Very weird theory that I found on the Internet

originally posted by: peter vlar
Like most of the rest of you, I always remembered it as BerenstEin which is sad because I watch the show all the time with my 6 year old. I still didn't want to believe it, even after reading the comment from the son of the creators in the OP link so I went searching. And I found one that belonged to my wife or her sister when they were kids. So here are a couple of photos and the copy write date for this run/printing is 1985 so it was probably my sister in-law's who was 5 at the time. Photos are Front cover:

front cover close up on BerenstAin

inside panel copy write date

Since we are on page 9 and people are still insisting that it has to be a conspiracy because they remember it being spelled BerenstEin, this is a 29 year old book from my wife's childhood that was given to my kids by my father in law. The cover clearly shows that for at least the past 30 years the spelling has been BerenstAin. I realize the books were first printed in the early 60's so the books I have at my house are from the middle of the production run but unless someone can produce a physical copy of a book with the alternate universe spelling I think the entire hypothesis is sorely lacking in evidence aside from anecdotal groupthink.

a reply to: peter vlar

I don't think anybody is disputing that there are Berenstain books out there. I thought we were looking for evidence that there were Berenstein books at some point.

However, star (again) for taking the time to provide the photos, and keeping the thread interesting

originally posted by: jacygirl

Well I found this after much searching...doesn't appear to be photo-shopped to me....?

I'm heading out now, and will be looking for old books. I will report back later with my findings.

Peace out!
jacygirl

I've already ran this photo through foto forensics...It was indeed photoshopped...that's the only reason I haven'tposted it...

Here is the foto forensics
(I won't stop looking for others though)
A2D

originally posted by: Axial Leader
AND ONE MORE note (because I can't leave this topic alone, sorry) I frankly always thought is was BERNSTEIN Bears -- now I find it is "BEREN" instead of "BERN" and also "STAIN" instead of "STEIN", so I am just really disillusioned at my spelling ability altogether.

Haha, I did not notice that it is spelled BEREN until you pointed it out. I kept reading it Bernstain for the first three pages. Even though this is about the spelling.

That sort of proof your point, really.

a reply to: peter vlar We are from two different worlds afterall.

This is almost like the Cadbury egg. They shrunk the heck out of it, then made a commercial saying "We did not shrink the cadbury egg, you got bigger"

a reply to: Agree2Disagree

Is it just me or does that picture of the BB kinda remind you of being an innocent type of The Simpsons? For me a precursor to The Simpsons.

originally posted by: NarcolepticBuddha
a reply to: peter vlar

I don't think anybody is disputing that there are Berenstain books out there. I thought we were looking for evidence that there were Berenstein books at some point.

However, star (again) for taking the time to provide the photos, and keeping the thread interesting

I almost hope someone does find one haha. Like I said, I always remembered it as berenstEin and have even watched the cartoon within the last 5 days or so. I wouldn't believe it until I snuck into my daughters room while she was sleeping to look for one of the books to see for myself. Thus the pictures and my continued astonishment that for the nearly 4 decades I've been reading I was oblivious to the proper spelling prior to this thread. I asked my wife to spell it earlier and she gave the stEin spelling as well and had to show her the book because she thought I was nuts.

a reply to: peter vlar

I did find a photo of 3 BerenstEin books...but I can't figure out if it's photoshopped or not...I haven't seen any of the typical photoshop-tells while viewing and running it through fotoforensics...but that doesn't mean I didn't miss something....

A2D

originally posted by: thisguy27
woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.ca...

That kind of #s with my mind.

Like, what if the people who remember the -stein way are different than those who remember it as -stain

Or this guy is crazy as #.

What do you guys think?

I don't like you thisguy27. All day I have been thinking about this at work. Tomorrow I'm going to visit this old bookstore down the street from where I live and hopefully they have a copy of one of the books that was not affected by this parallel universe bovine scatology. I'm off to get a !!

Chiming in with a late vote for the Stein camp.

I didn't read or watch these as a kid was introduced as an adult when my daughter watched them. I distinctly remember thinking of the name as beer in steins, as I like beer lol.

Kinda looks like it points to to realities passing through each other, both ending up with a mix of each other. Which could explain the concrete memories of both sides of the discussion, perhaps were both right?

This merits looking into, as something this mundane surfaced surely there will be other inconsistancies out there. As evidence builds, perhaps the case will become undeniable.

They used to read this to us in school all the time. I swear I remember it being Berenstein.

Obviously, we aren't living in a parallel universe, it is just weird.

I'm hoping that if we did go to the past to change something, the name of a children's TV show isn't one of the top things on the list.

Another weird one is "Cats in Craddle" rock song, ask anyone who loves that song who sang it, they'll say Cat Stevens, but he actually didn't sing it (familiar voice and "Cat" Stevens and "Cats" in the craddle probably are to blame). Even people from the sixties get this wrong.

a reply to: filosophia

Maybe a little off topic but a true classic

m.youtube.com...

a reply to: NarcolepticBuddha

I agree with you. How can it possibly be "stupid" if so many VIVIDLY remember it being spelled "Stein"? If it were just a few folks, then one could dismiss it entirely to faulty logic/memory. But the more I looked into it last night, this seems to be really widespread. It's also generally the older people who remember the "Stein".

