Chapter 2

"Maureen," I asked her right from the start of our conversation, "was it just me, or was Bad News Bear really the worst thing you've ever watched in your entire life?"

"Worst doesn't begin to cover it. Sometimes there are bad shows that are really almost kind-of fun to watch, being awful but in an interesting or amusing sort of way, but Bear was completely different. Terrible in the very worst way, not just merely bad ... but really something actually evil."

"And you've watched them all, all eight of them? I've only seen the original pilot."

"Lucky you. No, I've seen them all. My older sister just loved the show and she'd watch them over and over again when we were kids in Korea ... and she usually made me watch them with her too."

"She loved the show? How odd ... but you didn't."

"Not at all. I think she liked the fact that watching the show made me cry. In fact, I think she liked to play the tapes and force me to watch them just so that she could enjoy watching me cry. She'd laugh then ... and laugh so hard that she'd roll right off the sofa."

"My pardons for saying this, but well it sounds like your sister was a complete bitch."

"She didn't used to be ... but now think she became one, just from watching the show. We used to be close, but after Korea..." Maureen's voice trailed off and I'm sure that I could now hear her sniffle. Already our discussion of Bad News Bear was bringing back lots of old bad memories that we'd both worked really hard at burying.

"So it's not just my imagination ... the cartoon was actually something genuinely evil then?"

"Worse!" Maureen emphatically insisted, "it destroyed both my sister and then my father and it did it's best to destroy me too ... and sometimes I think that it nearly succeeded."

"But it's just a cartoon," I insisted, more to play devil's advocate than for any real purpose of actual disagreement, "a cheaply drawn piece of Asian produced media-crap with lousy English dubbing done by the cheapest bidder. Just crap ... it has to be."

"No," she insisted, "it was pure evil – drawn by the devil himself to reflect the sort of world that he wants us to create, a place were wrong is better than right, evil is better than good, and the strong should do unto the weak whatever the fuck they want to because there are no real consequences in life. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!"

Maureen was serious. Completely, absolutely, dead serious. I'd only seen that pilot cartoon once ... but that had been enough for me. She'd seen all eight episodes – repeatedly. This was something that I needed to understand better, for my own piece of mind, and already what we were discussing was a bit too personal and intimate for thrashing about over the phone.

I thought that we needed to meet and the sooner the better. Maureen felt otherwise and then immediately hung up the phone on me. She hadn't given me her home number and my cell phone just indicated that the incoming number she had called from was a blocked private number that couldn't be auto-redialed back.

This, apparently, was the end of it, I thought with about equal amounts of hope and dread. Bruin Bear could (and probably should) stay dead inside of my heart forever, I insisted to myself. I'd didn't want or need to know exactly what was on those other seven video tapes. No ... I really didn't!

At least this was what I kept telling myself over the next few days until Maureen suddenly called me back with an arrangement for us to meet together for coffee this next Saturday afternoon.

I was frantic by then, unable to sleep and barely able to concentrate on my job. All I could think about was Bad News Bear. Was my childhood memory of watching that pilot episode even real? Had it really happened the way I now remembered it?

Also was it really true that this cheap-ass Korean cartoon had destroyed virtually every life it had touched? I not only wanted to know ... I now needed to know! Memories I'd either forgotten or had repressed were now stuck in my mind, looping endless and I needed to know if what I was recalling was true ... or if I was now starting to go mad as well!

We made final confirmations for the meeting at a decent roadside diner just on the New York side of Edison, New Jersey. She lived about a half hour away further west in Somerville, so the drive there was about equally convenient for us both. Now, with growing apprehension, I just prayed that Maureen would actually show up.

Maureen hadn't wanted to come, but she had. I recognized her instantly even though I'd never even seen a photo of her. She resembled exactly to a 'T' my preexisting mental image of her that I'd formed from the basis of our phone conversations. I was expecting a mousy plain-ish sort of woman closer in actual age to forty than thirty-five, but her appearance would project to be at least five years older. Probably the sort of woman who never wore makeup, never bothered to have her hair or nails done and certainly never had any passing acquaintance with anything resembling 'stylishness'.

If anything, even these minimal expectations were optimistic. Maureen might have been of average height but from the way that her shoulders slouched she appeared to be at least several inches shorter. The hang-dog sort of manner in which she held her head down with her face mostly obscured by the bangs of her limp stringy sort of brown hair didn't help her slumped posture either. As for fashion sense, true to my expectations she didn't display any. Her jeans and sneakers were old and not especially clean and the less said about her shapeless dark grey sweatshirt the better. She was bra-less underneath, habitually I would surmise due to the apparent sagginess of what ought to have been otherwise perfectly acceptable medium sized breasts. Maureen apparently had little interest in displaying herself to any sort of advantage.

I waved at her from my corner booth and her first instinct was to freeze up. Her fight or flight instinct was triggering now with the stress of meeting a near-complete stranger and I could tell that flight was winning the race by several lengths. She turned to leave, but froze up again once her hand touched the diner doors and slowly and with apparent and obvious effort she managed to get herself somewhat composed, enough to turn around once more to face me and slowly shuffle her way across the diner to our booth. If the look on her face was any sort of indication, she not only had second doubts but an entire group of severe reservations about the wisdom of this encounter. Still, she sat herself down into the booth across from me with a looked of sad resignation.

