Showing posts with label Berenstein Bears. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berenstein Bears. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Effective Mandela Theory


There are at least hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of people around the world who were shocked to hear that Nelson Mandela died recently.  Their shock wasn't that a world-famous civil rights advocate had passed away.  They were shocked because they thought
the man had died thirty years ago!

According to an impressively large number of people, Nelson Mandela originally died back in the 80s when he was in prison.  They remember seeing it on the news and hearing about riots that broke out all across South Africa.  It's a very specific memory, and a lot of people share it.  It didn't happen (apparently, anyway), but thousands and thousands of people insist on remembering Mandela's death in prison and the resultant riots, and their accounts are fairly uniform (as uniform as memories ever are, anyway).

Now, people misremember things all the time.  And usually, people can be pretty stubborn about what they remember, especially when it's two memories against each other.  But when presented with something like every single newspaper ever printed that contradicts their claims, most people relent and admit that they're wrong.  With Nelson Mandela's death, the people who swear he died earlier believe this memory so strongly that they will not let go of it, despite being contradicted by every relevant fact in existence.  It isn't because they're just that stubborn, or that stupid.  The memory has a certain quality to it.  For whatever reason, their brain refuses to discard it.

This sort of phenomenon has become known (for better or worse) as the Mandela Effect.  It is when a large number of people share and insist on a fairly cohesive counterfactual memory.

Monday, June 23, 2014

On the Berenstein Bears Switcheroo


Two years ago, I wrote a post about one of the icons of my childhood, the Berenstein Bears.  Except, as I learned, they aren't called the Berenstein Bears.  As it turns out, they're the Berenstain Bears.

BerenstAin.  With an "A".

My mind was blown.  I had very distinct memories of the bears.  I grew up reading their books and watching them on TV in school, and remember how it used to be spelled.  I tried to figure out when the name had changed.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Berenstein Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe

if only facebook would make this the preview photoWhen 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.