Was replacing Berenstain Bears with Peanuts a good idea back then?

Did you think replacing Berenstian Bears with Snoopy was a good idea back in the day?

My 5 year old mind thought it was when I saw the Camp Snoopy commercial on my Grandparents' basement TV,

What’s a Berenstein Bear?

Not near as bad at replacing the SF Earthquake with Berenstain Bears. Talk about a heartbreaking discovery.

darkrider68 said:

Not near as bad at replacing the SF Earthquake with Berenstain Bears. Talk about a heartbreaking discovery.

So true! SF Earthquake ride was one of my favorites.

At the time, I wasn't impressed by the IP change. Berenstain Bears wasn't the biggest, most famous property, but it was OURS. No other parks used them, and they were popular in the age group. Cedar Point did a nice job using them as a theme. So I viewed the transition with a wary eye. I thought Peanuts was too large an IP in that its use would be overly controlled by the IP managment. Also, Snoopy was Knott's IP. I didn't want what the Nickelodeon characters have become as a generic "Kiddyland" IP, in use everywhere with a couple bucks to spend.

In retrospect, my fears were mostly unfounded. Cedar Fair has managed the use of Snoopy deftly. I still prefer the physical look of the Bears characters over the Peanuts Characters, but I don't think the Bears have aged as well. I don't think I have seen a Berenstain Bear in pop culture in years. Snoopy is better than a "Who's that" bear.

But if I ever get the time machine in the basement working, Earthquake and the Giant Slide are high on the list of things to revisit.

According to Wikipedia, the Berenstain bears were at Cedar Fair parks from 1990s to 2000s.
Is that wrong or is there a lot of rose colored false memories of the BBs at the park?
That’s about 15 years at most for presence in the park.
I hadn’t been to CP until 2007 and the Peanuts were in full force by then.

Edit: found a 1987 tv ad for CP with the BBs, so maybe 20 years at CP.

According to some weird site on the Internets, Berenstain Bear Country opened in 1985. And according to that same site the final season was 1998. Snoopy would begin taking over the park the following season.

So the Bears were in place for 14 years, and Peanuts have been in place for 21 years (and counting) as of 2019.

Thanks DJ, from the gist of some posts it seemed like the BBs were at CP for a much longer period of time.
And searching web for BBs/cp doesn’t really yield very much info on their time in the park. On the web there does seem to be an inordinate amount of misremembering of the bears, even the spelling of their name. (Something in the Lake Erie water?)

With a chain as a whole....if Berenstain Bears were to remain as the IP....through the Paramount Parks merger and on....I don't think we'd see as many IP related shows as we do within the chain.

They'd probably be recognizable now that they've hit a low key meme status- nearly everyone I know (myself included) remembers their names as 'Berenstien' instead of 'Berenstain' and it's sort of become a half-joking bit of 'evidence' of the existence of parallel universes.

I think it might go over the heads of little kids, though XD

I never understood the 'Mandela effect' with this one. People claim it was spelled Berenstein, yet those same people have no problem pronouncing it Beren-stain. If it were spelled -stein, it would either be steen or stine.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to the music from West Side Story, composed by Leonard Bernstain.

^^count me in for the Berenstein camp. And I always recall pronouncing it Beren-steen. Haha.

haha, i had no idea it was Berenstain and not Berenstein,

The Bears had one thing going for them, though. The area was designed for them. Although the Earthquake Ride should have stayed, the building was designed specifically for the Bears. One portion of the building was the "Spooky Old Tree", and there were other play areas including Dr. Gert Grizzly's office, the school, the treehouse and other themed areas taken right from the books. Although we can debate how memorable it was, it was clearly designed specifically for the bears and the scenes were unmistakably taken directly from the books. When Peanuts moved in, Cedar Point did what Cedar Fair does when it comes to theming. They half-assed it. The area that was the spooky old tree suddenly became a dark, blacklit area of the Snoopy Boutique Gift shop. All the theming was hastily retrofitted. When Camp Snoopy came to be, they took a bunch of old, unthemed kiddie rides from Geauga Lake and shoehorned them in. Snoopy may be cuter but the park never really made an effort to theme an area for him the way they did the bears.

I think the Peanuts characters probably do a better job at being attractive to parents and children at the same time. I had the Berenstain Bears books and watched their TV specials when I was a kid just as I watched Snoopy as a kid but as an adult I really hold no warm, fuzzy affection for the Bears. I love Snoopy.

To put it simply, when Cedar Fair acquired Knotts the rights to Peanuts came along with it. When it came time to renew the Berenstain Bears they already had a long term contract for the Peanuts characters. It was a no brainer, let the Berentain Bears go.