The Berenstain Bears (1979-1983)
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 Before the 1985 series of The Berenstain Bears, we had these horrible specials.
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From 1979 to 1983, five holiday-themed Berenstain Bears animated specials were produced by Perpetual Motion Inc. and The Cates Brothers Company and aired on NBC. Lawrence and Berenstain would provide music and lyrics for each the specials.
Why These Specials Don't Feel Like A Bear
- Quantity Over Quality: No fewer than five of these specials were produced.
- The animation is quite poor, rushed, limited, Hanna Barbera-esque (50s-70s) and unremarkable as a result of Perpetual Motion Inc. and The Cates Brothers Company's low production budget; it ranges from being bland and simplistic to just plain uncanny and creepy-looking to the point where it wouldn't feel out of place in a Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, Terrytoons, UPA, Jay Ward, Total Television, Warner Bros. Seven-Arts or DePatie-Freleng cartoon. Also not helping this is that the specials were completed in less than a year. In comparison, The Berenstain Bears (1985) and even The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show boast superior animation quality.
- Though to be fair, limited animation is a recurring problem problem found in every original television cartoon made between the 1950s and the mid-1980s by every single animation studio, due to low production budgets. It wasn't until when Disney officially launched its television animation studio in 1985 when cartoons started being produced with higher budgets and higher production values.
- The color scheme is very washed-out and unappealing to look at.
- There is barely any movement in some scenes and most of them look rushed.
- Certain scenes have choppy framerates and/or out-of-nowhere jump cuts that can be distracting.
- The characters have really awkward walk cycles, especially Brother Bear.
- It is also repeated way too many times... to the point where it quickly gets predictable.
- The characters have little to no exaggerated facial expressions to show their emotions, making those scenes seem rather lifeless and more often than not, bland.
- Notably slow pacing and timing, causing most of the jokes to fall flat.
- Multiple continuity errors: The worst offender is the whole "true meaning of Christmas" premise in Christmas Tree. As per usual for an animated Christmas special, it is not only clichéd both on paper and in execution, but it doesn't make any sense since everyone in Bear Country is over-indulging in mindless consumerism.
- Papa even tells Brother and Sister that Christmas is the time to be "thinking of family and friends", which also technically makes the Bear Family hypocrites.
- Papa says that Thanksgiving dinner is his favorite part about the titular holiday in Big Paw, despite it being nowhere near as important as giving thanks and Papa telling his children that "there's much more to Christmas than just presents" in the previous special.
- Nonsensical endings, such as the Boss Bunny being reformed by seeing a rainbow in the Easter Special and Sister Bear being born.
- Below-average humor and overuse of rhyming. Everyone speaks in rhyme, even the narrator, which gets annoying fast.
- Poor audio quality, with the Comic Valentine special (specifically the 2009 version included on a The Berenstain Bears - Kidness, Caring and Sharing DVD) being the worst offender of this; all of the voice actors sound like their microphones broke or they're from the end of a broken phone speaker.
- Ugly, off-model, uncanny, unfitting and/or rehashed character designs that strike a bearing resemblance to the designs of the Tom and Jerry cast from the Gene Deitch era.
- The Bear Family's personalities have been drastically changed to be the exact opposite of what they originally were:
- Papa Bear went from an over-eager, bumbling carpenter to a crazy, unlikable screwball prankster.
- Mama Bear went from a perfectionist housewife to a bland, stereotypical cartoon parent.
- Brother and Sister Bear are now bland-as-wheat, stale protagonists.
- The townsfolk are initially unlikable in the Big Paw special; they seem to fear and ridicule Big Paw just because he's real and consistently try to beat him down with random nonsense. This is an incredibly ludicrous and idiotic idea that makes no sense whatsoever, since the concept of Bear Country being afraid of Big Paw and thinking he'll destroy the town isn't complex enough to sustain a feature-length TV special.
- False Advertising: In The Berenstain Bears Meet Big Paw, Big Paw only appears halfway through the special, with loads of filler and padding throughout the first half. Even worse, he has his name in the title and appears on the VHS and DVD cases.
- Lazy editing, as there are many animation errors.
- Generic title cards and closing credits with cheaply-inserted Scanimate graphics.
- Poor voice acting.
- Unnecessary, pointless and overly sentimental musical numbers.
- The specials tend to have horrendously monotonous soundtracks in general, due to the awful music scores (some of which would be reused in the 1985 series) and low-quality stock sound effects that never fit in with The Berenstain Bears feel. Some find the music catchy–albeit in an aural virus way.
- Very poor plots that feel as though they have no story at all.
- Unfunny and lazy humor that feels plodding and poorly-done; most of it consists of either generic slapstick or the most generic, stale, barebones, cookie-cutter gags imaginable. On top of that, the pacing is very slow and awkward, which absolutely kills the specials' potential with comedic timing.
- The supporting and minor characters are either one-offs, barely get any screen time at all or both.
- Somehow, DVD releases and subsequent prints of the specials suffer from digital destruction, especially since one of them ("The Berenstain Bears' Comic Valentine") suffers from noticable tape fuzz.
Qualities That Feel Like A Bear
- The specials have good morals.
- The specials are very faithful to the source material, despite their low-budget quality and annoying rhyming.
- The character designs, while ugly, are at least faithful to their book counterparts.
- Big Paw is a likable character.
Reception
In contrast to the 1985 and 2003 television adaptations of The Berenstain Bears, these specials received generally negative reviews for their poor-quality animation and production values, poorly drawn characters, bad voice acting, bland music scores, watered-down usage of slapstick and violence and overall awkward pacing that killed any comedic timing.
Despite their negative reception and obscurity, they have high IMDb ratings for some reason.
Trivia
- The rough masters were thrown out almost as soon as the specials were finished. Since the masters were edited on videotape and both the opening and closing credits were done in Scanimate, a true restoration of these Berenstain Bears specials would be straight up impossible. The TBB DVDs that include these specials use the unrestored prints, resulting in many issues such as color bleeding, ghosting, interlacing and grainy imagery.
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