The Cocaine Bear Necessities

Yours truly has been a bit of a slovenly correspondent when it comes to telling you about last month’s trip to Lexington, Kentucky for the big Comic and Toy convention. We did too many trips in a row, and real life got piled up while we were gone, so I’m just now getting around to telling you about this cool side trip we took while we were there.

Just a few blocks away from Rupp Arena, tucked away near a residential section of town, we found the Kentucky 4 Kentucky Fun Mall. It’s part tourist trap, part oddities museum, part gift store, but most famously it is the final resting place for the real life Cocaine Bear, of recent Hollywood movie fame.

If you somehow missed the hulla and its associated baloo, there was a big Hollywood movie called “Cocaine Bear” released a couple of months ago, that was allegedly based on a true story about a drug dealer who tossed his stash of the other white stuff out of an airplane, intent on parachuting out alongside it for later retrieval and distribution.

The parachute failed. Mr. Drug Dealer perished. The cocaine fell to Earth, where it was promptly eaten by a wandering bear.

That much of the story is absolutely true, and really did happen.

In the movie, the bear, coked to the gills, goes on a 1970s rock star-like rampage, terrorizing campers and wreaking all sorts of havoc. It is, a horror/comedy, filled with wonderfully-choreographed cartoon violence.

It made for a really fun movie.

Now, in real life, the bear ate the cocaine, dropped dead of a heart attack on the spot and wasn’t found for a few months.

So, don’t do drugs, kids.

KY 4 KY claims to have the taxidermied carcass of the real cocaine bear on display, and in spite of the logical fallacies of a bear carcass that’s been decomposing in the woods for a few ,months looking this good, I choose to believe their claim. It’s more fun this way and either way, I salute their entrepreneurial hucksterism.

As KY 4 KY says…

OUR MISSION IS TO ENGAGE AND INFORM THE WORLD BY PROMOTING KENTUCKY PEOPLE, PLACES, AND PRODUCTS. AND TO KICK ASS FOR THE COMMONWEALTH!

Of course, they have a sizable assortment of T-shirts, soaps, stickers and other associated merchandise devoted to the creature that made cocaine funny again.

KY 4 KY Fun Mall is filled with all kinds of cool stuff, not all of it Cocaine Bear-related, and it’s a fun diversion if you find yourself in Lexington. Here’s some photos to give you a taste of the experience…

More hyper than your average bear, here is the star of our story.

In answer to the question posed on the sign…no, I did not know that.

When you walk into the place, this subtle reminder lets you know you found the right place.

One of the many Cocaine Bear shirts. BTW, we don’t call him “CB” That’s too close to the awful Hanna-Barbera cartoon, “The CB Bears,” and nobody wants to be reminded of that.