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The Berenstein Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe
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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| Courtney Gains |
Honestly, I had a kid, so you watch the movies your kids want to watch. I'm also a producer, so when I watch movies, I look at them from the genre they are, the budget they had, and the time they had to produce it. That's how I evaluate their success. |
| Ambrose Bierce |
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. |