It was like looking into the eyes of a whimpering often-beaten dog that still crawled back to its master yet again once more, hoping and praying for kindness but resigned for yet further misery and disappointment. Passive and waiting ... sure that something awful and horrid was certain to occur, but that was to be her lot in life. What comfort could I hope to offer? I needed to bring Bad News Bear back into both of our lives once more.

We made half-hearted casual conversation for the next hour or more before the lurking topic of the bear was even broached offhandedly, in just vague generalities. Maureen was still extremely skittish and appeared ready to bolt again for the door and freedom merely from the stress of even casually speaking with a stranger. So I spent most of the first hour just talking about myself and my job, and only indirectly steering the discussion towards more harmless discussions of television once she seemed to be visibly relaxing. With growing cordiality we then spent a very long afternoon in the corner booth until Maureen was finally prepared to reopen that rather deep old wound and bare her soul to me.

It was still hard to get her to open up and talk, especially about Bad News Bear, so I picked off my old emotional scab lesion first by telling her the unvarnished history of how my father came to be involved with the cartoon and at the very risk of his own job fought to have the show's forthcoming scheduling cancelled. And how at his near last minute screening for the network children I'd been one of those crying young kids (12 years old) present.

No good deed every goes unpunished, I told her with some bitterness. As for dad's further career prospects, he may have won that fight but he'd already lost the war. It didn't matter that he'd been 'right', what the top floor executives remembered afterwards was that he'd questioned their judgment. Less than a year later, when the next corporate reorganization occurred, the management deck chairs all got shuffled about and my father found himself the first one stuck standing without a seat, or a job. He couldn't find another major network job and he ended up his career working for a series of relatively minor cable networks at about half of his previous salary. Mom never forgave him for that and she packed her bags on the marriage about the same time that I packed myself off to college.

He blamed Bad News Bear for it all, loss of career, his wife, near poverty, estrangement with his only son, exile from his beloved hometown of New York, his growing alcoholism and chain-smoking, you name it. The bear was to blame. He was still cursing the show on his deathbed. Maybe he was even right. The experience certainly hadn't done me much good either!

As for myself, as a younger kid I'd been active and pretty assertive for my age. I loved sports then and always needed to be 'doing something', preferably outdoors and being active. Afterwards, post-Bear as I jokingly refer to my life after that, I became increasingly passive and insecure. For the first time in my childhood I needed a nightlight ... and began another new humiliating nemesis, bed wetting. In elementary and middle school I had been something of a leader, but now I either deferred to others or just kept entirely to myself. Instead of playing or doing things, I preferred to just keep to myself, being alone ... preferably with a book to read.

I've occasionally joked in private to my co-workers that if I hadn't discovered the wonders of statistics in college that I'd have probably eventually killed myself. Here and now, that joke didn't quite seem so funny.

Maureen's sister Kate had killed herself at the age of sixteen, about a year after the family had returned home to the states from Korea, after her father's retirement from the military. Like my father, Maureen, blamed it all upon Bad News Bear... every single bit of it.

"It changed her," she whispered to me, stirring some extra cream into her already rather cold and nearly pale-white coffee, "it completely utterly changed her, a full 180 degrees about from everything that she had been before. She was a good sister before then ... she was happy and we had fun times together overseas. Before. Then it was like a switch had been thrown inside of her and everything I knew about her changed and became different. I was younger than she was, so I didn't understand what was happening to her at the time, but now I think she just stopped being fourteen, almost fifteen I think then, and became like she was twenty-four instead. No rules applied to her anymore, she did what she wanted, when she wanted, and screw anyone that got into her way."

"She started acting like a grownup overnight then?"

"Yes and no. Acting like a slut on the prowl, yeah sure, for starters. I don't think she had even noticed boys before then, let alone discovered sex, but then almost immediately she started to dress like a tramp, everything short and slutty. She specially like dressing like Madonna, that style of see-through lingerie fashion that was popular in dance clubs. You remember that style, a lacy black bra showing under a sheer white top and also she always now wore stockings with either a micro-short skirt or short-shorts. Her hose was always torn and ripped, or she'd wear fishnets. Skanky, but that's what the older high school kids were sort of wearing, at least when their parents weren't around, and she suddenly wanted to fit in. Almost immediately she started running around with guys, older guys, and not just schoolboys her age. Dudes way too old for her! She'd hang out at the base rec center and flirt with the airmen and soldiers ... and worse. They caught her naked in the base dorms pulling a train, twice! I think she might have been fifteen by then, but barely. Still statutory rape, even if she was the one asking it. She got dad into a lot of trouble and they were going to send her home immediately but dad couldn't find any family back in the States to take care of her. Eventually he had no choice but to arrange to take immediate retirement when he reached his twenty year service point later that year. That fucked up his career plans totally ... he'd wanted to stay in at least another five years and maybe even go for the full thirty, but he couldn't find anyone that would take Kate! In the end, none of it mattered ... we hadn't been back home in New Jersey for more than two weeks before she ran away, for good."

