And then maybe they doctored the images of the cover to turn the original "e" in to an "a". Except as I read, I learned about people equally as shocked as I am, who ran to their parents house and dug up their own copies of the books and saw, to their own great terror, that the physical book itself no longer says "BerenstEin", but in fact says "BerenstAin", but more horrifying still is that it has always said "BerenstAin".
Stop the lies!

Here's the thing. These books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of whom clearly and distinctly remember "BerenstEin", that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the "BerenstEin Bears" when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc.

In 1992 they were "stEin" in 1992, but in 2012 they were "stAin" in 1992.

Some explanations have been proposed. One person suggested a change due to time travel, similar to "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury. It's an interesting theory, and I admire it for its simplicity, but it is flawed. Time travel doesn't actually work that way, and if someone had "stepped on a butterfly", it would not impact the future because they had already stepped on the butterfly before they left for the past; history has to be consistent.

I would like to make a modest proposal: We are all living in our own parallel universe.

There is at least one other universe parallel to our own. I will distinguish the two by the stEin universe and the stAin universe, depending on the surname of the creators of the famous children's book. The stEin universe was the world we resided in during the 1990s. Sometime after we all stopped reading kids books, that is when we were shifted in to the stAin universe. There may be more differences than just the surname of the Berenst_ins, in fact there almost certainly are more differences, and we just need to find them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4cFIzr85cU

Action Yak
Nov 9, 2008

I've heard this theory before and it's incredibly stupid. The simpler explanation is that we are much more used to seeing names with the suffix "-stein" and never see "-stain" outside of these books so our brain just fills in what we expect to see.

I know the OP isn't serious but some people are actually blown away by poo poo like this.

Edit: I mean, like they think the alternative universe thing is plausible, not the cool poo poo your brain does. You can be blown away by that.

Action Yak fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Oct 21, 2014

Junkfist
Oct 7, 2004

FRIEND?
Why is it so hard to keep Jews in prisons?

They eat lox.

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
i found this out a few days ago and was like "oh poo poo mind blown"

another example of your brain playing tricks on you

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)
I too, found it hard to believe it isn't Berenstein.

Maybe it can be if I want it to be.

Electric Charity
Mar 22, 2009
gabagool




spagool

a hole-y ghost
May 10, 2010

burhunschtine

Fuck Your Website
Nov 29, 2003
FUCK YOU, AND FUCK YOUR WEBSITE
Kids think all kindsa dumb poo poo

Just think, half of what's on your head right now is on the level on you knowing the name on something you saw every day for years

Your world is crumbling

Bits of your consciousness, falling away like tiles from a shuttle on reentry

Otto Von Jizzmark
Dec 27, 2004
The Koreans created their own version of the Bernstein bears called "the Korean bears"

Backweb
Feb 14, 2009

That was a good OP, angerbot. I remember back when I realized the spelling was different from how I pronounced it... I took a mental note and moved on. How foolish I was.

Mods please change my name to Backwab to fit with this parallel "A" universe. TIA. :)

Lightanchor
Nov 2, 2012
Criticism

The series has been called "syrupy", "unsatisfying", "infuriatingly formulaic", "hokey", "abominable", and "a little more than stern lectures dressed up as children's stories."[6][19][20][21]

In a 1989 editorial titled "Drown the Berenstain Bears", Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer lamented the popularity of the books, writing that "it is not just the smugness and complacency of the stories that is so irritating," but the bears themselves, particularly "the post-feminist Papa Bear, the Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman." He described Mama Bear as "the final flowering of the grade-school prissy, the one with perfect posture and impeccable handwriting...and now you have to visit her every night. The reason is, of course, that kids love them. My boy, 4, cannot get enough of these bears."[22]

The New York Times '​ Janet Maslin expressed similar sentiments in a 1988 review of the Berenstain Bears' video series, calling the bears "a thoroughly disagreeable bunch." Noting that "the nagging, scolding Mama Bear is a pillar of pettiness and conventionality" who "seems to care more about how the Bears' tree house looks than whether anyone is happy inside", she wrote, "Some viewers may find it a genuine relief when the cubs demolish Mama's favorite lamp."[23]

