I don’t think so. Probably would’ve been able to name the rat, though.
Did the wife’s mistake cause her husband to be located?
Correct; if she’d just swapped in the word ‘rat’ for the word ‘bear’, it would’ve been unhelpful by dint of being unremarkable, location-wise.
Were the stories about the bear set in any relevant real-world location?
Were the stories about the rat set in any relevant real-world location?
Does the bear’s name include the word “Bear”? “Grizzly”? “Kodiak”? “Bruin”? Any other word indicating species?
Does the rat’s name include the word “rat”? Any other word indicating species?
I think “stories” would be waaay too generous.
Only in a Kermit-The-Frog sense.
Well, not the word “rat”, no; but you’re right that something of the sort is going on with the rat’s name — though not enough to narrow it down to a suggestion of rats instead of, say, mice.
Yes, that’s what I mean. Kermit the Frog’s name includes the word “frog”. Does this bear’s name include any of those words?
Per TV Tropes and the relevant wiki, no, it looks like nothing bearish is actually part of the name.
Are they toys? Ventriloquist dummys? Do they appear in sketch or stand-up comedy? Used in advertising? Part of a theme park ride? Used in education?
Not to my knowledge.
Not to my knowledge.
…you could say that, yeah.
Well, yes.
No.
Just entertainment, as far as I know.
…I’ve googled it, and both the bear and the rat have apparently gotten the ‘toy’ treatment. (I’d say it’s not what they’re known for; this isn’t like the quip about how the GI Joe cartoon was just a half-hour ad for the action-figure line, or some such. But, yes, technically, toys were made.)
The Charmin bears?
Nope.
So, the wife mentions a bear in a letter/email, and that leads the authorities to know where the husband is? e.g. “Larry saw a brown bear last week, looked just like the one in that coffee ad”-> cops realise Larry is hiding out in his log cabin in Alaska and not his safe house in New Mexico?
Are the bear and rat animatronic?
Restaurant related?
Yes!!!
Are we talking Chuck E Cheese vs. ShowBiz Pizza?
So, to wrap this up — because Cheesesteak clearly has all of the moving parts in place, and it’d be absurd to give it to anyone else once it got googleable — he went on the run, wife and kid in tow, deciding to hide out in Virginia; his wife eventually wrote a letter to her mom, explaining that, hey, sorry we can’t see you, but we’re happy and healthy and just took the kid and a pal “to one of those pizza places like I used to go to at home with video games”, adding that he was thrilled when “the bear brought out his birthday cake & sang him a song”.
Larry made sure the letter got mailed from a state thousands of miles away, and demonstrably had nothing against changing up a detail or two; the problem is, neither he nor his wife realized that mentioning “the bear” was weird. Mentioning “the rat” would’ve, what, meant they’re not too far from a Chuck E Cheese? That’s not really helpful; the cops can narrow their location down to “uh, maybe California, possibly New York; could be any number of states in between; wait, how about Hawaii? Can we at least say ‘somewhere in the United States’, or is Canada in play? Is this any help, or is this basically just We-Went-To-A-McDonald’s?”
But that bit about “the bear” — see, that got the cops asking, uh, is there, say, a pizza place with animatronic puppets (a) that’s pretty much just like Chuck E Cheese, (b) except, instead of “a rat”, they have a bear? Uh-huh. Clad in overalls, you say? Well, that narrows it down like crazy…
Asking as an ignorant foreigner, I take it that there is, and it’s very local?
Not very local. It was a national chain in the U.S. Just like Chuck E. Cheese. It was just considerably smaller. The two came out of the same parent company, but were run as completely independent companies. Until Chuck E. Cheese bought Showbiz, or Showbiz bought Chuck. I don’t really remember. But they shut all the Showbiz down or rebranded them as Chuck.
Really, the whole story is just full of epic corporate weirdness. I only remember the vaguest of the history of them, but I think Wikipedia has the full details.