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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

> a longstanding association of elephants and alcohol in popular thought

What? the hell?

Maybe not watching television for over 20 years has left me more out of touch with "popular thought" than I realized...

I remember my grandma doing a drunken "dance of the pink elephants", whatever that is, in the mid-70s. This has been a thing for a while

It's from the Disney classic 'Dumbo'.

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Pink_Elephants

Didn't Dumbo get drunk in the eponymous movie?

You don't get more pop than that.

85 year old movies are not exactly the cutting edge of pop culture.

In ye olden days, TV stations broadcasted again what they already had once.

We called this phenomenon the "rerun".

I would place the poster of the comment that I am replying as a 38+, so deep into Dumbo rerun territory but, perhaps I am wrong and it was a 21yo zoomer growing up in a compound.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/499983

> The suggestion that the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) becomes intoxicated from eating the fruit of the marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea) is an attractive, established, and persistent tale

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article/16/4/2020007...

> Possibly the most iconic is the story of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) and marula fruit. According to this widespread lore, elephants across Africa preferentially feed on the fallen, fermenting fruit of the marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea), becoming intoxicated

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_pink_elephants

When I was a kid, animal documentaries usually had a little bit on animals getting drunk from fermented fruit laying on the ground. Drunk elephants were often the highlight, because a stumbling, drunk, elephant is pretty entertaining to watch (although their legal drinking age seems to be MUCH lower than with human societies!).

Maybe the Delirium Tremens beer brand from Belgium?

Hence Chang Beer.

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