"I bet that pissed your dad off, big time. Ending his service time early because he had to deal with her."

"There was that, but mostly he really liked working for FEN and it pissed him off to leave early. He was NCOIC of broadcasting and they were always throwing old movies and TV stuff away from their tape library and dad would bring it all home with him. Boxes of it, hundreds of boxes of U-matic tapes and film reels. His plan had always been to retire later, after his collection of broadcasting tapes was more complete and he'd saved up enough money to buy himself a small UHF station somewhere in the back-ass of nowhere. There he could become his own station manager and programming director and broadcast his entire tape and film collection."

"Not a bad retirement plan ... but it didn't work."

"No, this completely screwed up all of his plans. For starters, he didn't have the money saved up now. He was also now only on a half-pension and he was soon blowing half of that trying to find Kate, not to mention that I was pretty much a basket case myself by then. I spent years in therapy and they had to institutionalize me twice. Daddy never blamed the bear ... don't think he ever even saw the cartoon once, but I know better. I'm sure it destroyed our lives."

"So, what happened to your sister?" I enquired, then grimaced with regret, remembering that Maureen had mentioned something about a suicide earlier.

"Dead. She ended up living on the streets of New York, mostly stealing but she had two arrests for prostitution as well. They found her body about a year after she'd run away in some old abandoned warehouse. It was a murder suicide; she'd killed her boyfriend with a knife and then herself. The police wouldn't let dad see the crime scene photos. Apparently she'd stabbed him at least a hundred times and then done other things to his corpse ... there were 'satanic ritualistic elements', I heard one of the officers saying to my father. They let him identify her body at the morgue but I was still too young and 'too sensitive' to go. He told me once later when he was really drunk that she had carved a fresh pentagram into her own forehead with a knife before she died. That's when I started to go really crazy, right after that. I'd wake up at night and see visions of her bleeding naked body floating over my bed, whispering insane crazy things to me while dripping blood all over me. There would be blood everywhere, on the ceiling, the walls, the floors, pouring from out of my sister's body. I'd hear laughing too, but it wasn't her voice ... it was the bear's laugh! Then I'd scream and scream and scream ... that's when they had to put me into treatment for awhile."

Neither of us talked for a long while after this. We'd both spoken of our most private secrets to the other and we had a growing sense of connection between us. Two rather emotionally damaged people who'd had something happen to our lives when we were both still barely children that we could neither explain or entirely adequately deal with the lingering historical repercussions.

"Ok ... so Bad News Bear somehow fucked up our lives. How? Why? And why still now twenty years later? Obviously, we're not 'over it', neither one of us. There has to be a reason..."

"You want to watch them ... to see all eight of the cartoons." It wasn't a question. "Would that really help?"

"If you or your dad still has them, yes, I do! I want to see them all. I've just got this one awful memory of watching the pilot and then my childhood was ruined. I need to know what's on the rest of them. Then I want to record them, digitally convert them and burn them onto discs and analyze the bejesus out of them, take them apart frame by frame and find out what make them tick."

"You wouldn't post them on the Internet or anything like that, would you?"

"Absolutely not. Bruin Bear and his sociopathic friends are dead, as far as the history of television cartooning is concerned and if those shows are even half as awful as I remembered, than history is a much better place without them. The bear can and should remain an urban legend!"

As we got up to leave the diner that early evening I moved close to Maureen to offer her a friendly comforting hug, but she shied away. The timid mouse was regaining control, but I managed to briefly touch her hand in what I hoped was a reassuring manner before she scuttled off, out the door and to the comforting solitude of her home.

We had made firm arrangements to meet again the next Saturday at Maureen's house, but true to her indecisive nature she called me on Tuesday to cancel the arranged viewing. Then she called back again the next day to re-comfirm our meeting once more. Friday evening she called me in tears begging me not to come but then the very next morning she called once more, early just after my breakfast to ask me what time I'd be coming.

I told her that I was just now on my way. I had one fast stop to make back at the office first to pick up some equipment but that I'd be there right before noon, as scheduled. The tone of her voice suggested both anticipation and resignation, probably in about equal amounts.

At the office I didn't have to linger about long to find what I was looking for. Most of my staff, not to mention my partner, all have lives outside of work and usually I'm alone in the office on Saturdays. This let me rummage about in our storeroom without any sort of interruption until I found what I'd been looking for. About ten years ago when I first started my ratings analysis company, DVD's hadn't quite yet become an industry standard and I used to receive U-matic and even the odd VHS advance screener tapes on a near daily basis. For simplicity, I had a media geek friend of mine Sylvester (Sly to his friends), rig me up a portable media center on wheels which he has kept maintained and even upgraded over the years. The rolling cart comes complete with U-matic, VHS and even BetaMax tape players, an RCA Selectavision disc player, a top-end four DVD jukebox multiburner, and not least an Apple laptop with all of the latest audio and video software. It even has its own mounted 32" 4K flatscreen HDTV. All it lacks really is a built-in popcorn machine! For playing or converting any legacy media to digital formats, there was no better toy.