Interesting trivia: The famous three monkeys originated from a pun. It's based on a Chinese saying which didn't have anything to do with monkeys, but when a version of it got translated into (now old-fashioned) Japanese, "hear not, see not, speak not" (kikazaru, mizaru, iwazaru) sounded just like "hear-monkey, see-monkey, speak-monkey". And so the Japanese made monkeys out of it, and the punny words Kikazaru, Mizaru, Iwazaru are said to be their names.
I mean it will never be lost for people our age and older. But there's been 50ish years of additional culture since the Muppets were introduced; it's not fair to expect someone who has only been alive for about half of that time to keep track of all of that. Besides, they all knew about Beaker.
I feel like the muppets havent left cultural references, but anything specific about it has. Most people up to the age of 20 that i know know kermit, and have heard of them, but never seen it. So they will see him and go thats the scientist from the muppets, but they dont know his name.
I’m 21, and the Muppet Show Muppet Labs segments are some of my favorite things on TH-cam- the banana sharpener, all-purpose tenderizer, and gold-to-cottage-cheese ones are personal favorites. But then I’m only really familiar with the Muppets because my dad likes them, so maybe.
I didn't get the actual reasoning until the very end, but I immediately thought about the right answer when I thought "hmm, a famous statue with three figures in a particular order?"
Similar here, but I'd forgotten Dr Bunsen had no eyes (I thought it would be a lack of ears). I guessed Hello Kitty was mute (rather than lacking a mouth entirely)
This was the ONLY Lateral question I figured out the answer to before the question ended (without having knowledge of the answer beforehand). Quite happy with myself on that one!
I jumped to the three wise monkeys almost immediately, but then second guessed myself because typically the order (of the proverb at least) is See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil
I legit got the answer right almost immediately. Not even thinking about much of the question, my mind just went "3 things together, replacing a statue? Is it the monkeys thing?"
I mean to be fair it took me a long time to get bunsen honeydew through my skull. And if it weren't for the recent series on Disney plus I would only have been able to name Dr. Teeth, animal, and Janice in the electric mayhem.
I got the answer straight away and then talked myself out of it because in my memory Dr Bunsen Honeydew didn't have ears either. When Tom started saying things like "what do they all have in common?" all I could think was "round heads?"
This is one of those questions where I wonder if I would have been helpful despite myself. Because I was having trouble picturing any of them and specifically wondered "Are they all missing noses?" Which is wrong x3, but correcting me would put someone else very much on the right track.
I don’t know what it’s like because I have very good visualization abilities, but aphantasia seems horrible. I guess for someone who’s never had that capacity it’s fine, but to me it’s a viscerally terrifying idea to have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia... But didn't realise it was a thing others could do until I was in my thirties. It's like finding out everyone else has a superpower and you got left out 😂
@@MrBull1832I don’t mean to offend or anything, but is that not incredibly frustrating? I can’t imagine it (ironic), but I’ve got to think it’d be extremely frustrating to realize at least like 95% consider completely normal a capacity you’ve never experienced. Actually, I kind of feel this way about lots of cognitive things- are people with prosopagnosia (face blindness) generally bothered by the fact that most people can identify a face visually instead of through recollection of facts about that face, for example? Or are colorblind people bothered by the idea that there are visual distinctions between certain objects that others can observe but that they just can’t? I dunno- these things just sound extremely bothersome to me.
@@MrBull1832 genuine question, when searching for a place you've never been to, people usually describe the surrounding area. the color, size, shape of buildings, landmarks. how would you do it?
@@jessehammer123 there's definitely an element of that... on balance it's a case of "you don't miss what you've never had" but it just seems soooo bizarre that people can do this. What hurts most is when my four year old says she can "see" the things I'm telling her in stories I'm making up myself. She lives them in a more real way than I do... and I'm telling them! :P
@@ubikledek I can still do all of that - I just can't "see" it if it's not there - I'm not blind :P so I can describe what someone looks like, but I'm doing that from memory I guess - I struggle to describe the way I can remember what something looks like given that for me it's perfectly natural to not be able to visualise something but still know in the abstract what it looks like... Like being able to recite notes of a song even though you can't hear the music? That's probably a bad analogy
I... didn't realize Hello Kitty had no mouth. I mean, I don't see her much at all, but in my imagination she definitely has a smiling little pencil-line mouth 😅 Also, fun fact: the original monkey symbolism had *four* monkeys, ending in an arms-crossed "do no evil". Somehow, over the years, we decided "nah, we'd like to do evil, we just want to ignore that we're doing evil instead" 😂
I was way off, got locked in on size. Squidward is tall and skinny, Bunsen is middle, and Hello Kitty is short. The Evolution of Man.... but backwards??
