A note on the pronunciation of āBerenstain Bearsā
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 asĀ āBerenstein Bearsā with theĀ āeiā pronounced with a longĀ āeā 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:Ā 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 McDonaldās happy meal and hearing a commercial advertising this promotion.
I suspect this is the first time I heard the nameĀ āBerenstain Bearsā 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 hearĀ āBerenstain Bearsā: 0:19, 0:22, and 0:28.
The third time is a generic narrator who pronounces theĀ āaiā clearly as a longĀ āaā, but the first two are a voice apparently meant to represent the father bear.
He uses a distinctively twangy, vowel-poor accent that makes theĀ āaiā sound like the longĀ āeā 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 sayingĀ āBerenstainā 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 bearsā surname in-universe is not Berenstain or Berenstein but just Bear:Ā https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Berenstain_Bears_(1985_TV_series)_episodes
āBerenstain Bearā apparently refers to the entire species or to an ethnic group within the species, though they also refer to themselves asĀ āGrizzliesā.
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, theĀ āaiā sounds like the same twangy long āeā.
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 āBerenstainā, 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 Berenstainās surname as āBerensteinā even when he was still a child (Wikipediaās 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 bearās voice actor, Brian Cummings (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0191858/) was under the impression that the pronunciation involved a longĀ āeā.
While my first impression was that he was trying to sayĀ āBerenstainā with an accent that distorted the longĀ āaā, he pronounces longĀ āaās 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 withĀ āBerensteinā than withĀ āBerenstainā would have gone a long way toward nudging childrenās memories of how it was pronounced and thus how it should be spelled toward the former over the latter.
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.
vaporwave
germansingergirl
annaxmalina
areudirty