Upon the death of Stan Berenstain in 2005, the Washington Post published an "Appreciation" piece which many Post readers found surprisingly unappreciative in its tone. Written by Paul Farhi, who had previously rebuked the Berenstain Bears as the most popular example of a lamentable and misguided "self-help" genre aimed at children,[21] the 2005 piece revived his earlier sentiments:

The larger questions about the popularity of the Berenstain Bears are more troubling: Is this what we really want from children's books in the first place, a world filled with scares and neuroses and problems to be toughed out and solved? And if it is, aren't the Berenstain Bears simply teaching to the test, providing a lesson to be spit back, rather than one lived and understood and embraced? Where is the warmth, the spirit of discovery and imagination in Bear Country? Stan Berenstain taught a million lessons to children, but subtlety and plain old joy weren't among them.[15]

Subsequent letters from readers condemned Farhi for expressing such harshness toward the recently deceased; one wrote, "In the name of fairness, please be sure to allow the Berenstain family the opportunity to someday retort in Farhi's obituary."[24] Readers also defended the books' "warmth" and their enduring popularity among young children.[24][25]

Slate's Hanna Rosin revived Krauthammer's complaints, drawing criticism for writing of Jan Berenstain's death, "As any right-thinking mother will agree, good riddance. Among my set of mothers the series is known mostly as the one that makes us dread the bedtime routine the most." (Rosin subsequently apologized and admitted she "was not really thinking of [Berenstain] as a person with actual feelings and a family, just an abstraction who happened to write these books.")[26][27]

Trochanter
Sep 14, 2007

It ain't no sin
to take off your skin, And dance around in your bones!
I keep telling you guys, this is why the Jews did 9/11, to distract everyone from thinking THEY wrote those children's books!

Wait a sec... Angerbot's av isn't a cat in a fish costume... McCain's not the President?! We never invaded Kazakhstan?!? Oh god I've crossed over aga

Al Borland
Oct 29, 2006

by XyloJW
DId they have their own 9/11?

Sekkira
Apr 11, 2008

I Don't Get It,
I Don't Get It,

THIS IS NOT OVER

BEARS

Lightanchor
Nov 2, 2012

Saalkin
Jun 29, 2008


I more amazed that I read that whole drat post. Like, wow.

Sheng-Ji Yang
Mar 5, 2014


werent you a mod or something

Herstory Begins Now
Aug 5, 2003
SOME REALLY TEDIOUS DUMB SHIT THAT SUCKS ASS TO READ ->>
in first grade I got suspended for smashing some other kids head into a brick wall so he wouldn't take the last berenstein bears book that was left

not proud of that, but it was what it was

Backweb
Feb 14, 2009

The-Mole posted:

in first grade I got suspended for smashing some other kids head into a brick wall so he wouldn't take the last berenstein bears book that was left

not proud of that, but it was what it was

That's hardcore.

Do you remember what the book's lesson was?

Fur20
Nov 14, 2007

すご▞い!
君は働か░い
フ▙▓ズなんだね!

Backweb posted:

Do you remember what the book's lesson was?

prob something banal like "don't poo poo outdoors in public"

the berenstain bears & the dook dropper

Al Cowens
Aug 11, 2004

by WE B Bourgeois
Mangostain

GenderSelectScreen
Mar 7, 2010

I DON'T KNOW EITHER DON'T ASK ME
College Slice
I had a book that my mom had bought from a garage sale where the lady had crossed out what Mama Bear had said about a rainbow and replaced the dialogue with "Because God made it." :wtc:

Spider Helidon
Nov 4, 2010

by XyloJW
Dude, that's nothing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby

quote:

The hat's name derives from the stage adaptation of George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby; a hat of this style was worn in the first London production of the play, and promptly came to be called "a Trilby hat"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora

quote:

The word fedora comes from the title of an 1882 play by dramatist Victorien Sardou, Fédora, written for Sarah Bernhardt.[3] The play was first performed in the United States in 1889. Bernhardt played Princess Fédora, the heroine of the play. During the play, Bernhardt wore a center-creased, soft brimmed hat.

These are both clear examples of the Time Monks having to stitch history back together after some kind of cataclysm.

Zanzibar Ham
Mar 17, 2009

You giving me the cold shoulder? How cruel.


Grimey Drawer
I'm a native to this parallel universe, I always knew it as Berenstain.

I know that papa bear was a racist in one book, but was he ever a homophobe?

