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[adamgcraig]

Last post of pictures from the Jeffrey Deitch Tokyo Pop Underground exhibit.

There is a lot more to see, but a lot of it is NSFW.

Go see it for yourself: http://deitch.com/los-angeles/exhibitions/tokyo-pop-underground

[adamgcraig]

More from the Tokyo Pop Underground exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, ongoing through January 18: http://deitch.com/los-angeles/exhibitions/tokyo-pop-underground

[adamgcraig]

Tokyo Pop Underground exhibit at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in LA:

http://deitch.com/los-angeles/info

[adamgcraig]

80s Gainax vs 2000s Gainax

Panthers & Pocket Panthers

Via Trastorno Nocturno

[adamgcraig]

More EYM fund-raising

This has something to do with the Golden Globe awards, but I cannot follow all the show-business jargon:

https://www.charitybuzz.com/catalog_items/get-all-of-swag-from-gbks-golden-globes-gifting-suite-1951800

[adamgcraig]

A note on the pronunciation of “Berenstain Bears”

I recently started watching the Angry Video Game Nerd on Youtube.

This evening, I saw the episode where he reviews the Berenstain Bears video games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB3CybXl8rs).

He references how he and many others remember the name as “Berenstein Bears” with the “ei” pronounced with a long ‘e’ sound.

That is also how I remembered it, and I think I heard about this as a subject of contention before, but I did not give it any further thought at the time.

See Wikipedia for a brief description of the controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain_Bears#Name_confusion

Hearing about it again, however, something occurred to me: Even when I was in kindergarten and elementary school, I the Berenstain Bears failed to capture my interest.

I am reasonably sure I never made a concerted effort to learn how their names were spelled or pronounced and never asked my parents to read their books to me.

There is only one context in which their moralizing, bucolic, pseudo-old-timey, killer-cyborg-less antics would have held my attention: in conjunction with greasy fried foods.

I quite clearly remembered getting a Berenstain Bears toy with a McDonald’s happy meal and hearing a commercial advertising this promotion.

I suspect this is the first time I heard the name “Berenstain Bears” pronounced aloud.*

At the time of this writing, a commercial from the right time-period matching what I remember of it is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H855OPGgr48.

Note the three instances where we hear “Berenstain Bears”: 0:19, 0:22, and 0:28.

The third time is a generic narrator who pronounces the “ai” clearly as a long ‘a’, but the first two are a voice apparently meant to represent the father bear.

He uses a distinctively twangy, vowel-poor accent that makes the “ai” sound like the long ‘e’ that I remember mixed with a subtle gulp or glottal stop.

To check whether this was just a fluke, I wanted to find more instances of the bears themselves saying “Berenstain” and so checked whether there was a TV series and whether I could find an episode where they would be likely to introduce themselves to others.

While there was a TV series, the bears’ surname in-universe is not Berenstain or Berenstein but just Bear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Berenstain_Bears_(1985_TV_series)_episodes

“Berenstain Bear” apparently refers to the entire species or to an ethnic group within the species, though they also refer to themselves as “Grizzlies”.

Whatever it means, the only other place I could find where a character pronounces it is in the opening (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxN-dGgeNDY), where again it is either the father bear or the whole family in chorus.

In either case, the “ai” sounds like the same twangy long ‘e’.

I do not care enough to wade through every minute of every episode or hunt for more fourth-wall-breaking commercials or TV specials to find every instance where a bear character pronounces “Berenstain”, but this is at least one possible source from which children in the 1980s might have gotten the impression that the name was pronounced Bare-un-steen.

This by no means shows that it was the origin of the misconception; the Wikipedia article section on the matter linked above reports that people were misspelling Stan Berenstain’s surname as “Berenstein” even when he was still a child (Wikipedia’s source for this: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/its-berenstain-like-coffee-stain-or-jello-stain-one-berenstain-bears-author-rejects-parallel-universe-theory).

It may even be that the father bear’s voice actor, Brian Cummings (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0191858/) was under the impression that the pronunciation involved a long ‘e’.

While my first impression was that he was trying to say “Berenstain” with an accent that distorted the long ‘a’, he pronounces long ‘a’s in other words normally.

Even so, hearing one of the bears routinely pronounce the name in a way that could easily be heard as more consistent with “Berenstein” than with “Berenstain” would have gone a long way toward nudging children’s memories of how it was pronounced and thus how it should be spelled toward the former over the latter.

*Tangent:

This is probably not the only time, since teachers were fond of reading these books in class.

Some such case where I was a captive audience is probably the source of my second clear memory of them, a book in which the mother bear and a doctor take the father and children to task for eating too much junk food.

This is not germane to my main point; I am merely offering it as further testimony to the power of cholesterol to cement things in my memory as well as in my arteries.

The implications of using the same characters to decry fast food consumption in one instance and promote it in another are beyond the scope of this text.

[adamgcraig]

Supporting Educating Young Minds

I am posting a link to the non-profit where I worked from 2007 to 2014.

If anyone is looking for organizations to support for Giving Tuesday, please consider them.

They provide low-cost after-school tutoring, Summer school, weekend SAT prep, and mentoring to inner-city K-12 students from diverse backgrounds, mostly African-American.

They are also developing accessnoexcuse.org, an online portal with various educational resources.

http://www.educatingyoungminds.org/donation.html

[adamgcraig]

In which season does he turn into a gold-colored, hair-standing-straight-up version of this?

That’s a very late premiere, but apparently this “season” will only be 10 episodes. The way the article’s written also suggests that this season will only stream on Funimation’s service…