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Top review. Charming, enchanting and sadly The Care Bears seem to mean different things to different people, some hate them with a passion that is almost holy while others, like myself can look back at them and see the warm fuzzy memories of childhood.
There are doubtlessly other variations between those two extremes, those just happen to be the two examples I've run across. I have always loved the Care Bears, like so many of the cartoons of the eighties, the combined good animation well at least good for the day , that has held up relatively well over the years, with interesting storylines that don't feature the violence and sheer stupidity that so many 'kids shows' do today.
Even when the 'new care bears' was released and it wasn't quite as good Care Bears continued to actually teach kids something about life through it's cute little half-hour episodes Some of the episodes are still out on video, do yourself a favour and pick one up At the time, Kenner was known for its Star Wars figurines and wanted to get into the plush business with a line of teddy bears. In a interview with Cleveland Magazine, Shaffer remembers his initial grievances trying to design the characters.
We could only think of so many symbols, and then we ran out of gas. We had done all this research, and I had all this artwork on symbolism lying on my desk. It'd been three months since our meeting with Kenner, and I was still trying to come up with something. I drew that heart on that bear," Shaffer recalls. American Greetings contracted cartoonist Dave Polter and illustrator Elena Kucharik to help bring their idea to fruition.
Once the team was assembled, the development of the new concept continued. Let's do a counter to all this sweetness. Let's do a Grumpy Bear. Balancing out the cast, this irritable bear became a fan favourite and has appeared as a main character in nearly every iteration of the franchise. Polter mentions the diversity of the bears' charm.
You could have them be funny. Bears are the ultimate anthropomorphic character. Shaffer also detailed the process of prototyping the bears. We did hundreds of prototypes. They were working under a genius plush designer, Sue Trentel. You could give her a piece of artwork, and she could translate it into a three-dimensional plush design.
She was just magic. The end result almost mirrored the original pencil sketch. We sort of copied the Steiff bear - [the first stuffed bear with movable arms and legs, which took its name from President Theodore Roosevelt] - by putting a heart-shaped button on the backside of the bears to make them official Care Bears. We also got a patent, which is rare and hard to do.
The patent was for the application of putting graphics on a bear's stomach. Nobody had ever done that before. Once the bears had been designed and Kenner had shown their undeniable interest in the concept, they still required a marketing plan. Previously, American Greetings would release a new character and if it was popular with their target audience, other products and perhaps even a movie or television program would follow.
Care Bears would launch simultaneously with thousands of licensed products, including books, bedding, children's clothing, housewares and more. Shaffer states that the team didn't just design the characters, they also meticulously lined up a range of big-name companies to licence the concept at the same time.
It took them a total of two years in development to reach the launch date. Chojnacki details "There were 26 licensees that all went to market together and each of them had anywhere from 10 to a thousand products. Once the retailer saw that 26 of his leading suppliers were on board, he got pretty excited about it and committed space and advertising. After two years and millions of dollars in development, Care Bears were privately introduced to investors in and then to the world at the New York City Toy Fair, where a Broadway-style play was planned to celebrate the launch.
He proposed we mount a play. I think it cost a million dollars. Everything cost a million dollars. It was a one-shot deal. One night. The concept was that Strawberry Shortcake introduced the Care Bears to the world. We launched in March because we knew Easter is a good time for stuffed toys.
We also did 16 running feet of Care Bear Cards in the stores. The toys were a hit, and American Greetings knew they had something special.
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