I'm too old to have gotten into Spongebob, but I'm vaguely familiar with Hello Kitty, so I guessed the 3 monkeys, and looked up Squidward to be sure. On the other hand, I see Squidward doesn't have ears, like an octopus or squid, so I could've been even more confident. It's impossible for much younger people to realize the absolute *sensation* the Muppets were. They were just so ORIGINAL and HILARIOUS. I first remember them from their very occasional appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. Sesame Street started when I was in college and was a HUGE hit even among college students. The Muppet Show started a few years later.
When Tom confirms that they're standing in a line from left to right, the first thing that entered my mind was that sketch with John Cleese and 2 other comedians (there are different versions with different comedians) about class. "I'm upper class and I look down on these two..." Edit: Of course, I was wrong.
Like Caroline, I also have aphantasia, so I was thinking of traits they had, and I was really trying to figure out if I knew a lineup of a clarinetist, a scientist, and a furry, and personally, I couldn't think of one. If someone else knows one though, PLEASE let me know.
Oh, that's clever. Though I'll add that I wouldn't have discovered it myself, as it seems I had been subconsciously merging Hello Kitty with Miffy (Nijntje for us dutch people), who does have the thing Kitty is missing.
I thought it had to do with noses, where Squidward has a long nose, Honeydew has a bit of nose and Hello Kitty has a triangle for a nose, but I couldn't think of why a statue would have that (and then Tom said spatially and not temporally, so the idea of a statue with a water balloon nose was right out XD )
Spoiler: Clicked for me 4:50 when Tom says "Depending on how accurately you remember those characters..." because I took that as a pretty heavy handed hint towards the characters each having some quirk specific to them instead of who they are as a whole. TIL Hello Kitty has no mouth, but Squidward no ears and Bunsen no eyes pretty quickly arose in my mind at that point.
Just a question to anyone who might read this (as I was astounded by the amount of people having quite emotional reactions to the people in the video not knowing about the Muppets): were the Muppets a big thing anywhere outside of the English-speaking world? I live in Eastern Europe and we had absolutely nothing of them. To be fair, being behind the Iron Curtain certainly did not help, but even after the '90s, the Muppets never really appeared anywhere.
@@xipalips yeah, he's an octopus. that's his entire joke. the fact that he's named squidward but have 8 tentacles. the writers were very clever, at the cost of people failing to realise.
According to Sanrio who manufacture Hello Kitty, "Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature."
"Hello" is also not part of her name. Her name is Kitty White, and "she is not a cat, she is a cartoon character"; "Hello Kitty" is the phrase on her first merchandise, a vinyl coin purse.
It's one of those jokes that goes over a lot of people's heads from the show. His name is squidward but he's confirmed to be an anthropomorphic octopus in multiple parts of the franchise.
I love that Tom identifies Dr. Bunsen Honeydew as "Not Beaker"
Maybe a bit more distinctive than "the Muppet scientist with the green, spherical head".
(Edit: missed a word)
@@myladycasagrande863 I thought he was yellow, like the honeydew melon outer shell :/
@@PianoKwanMan kind of yellowish green, or greenish yellow. Matter of perspective, I guess.
"Hello Kitty has no mouth but she must scream" thats why they gave retsuko a microphone and let her scream
Interesting trivia: The famous three monkeys originated from a pun.
It's based on a Chinese saying which didn't have anything to do with monkeys, but when a version of it got translated into (now old-fashioned) Japanese, "hear not, see not, speak not" (kikazaru, mizaru, iwazaru) sounded just like "hear-monkey, see-monkey, speak-monkey".
And so the Japanese made monkeys out of it, and the punny words Kikazaru, Mizaru, Iwazaru are said to be their names.
I don't know why but every time I see the names displayed I think it is "Carolina Reaper" and "Tom Yum"
i think you might just be a big fan of spicy food
It means you're hungry!
And every time we kiss I swear I can fly
My nightmare blunt rotation.
loll hello kitty can hang tho
The most shocking thing in this episode is two of the cast referring to Squidward as an Octopus
Do you mean shocking that they recognize he is an octopus and not a squid? Because they're correct.
