We Bare Bears: Our Stuff Rewatch

August 22, 2015 2:42 PM - Season 1, Episode 1

After a basketball game with human beings, the bears discover that the backpack containing their stuff has been stolen! Their efforts to track it down lead to the library and a shady guy's apartment....
posted by JHarris (4 comments total)

We Bare Bears is a new Cartoon Network show about a trio of bears, Grizz, Panda and Ice Bear, trying to make it in the big city. Animals in the show are generally not human-civilized, although shown to be intelligent, but the guys are an exception: they can walk on two legs and talk and love humans. Especially Grizz, the outgoing one. Panda is more introverted but is an internet addict, and desperately seeks female companionship. Ice Bear is quieter and more of a mystery, but seems friendly enough... usually.

It's a pretty silly show, but sometimes it throws you a curve ball. Details of the curve balls will be supplied as we reach the episodes containing them. One might compare aspects of it to the earlier Hanna-Barbera show Help! It's The Hair Bear Bunch, but this show does seem to have a backstory explaining how the bears got to be the way they are....
posted by JHarris at 2:51 PM on August 22, 2015

And the episode itself (list formatting courtesy of Markdown for Metafilter) --

• The Basketball Game is (excluding the wonderful short Bear Cleaning) our first introduction to the bears and their eccentricities. It's just a rapid series of cutaway gags.
• When the guys come back to their backpack, notice there are pigeons around the bench. Foreshadowing!
• A common theme is that the bears know just enough about city life to get around, but don't know just enough to get into trouble. Hence knowing to hail a taxi, but not enough to know that a parking violation with FBI written on it isn't enough to commandeer a cab, and general just trying to emulate what they've seen on TV regarding finding the thief.
• When Grizz is laying out the scene of the crime at the diner, he uses salt shakers to represent the three of them. His is pepper, Ice Bear's is salt, and Panda's is layers of salt and pepper. Nice attention to detail, although weird to find in a diner.
• Panda's "mug shots" are manga/anime influenced. We find out in a later episode that Panda is a manga fan.
• Ice Bear apparently can speak pigeon. Although there is a single meow interspersed in his speech.
• The pigeon (who we later find out is undercover police) leads the bears to the library, which actually turns out to be a good move -- as Panda exclaims, the library has internet, and thus the smartphone's tracking feature. Good writing! Except....
• Except phone finder lead them to the wrong place? Or maybe more accurately, it led them across the street from that place. Curse you inaccurate Apple Maps!
• The library's theft sensor goes off as Ice Bear walks in with the tye dye shirt he got from the street vendor. In the words of that vendor: "What?"
• "Ah! Evil number!"
• And so they sneak into the guy's apartment to get their laptop, but get so into the basketball game on TV that they completely forget what they were doing. Ah, bears.
• The "tip" they left at the restaurant was an anime-themed drawing from Panda. Continuity!
• One weird moment that's easy to miss... in the scene out on the ledge before the "group huddle," that pigeon is standing on the ledge watching them. It has the same markings as the one in the park, and the one revealed to be the informant later! More continuity!
• At the end they still have the movie they accidentally guy from the guy in the apartment. The bears still seem to be a bit iffy on the concept of personal property.

posted by JHarris at 3:24 PM on August 22, 2015

OK, that's adorable and packs a lot of entertainment into 11 minutes, so I'll check out the later episodes. Thanks for the heads-up!

Ice Bear does seem like an unknown quantity, especially with the "refers to self in third person" thing. Panda seems to be quite emotionally expressive as a key character trait, in that if these bears were in college, I'm guessing Panda would be a theater major.
posted by FelliniBlank at 12:48 PM on August 23, 2015

But why did the undercover pigeon lead them to the library? Was it just trying to be nice and leading them to internet? Was it just flying off and happened to land near the library? Did the pigeon know that the pigeon cartel had taken the backpack and was counting on the bears to bust the cartel? If so, couldn't the pigeon just have alerted the police to the cartel's location? Maybe I'm overthinking this.


> Except phone finder lead them to the wrong place? Or maybe more accurately, it led them across the street from that place. Curse you inaccurate Apple Maps!

Looks like the marker was in the middle of the street when they did the tracking. So maybe just a GPS margin of error messing things up?


The small details are really nice. It's nice to see that there are people working on the show who care about things like that, and that also they have the budget to actually think of things like that and add them.
Also, that Bear Cleaning clip is hilarious!
posted by bjrn at 1:03 PM on August 30, 2015 [1 favorite]