I am not sure it is possible this many people are dead wrong.

I am not really into time slips/shift, alternate universes, etc. (not to say it isn't possible, but I don't have enough proof personally to buy it or sell it) so I can not claim one of these theories is the cause, but it seems to be legitimate nonetheless.

There are other events that a vast number of people also remember that others do not. As in there being 52 states, Mandella dying more than once, etc. The Stein confusion is just one of many.

I don't know the reason we remember it the way we do.... we just do. I don't think we are wrong or crazy. The ones that never remember it being Stein probably do wonder about our state of mind, but I think it's wrong to be labeled negatively because of that.

a reply to: johnwilkesbooth

The way our government works? That may be the only thing we changed.

i remember it as Berenstain bears. My grandparents had one of their books, can't remember the name, but it was one that i'd always see when i spent time with them. The cover of the book had yellow, cursive writing and the outer area of the book was purple. i remember always being unsure of how to pronounce their name, people would say Berenstein, but the "A" made me think it should have been pronounced Beren-stain.

This isn't a matter of manipulated time, it's a matter of nearly everyone being familiar with "stein": Einstein, Frakenstein, Epstein, Stein, etc. What's happening here is that many of us became familiar with hearing "stein" when our parents, teachers, grandparents, guardians, read it to us. I doubt many of us read the cover, nor did we care to, because we wanted to read the story, so we never took the time to see how the name was/is spelled. On top of that, the name was generally in cursive writing (unless I'm wrong) and not all children were savvy in reading basic print, let alone cursive. Many kids probably thought the cursive A looked like a cursive E. Now someone mentions being surprised that it was Berenstain all along, not Berenstein, and argues that time was manipulated because everyone remembers it as Berenstein, and everyone starts agreeing that it really was Berenstein.

It's easy to convince people of something this trivial when the memory is 15+ years old. Memories are faulty. A memory that old, especially a memory of a kid who paid little attention to the writing of a book and more to the pictures, isn't going to be accurate. Kids don't pay attention to the covers of books or author's names, neither do adults. When is the last time you picked up a book and studied the title or author's name for more than a few seconds?

This reminds me of the time i realized the author Danielle Steele's name is spelled Danielle and not Daniel. For some reason my mind always skipped over the "le" in her name. A friend of mine also thought it was always Daniel and not Danielle. i didn't pay attention to the name. It was a name i saw once, quickly, and never cared to really look at the name again until years later. It was odd to see the name was different than what i had thought for so long, but not once did my mind jump to "someone has manipulated time!" It never was Daniel, it was always Danielle. Berenstain has always been Berenstain.

originally posted by: DenyObfuscation
This is interesting

It's Seuss! He created the rift! We have to stop the creation of the time-machine! But we have to build one to go back and stop it.

woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.ca...

"I normally don't comment on blogs about our family name but yours was so unusual and imaginative that I thought it only appropriate to add my thoughts. "Berenstain" according to our family lore was an attempt by an unknown imigration officer sometime in the late 1800s to reproduce phonetically a highly accented version of the tradtional Jewish name "Bernstein" as pronounced by my Father's grandparents when they came to America from the Ukraine.
In that linguistic region, the name tended to come out sounding something like, "Ber'nsheytn". Since that's how the name was originally documented, it has always been spelled that way by our family and it has always been misread and mispronounced by nearly everyone. It has always been "The BerenstAin Bears". Your parallel reality theory is very resourceful but, unfortunately, by applying Occam's razor, we arrive at the explanation that most people have just misread the name.
Mike Berenstain (Son of Stan and Jan)"

I always remember it being the "Berenstein" Bears and that's what everyone called the books whenever we would skim over them at my elementary school's library. My mind was literally blown today whenever I saw that it is spelled "Berenstain" on the books as that's almost illogical for me. Almost. Most of our initial exposures to these books were as small children. If one person misreads the name and pronounces it to something they're more accustomed to, then we're going to pronounce it the same way and just assume that it has always been spelled that way instead of with the a in the place of the e.

I don't really buy the Mandella Theory and I think this is mostly just a case of mistaken identity in most cases. It's always something that people that experience it "vaguely" or "barely" remember from years upon years ago. The way the years fly by and the amount of things that occur in one's life, it's easy to become confused and combine information together that does not fit. Memory is a very strange thing indeed. We never quite remember something the same way each time.

It has also been shown before that false memory can be easily planted within the subconscious. This was done in an experiment where an adult and their parent were asked if the child were ever lost at a shopping mall whenever they were young. Certain emotions were also attached to this notion. The participants had a night to think about it and offspring began falsifying a memory of a time they were left alone in a mall or store and the parent even began believing it too. They even had to have therapy sessions for some of these people afterward after they had discovered that that in fact never really happened because they were absolutely traumatized.

Back to the bears though, I think because we've all always heard "Stein" then our minds have always filled in that "e" instead of the "a" to make things nice and logical for us because the brain hates chaos and disorganization. It tries its best to weed out things that don't belong. An example would be how you perceive sight. You can see an entire room directly in front of you whenever you look forward, yes? Did you know that right now, your brain is cutting out the image of your nose and instead fusing together other images to fill in the space? Your eyes ALWAYS see your nose. You just don't realize it. The brain is trying to keep things nice and tidy.