@@sam_vinette I had to look it up. You're right - Squidward is canonically an octopus. Changes everything I know about the world.
Squidward is an octopus. It’s canon.
When it opens with NONE OF THEM knowing who Dr Bunsen Honeydew is, I felt old. Is the cultural relevance of the Muppets really lost?
I had to look up a picture of him before i realized "Oh, its that muppet" genuinely didn't know his name
I mean it will never be lost for people our age and older. But there's been 50ish years of additional culture since the Muppets were introduced; it's not fair to expect someone who has only been alive for about half of that time to keep track of all of that. Besides, they all knew about Beaker.
I feel like the muppets havent left cultural references, but anything specific about it has. Most people up to the age of 20 that i know know kermit, and have heard of them, but never seen it. So they will see him and go thats the scientist from the muppets, but they dont know his name.
I mean he is a minor muppet character
I’m 21, and the Muppet Show Muppet Labs segments are some of my favorite things on TH-cam- the banana sharpener, all-purpose tenderizer, and gold-to-cottage-cheese ones are personal favorites. But then I’m only really familiar with the Muppets because my dad likes them, so maybe.
It's clearly GitHub's mascot, the octocat.
I didn't get the actual reasoning until the very end, but I immediately thought about the right answer when I thought "hmm, a famous statue with three figures in a particular order?"
I got the reasoning pretty quickly, but yeah, only after first thinking of the statue with three figures and working backwards
Similar here, but I'd forgotten Dr Bunsen had no eyes (I thought it would be a lack of ears). I guessed Hello Kitty was mute (rather than lacking a mouth entirely)
I think the world needs more squidward statues
Love it when Tom says something wrong and starts singing about it
3:26 meep meep meep meep meep 😂😂😂
Tom making something memeable once again
This was the ONLY Lateral question I figured out the answer to before the question ended (without having knowledge of the answer beforehand).
Quite happy with myself on that one!
I knew the anagaram one in the last video.
Aphantasia and an A-level in art is an interesting combination. I imagine that might've been challenging
I took it as sarcasm
I feel like that’s not so unusual
2:27 I'm thinking see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil (but I can't remember if that's the order they come in)
I thought that Honeydew and Squidward was backwards.
I jumped to the three wise monkeys almost immediately, but then second guessed myself because typically the order (of the proverb at least) is See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil
You could see Tom S die a little inside when NONE OF THE OTHERS knew who Dr Bunsen Honeydew was. I did too.
Ella Huber: "No, I'll stand by that" 😂
Respect, Ella, respect!
"line them up, line them up!"
- and all I could think of was, "what, a C'thulhu plushie?"
I legit got the answer right almost immediately. Not even thinking about much of the question, my mind just went "3 things together, replacing a statue? Is it the monkeys thing?"
How quickly things age, fancy not knowing a Muppets character.
I mean to be fair it took me a long time to get bunsen honeydew through my skull. And if it weren't for the recent series on Disney plus I would only have been able to name Dr. Teeth, animal, and Janice in the electric mayhem.
I was a kid who was just old enough to think the Muppets were too young for me..
Fancy that! What a jolly odd state of affairs!
GASP
you did NOT just call SQUIDward an octopus!
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-20/the-secrets-of-octopus-city-revealed
@@lateralcast he's a hexapus!
I got the answer straight away and then talked myself out of it because in my memory Dr Bunsen Honeydew didn't have ears either. When Tom started saying things like "what do they all have in common?" all I could think was "round heads?"
Hello Kitty doesn't need a mouth because she speaks the international language of love.
I made a connection that both Squidward and Dr Honeydew are both bald but that didn't lead me anywhere close to the right answer 😂
This is one of those questions where I wonder if I would have been helpful despite myself. Because I was having trouble picturing any of them and specifically wondered "Are they all missing noses?" Which is wrong x3, but correcting me would put someone else very much on the right track.
I don’t know what it’s like because I have very good visualization abilities, but aphantasia seems horrible. I guess for someone who’s never had that capacity it’s fine, but to me it’s a viscerally terrifying idea to have aphantasia.