Seizure Meat
Jul 23, 2008

by Smythe

Mehuyael posted:

I'm a native to this parallel universe, I always knew it as Berenstain.

I know that papa bear was a racist in one book, but was he ever a homophobe?

you never read Berenstain Bears and the Great Queer Beat-Down?

dude did it for God, that's a pious papa bear

DrManiac
Feb 29, 2012

Didn't the later books get super conservative or something?

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


Books about cleaning your room and not eating too many sweets are rightist propaganda, and I reject your bourgeois morality.

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


That's what I told my grandma when she tried to shovel me that poo poo on my 8th birthday.

Chrpno
Apr 17, 2006

kicked in the DICK

Pochoclo
Feb 4, 2008

No...
Clapping Larry
El Psy Congroo

Hollis Brownsound
Apr 2, 2009

by Lowtax

angerbot posted:

When I was growing up, all through elementary school we would watch movies and read books about the Berenstein Bears. I still even remember the theme song for the TV show, mostly, which wasn't a song so much as a guy in a gruff bear voice speaking in rhyming couplets. If you don't know who the Berenstein Bears are, they were nuclear family of anthropomorphic bears who lived in a tree out in Bear Country and had family-based situational comedy and taught life lessons. And Ma Bear always wore a blue shower cap.

These bears appeared in a series of children books by the married Stan and Jan Berenstein, that later became a TV series, that got beamed to 3rd grade classrooms all over the country. Anyone between the ages of 23-30, and maybe more, will know who the Berenstein Bears are. And they will remember the flashy cursive bubble-letters on the front of every single book and in the opening credits of the show. The bubble letters that spelled out "Berenstein Bears".

About a year ago, Jan Berenstein passed on, as had Stan some time before. And appearing in headlines across the internet, I saw "Jan Berenstain Dies at 88".

BerenstAin.

They misspelled her name. In her obituary. Gosh, that's really just morbidly embarrassing. "Berenstain" doesn't even make sense.
When I caught this, I decided to send a correction about the article title. Jan Berenstein's bears were a huge part of my childhood, I owe her at least this. Except when I went to the internet to find a source for the name change correction, it turns out everyone has misspelled their name. And everyone has always misspelled her name.

And then I saw the book covers. The ones in the squiggly bubble letters from the childhood. The ones I saw a hundred times a month from the formative ages of 5 to 9. The ones that every 20-something in the world will tell you read "Berenstein Bears".

Except they don't read "Berenstein". They read "Berenstain".

They all say it. At first I thought they had changed their name. Maybe anti-semitic pressure lead them to spell their name differently? And then maybe they doctored the images of the cover to turn the original "e" in to an "a". Except as I read, I learned about people equally as shocked as I am, who ran to their parents house and dug up their own copies of the books and saw, to their own great terror, that the physical book itself no longer says "BerenstEin", but in fact says "BerenstAin", but more horrifying still is that it has always said "BerenstAin".
Stop the lies!

Here's the thing. These books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of whom clearly and distinctly remember "BerenstEin", that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the "BerenstEin Bears" when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc.

In 1992 they were "stEin" in 1992, but in 2012 they were "stAin" in 1992.

Some explanations have been proposed. One person suggested a change due to time travel, similar to "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury. It's an interesting theory, and I admire it for its simplicity, but it is flawed. Time travel doesn't actually work that way, and if someone had "stepped on a butterfly", it would not impact the future because they had already stepped on the butterfly before they left for the past; history has to be consistent.

I would like to make a modest proposal: We are all living in our own parallel universe.

There is at least one other universe parallel to our own. I will distinguish the two by the stEin universe and the stAin universe, depending on the surname of the creators of the famous children's book. The stEin universe was the world we resided in during the 1990s. Sometime after we all stopped reading kids books, that is when we were shifted in to the stAin universe. There may be more differences than just the surname of the Berenst_ins, in fact there almost certainly are more differences, and we just need to find them.

I guess I've got to be the one the say it: hosed up if true OP, also I'm gay I guess.

Chrpno
Apr 17, 2006

HollisBrown posted:

I guess I've got to be the one the say it: hosed up if true OP, also I'm gay I guess.

Did anyone say "same"

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Light Gun Man
Oct 17, 2009

toEjaM iS oN
vaCatioN




Lipstick Apathy

Pochoclo posted:

El Psy Congroo

Berensteins;gate

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