It wasn’t until today, some 40 to 45 years later that I realized they got the name for Yogi Bear from Yogi Berra. I guess I’m not smarter than the average bear.
The cast o Glee is on Oprah tomorrow, Wednesday April 7th. The TV ad promoting the show start the “Wednesday” with the hand signal “W” used for Winner, which the show is.
They denied getting the name from Yogi Berra, but does anyone find that to be plausible? I’m sure it wasn’t based on his character, but there’s no way they didn’t borrow the name.
We discussed this in another thread. Hanna and Barbera probably denied taking the name from Yogi Berra to avoid getting sued. Berra probably decided that it wasn’t worth the bother suing them, since he found it to be good publicity. My memory from childhood was that everybody knew what the name Yogi Bear was based on.
I’ve got you beat for obliviousness. I was dragged to see “some old jazz dude” in college. Hey, I’m a rock ‘n’ roll guy, but this Brubeck character wasn’t bad…
But I didn’t like all the hecklers. I mean, yelling at this guy to take a break? That’s just rude.
**(Yeah, a good chunk of the audience would randomly call out “Take Five!”)
**
ps: Annie, thanks for resurrecting an always-appropriate thread.
Everybody has “known” a lot of things that were wrong. Did they ever posit a reasonable alternative explanation or did they just deny that Bear was based on Berra?
“There are many alleged lyrics to the ‘Winkie Chant’ performed by the Witch’s guards, including ‘All we own, we owe her’, ‘Oh we love the old one’, and ‘Oh we loathe the old one’. However, the correct version, seen in the film’s screenplay, is ‘O-Ee-Yah! Eoh-Ah!’ and any other interpretations are simply the result of the listener’s mind treating the chant as an audio ink blot.”
Not the last word but it’s pretty much the same as the Yogi Bear/Yogi Berra situation: too close to be a coincidence but the actual namers will never admit that. In the case of the candy bar, the company claimed that it was named after “Baby Ruth” Cleveland, Grover Cleveland’s daughter who was something of a media sensation at the time of her birth.
But Ruth Cleveland was born in 1891 (and died in 1904). Babe Ruth the baseball player signed with the Yankees in 1919 and quickly became a celebrity. And the Curtiss Candy Company decided to rename one of their candy bars Baby Ruth in 1921. So you have to ask, were they naming it after the most famous athlete in the country or after a minor deceased celebrity whose fame has occurred thirty years earlier?
I finally realized one of the things that makes The Princess Bride such a great movie.
I’ve heard a lot of interviews with actors who say that it’s most fun to play bad guys. And those really are great roles, sometimes; all the yelling and plotting and scheming. Alan Rickman was great in Die Hard, and every comic book or James Bond movie usually has a juicy role for the head villian. They get the lines that everyone remembers and quotes; “no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” (Were there even any good guys in Pulp Fiction?) I suspect it’s been that way for as long as their have been mustaches to twirl.
The Princess Bride is the only movie I can think of that gives all the great lines to the good guys. Prince Humperdinck and Count Rugen are pretty thankless roles. The Albino has only one scene, really. Vizzini is great, but is dead soon enough. Think about all the great characters and memorable, quotable lines from The Princess Bride, and it’s always the good guys.
I really can’t think of another movie that does that.
There’s a singer I like who does a song called You’re No Good. I don’t think it gets requested very often.