Back in April, I reviewed Care Bears: Cheer, There, and Everywhere, a collection of eight episodes from the 2007 animated Care Bears series meant to help younger children with some of the challenges of growing up. The episodes included lessons about friendship, helping others, and finding and using your talents.
In early June, Lionsgate released Care Bears: Tell-Tale Tummies, another collection of episodes, this time about honesty, integrity, and telling the truth. As a parent, I have to say I was very amused at the fact that the Care Bears of Care-a-lot were compulsive liars throughout the stories. If you look at it from a young child's perspective, it's just a bunch of cartoons of fluffy bears with funny voices. But if you look at it a different way, it's a collection of lies, exaggeration, and greed. The irony was not lost on me.
As I said in my first review, I'd been exposed to the world of Care Bears in the 1980s when my sister was young and collecting hundreds of stuffed animals (many of them Care Bears). It's hard to believe they're still around and making the toys 25+ years later.
If you're still unaware of the Care Bears, they were a toy born of a marketing campaign from American Greetings in the 1980s that eventually became a series of animated shorts and movies. Each bear is a different color and has a different symbol on its belly. They made ten different bears initially, but the population has grown wildly each time the franchise was reintroduced. A few of them were Funshine bear (yellow with a smiling sun on his belly), Love-a-Lot Bear (pink with two intertwined hearts on her belly), and Friend Bear (orange with two intertwined smiling flowers on her belly).
In 2007, a new Care Bears animated TV series was on the air, using five of the bears as main characters: Share Bear, Cheer Bear, Funshine Bear, Grumpy Bear, and Oopsy Bear. Both Care Bears: Cheer, There, and Everywhere and Care Bears: Tell-Tale Tummies include eight different stories from the series.
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