Saturday, August 20, 2011

Toonfomercial: Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears (1985)

In the mid-1980s, Disney decided to dive into producing animated series for television. One of their first efforts was Adventures of the Gummi Bears, which spent 4 seasons on NBC, then shifted to ABC for 1, and finished its run on weekdays as part of the Disney Afternoon anthology block.

The series called attention to the gummi bear candies that were becoming rather popular in those days. The producers, realizing that the series would act as a lead-in to NBC's #1 show of the period, Smurfs, set the series in a similar time frame. Gummi Bears, insofar as I know, may be one of the few series that the late Bill Scott, long associated with Jay Ward, had worked on after the Ward studio had closed. Here is the intro:



Sadly, the series now languishes in Disney's vaults, as there seems to be no interest in putting it on either Disney Channel or DisneyXD.

Rating: B.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

It's a shame this show hasn't been seen on TV in about 20 years. It really was quite good.

Best of all they did have some character and story development over time, even adding one new bear (and his pet bird) they encountered on an island.

Shame on Disney for not running it again.

hobbyfan said...

Shame on them for a lot of things, then, since so much good stuff is in the vault.