What is a Care Bear?

The bears in the image come from a multimedia franchise known as The Care Bears. characters that were introduced in 1981 for greeting cards made by American Greetings.  In fact, the 1980s are a very popular time for the Care Bears as Kenner created plush toys based on these characters.  This led to an animated TV show and three feature length films ("The Care Bears").

Care Bears are cute and played on this cute factor to gain popularity.  However, other factors helped to push their sale.  Advertising regulations on children's programming were very lax in the 80s which led to cartoons that were basically half hour commercials for toys.  So Kenner hired an animation company to create "The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings" and a media franchise was born.

So what do these bears actually do?  Well, they help people who just have given in to despair.  If you were in a Care Bears cartoon and said, "I don't care," these little fluffy guys would come down from the land of Care-A-Lot in their cloud cars and find ways to help you care again.  When they weren't helping humans, they were playing with cartoon stars with smiley faces and sleeping on clouds.

Originally, there were ten Care Bears with names like Sunshine Bear and Bedtime Bear.  You could tell the bears apart based on the symbols in their bellies.  In fact, these symbols also had the power to shoot beams of happy energy to help people feel good.  When a group of Care Bears got together, they could pool this ability to fire one, concentrated dose of caring in a rainbow beam called The Care Bear Stare.

A lot of cute things were popular and profitable in the 80s.  Cute does sell, but the lack of regulation on advertising for kid's shows also helped create a media blitz so that everyone could buy the plushies, playsets, and VHS cassettes available in the Care Bear franchise.  It's not just about who could say no to these cute guys but who can say no to a screaming kid demanding you buy these things for them.  By the time the 90s came along, many parents' groups came along and ostensibly killed this practice of using cartoons to market toys, which in turn was a major factor in killing the Saturday morning cartoon tradition as well.  The damage was done though, and these bears are now in the public consciousness.

Click here to learn more about how the forms in this image work together.

As a bonus, if you want to know more about these regulations and how they helped contribute to the downfall of cartoons on network TV in general, I highly suggest this video.