I have aphantasia... But didn't realise it was a thing others could do until I was in my thirties. It's like finding out everyone else has a superpower and you got left out 😂
@@MrBull1832I don’t mean to offend or anything, but is that not incredibly frustrating? I can’t imagine it (ironic), but I’ve got to think it’d be extremely frustrating to realize at least like 95% consider completely normal a capacity you’ve never experienced. Actually, I kind of feel this way about lots of cognitive things- are people with prosopagnosia (face blindness) generally bothered by the fact that most people can identify a face visually instead of through recollection of facts about that face, for example? Or are colorblind people bothered by the idea that there are visual distinctions between certain objects that others can observe but that they just can’t? I dunno- these things just sound extremely bothersome to me.
@@MrBull1832 genuine question, when searching for a place you've never been to, people usually describe the surrounding area. the color, size, shape of buildings, landmarks. how would you do it?
@@jessehammer123 there's definitely an element of that... on balance it's a case of "you don't miss what you've never had" but it just seems soooo bizarre that people can do this. What hurts most is when my four year old says she can "see" the things I'm telling her in stories I'm making up myself. She lives them in a more real way than I do... and I'm telling them! :P
@@ubikledek I can still do all of that - I just can't "see" it if it's not there - I'm not blind :P
so I can describe what someone looks like, but I'm doing that from memory I guess - I struggle to describe the way I can remember what something looks like given that for me it's perfectly natural to not be able to visualise something but still know in the abstract what it looks like... Like being able to recite notes of a song even though you can't hear the music? That's probably a bad analogy
Me watching this with my Hello Kitty blanket.
I... didn't realize Hello Kitty had no mouth. I mean, I don't see her much at all, but in my imagination she definitely has a smiling little pencil-line mouth 😅
Also, fun fact: the original monkey symbolism had *four* monkeys, ending in an arms-crossed "do no evil". Somehow, over the years, we decided "nah, we'd like to do evil, we just want to ignore that we're doing evil instead" 😂
Caroline's laugh is amazing!
I also have aphantasia - it's poses interesting challenges (and benefits).
@LateralWithTomScott
Dr. Bunson HoneyDew is the one with a round green head like a Honey Dew Melon.
Easy description.
I got it immediately and then thought "but wait, that's not _a famous statue"._
That moment where you figure out the answer exactly two seconds before the guests do.
Yeah I was stumped too, I couldn't understand what the question was getting at, at all.
I was way off, got locked in on size. Squidward is tall and skinny, Bunsen is middle, and Hello Kitty is short. The Evolution of Man.... but backwards??
I'm too old to have gotten into Spongebob, but I'm vaguely familiar with Hello Kitty, so I guessed the 3 monkeys, and looked up Squidward to be sure. On the other hand, I see Squidward doesn't have ears, like an octopus or squid, so I could've been even more confident.
It's impossible for much younger people to realize the absolute *sensation* the Muppets were. They were just so ORIGINAL and HILARIOUS. I first remember them from their very occasional appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. Sesame Street started when I was in college and was a HUGE hit even among college students. The Muppet Show started a few years later.
This 66 years young great grandma LOVES THIS CHANNEL 😅😅😅😅 THANKS . Especially my favorite Muppet
That was a tough question, I didn't even know that was a statue
Hello kitty is canonically a human child
When Tom confirms that they're standing in a line from left to right, the first thing that entered my mind was that sketch with John Cleese and 2 other comedians (there are different versions with different comedians) about class. "I'm upper class and I look down on these two..."
Edit: Of course, I was wrong.
I got this one about a minute in, and I was shouting at the screen for the rest of the video.
Like Caroline, I also have aphantasia, so I was thinking of traits they had, and I was really trying to figure out if I knew a lineup of a clarinetist, a scientist, and a furry, and personally, I couldn't think of one. If someone else knows one though, PLEASE let me know.
Wow I couldn’t visualise it either, I would have been guessing forever.
I honestly thought it would be something to do with them being sorted by nose size
Oh, that's clever.
Though I'll add that I wouldn't have discovered it myself, as it seems I had been subconsciously merging Hello Kitty with Miffy (Nijntje for us dutch people), who does have the thing Kitty is missing.
I thought it had to do with noses, where Squidward has a long nose, Honeydew has a bit of nose and Hello Kitty has a triangle for a nose, but I couldn't think of why a statue would have that (and then Tom said spatially and not temporally, so the idea of a statue with a water balloon nose was right out XD )
Spoiler:
Clicked for me 4:50 when Tom says "Depending on how accurately you remember those characters..." because I took that as a pretty heavy handed hint towards the characters each having some quirk specific to them instead of who they are as a whole. TIL Hello Kitty has no mouth, but Squidward no ears and Bunsen no eyes pretty quickly arose in my mind at that point.
I thought it was gonna be a statue of doctor Cthulhu-chan.
Just a question to anyone who might read this (as I was astounded by the amount of people having quite emotional reactions to the people in the video not knowing about the Muppets): were the Muppets a big thing anywhere outside of the English-speaking world? I live in Eastern Europe and we had absolutely nothing of them. To be fair, being behind the Iron Curtain certainly did not help, but even after the '90s, the Muppets never really appeared anywhere.
annnnd my art history background failed me...
at 3:05 Laocoön popped into my head.
not quite the 3 wise monkeys
I hate that the they keep calling Squidward an Octopus…
It's hard to remember what animal SQUIDward is to be fair. I can barely remember what Mr. Krabs is supposed to be!
@@xipalips yeah, he's an octopus. that's his entire joke. the fact that he's named squidward but have 8 tentacles. the writers were very clever, at the cost of people failing to realise.
@@KusaneHexaku The tentacles part of his name is also wrong: octopuses have 8 arms and 0 tentacles, while squids have 8 arms and 2 tentacles.
@@KusaneHexaku Octopus dont have tentacles m8, thats the problem
So is this a statue set that "could" exist, or somwhere does exist?? Is there a name to look up??
Three wise monkeys.
Neptune approves of this episode!
5:03 Oooo no eyes and no mouth.. see and say no evil? what's squid ward missing dang
aha
Aphantasia is a great metal or prog band name
According to Sanrio who manufacture Hello Kitty, "Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature."
My guess was "characters with bulbous heads with weird proportions"
The "tentacles" threw me off completely
veery lateral question
Credit to the boomer who threw a damn muppet in as a curveball.
How is it that I never noticed Squidward doesn’t have ears 😭
Why does the thumbnail for this episode have them in the wrong order? WTF.
Because the order is "see, hear, speak". The question was ordered incorrectly.
All 3 say "Who's Dr. Bunsen Honeydew?" I immediately roll my eyes and say "kids these days..."
It’s not even been 5 years since his last appearance in muppets haunted mansion.
Waheyyy a fellow aphant! 🤝
Why doesn't anyone refer to the forth monkey anymore?
I love to see the video too
They have a different definition of "famous" to me. Who knew Hello Kitty had no mouth? Doesn't she talk in cartoons?
Are there animated cartoons of Hello Kitty? I only know her from the tons of merchandise she appears on.
The doctor has no eyes but wears glasses 🕶️
Frustrating to listen to when they didn't know who Bunsen honeydew was
But, fun fact, hello Kitty is not a cat
but she's not not-a-cat
"Hello" is also not part of her name. Her name is Kitty White, and "she is not a cat, she is a cartoon character"; "Hello Kitty" is the phrase on her first merchandise, a vinyl coin purse.
fun fact i learnt last week, hello kitty IS not a cat.
It's a kitten?
@@shambhav9534 Nope. She is a human girl. A British girl with her own pet cat.
"Who is Dr. Bunsen Honeydew?" You ppl are kidding, right?
I can't get past Hello Cthulhu.
Hello Kitty is a human girl, not a cat.
given she has cat ears, whiskers, and a pink nose, I think you might be wrong here
I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to hear them repeatedly call SQUIDward an octopus
He's actually an octopus tho
It's one of those jokes that goes over a lot of people's heads from the show. His name is squidward but he's confirmed to be an anthropomorphic octopus in multiple parts of the franchise.
And here i am, the Gen-Xer, screaming “How can you NOT know Dr. Bunsen?!?!?”
Meanwhile Marine Biologists are celebrating someone finally categorising this animated octopode correctly.
Snowman? Nvm
Having misidentified Bunsen Honeydew as Futurama's Zoidberg my tentacles lost their tent! : )
That's very ironic since "It's meee, Zoidberg!" is that character's catch phrase.
"Hooray, a person thought of me!"
Is "I Have No Mouth" a well-known story? I read it randomly years ago and hated it and never heard a single person reference it until now.
"I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" is a short story by Harlan Ellison, one of modern science fiction's great influences.
Is it just me getting annoyed at them referring to Squidward as an octopus?
Like, SQUIDward
SQUID ward
The creators have said he's an octopus.
“Who is Bunsen Honeydew?”
Someone was raised in a culture free environment.