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There apparently was a five or six month stretch in 1985 where I was obsessed with The Care Bears. Since I was not aware of the greeting cards or the toys and the show had not started airing (at least not in my neck of the woods), my only rationale is that the ubiquitous full page ads for that spring's The Care Bears Movie in the back of the comic books I purchased made a distinct impression on me. I was most definitely in the Mountain View Mall fourplex opening weekend and on the way back home, I made my mother stop so I could rent the one VHS release that was available at the video store. By the time Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation came out one year later in 1986 and earned a scant $8 million, I was definitely not interested any more. (Whether or not it opened in Bend, I honestly do not recall. It opened on far fewer screens so it may not have and my lack of interest may have been partially a sour grapes result of inaccessibility.)

I didn't see the sequel until I was an adult and so my thoughts on it are colored with that perspective. The first film calms me much as the second Apple Dumpling does, and this is thanks to Mickey Rooney's soothing tones as the narrator and the occasional Canadian accent detectable when someone says "about" or in Grumpy Bear's wonderful harrumphing of the epithet, "Baby bear mischief!" Much as many movies or television shows are filmed on the cheap in Canada, the Care Bears output gives us chaos running amok in what must be Canadian locales and I am always amused by the notion of grumpy Canadians who have stopped caring because of some evil spirit. CBMII has much the same sort of plot as the first one but suffers from a regrettable decision to be a prequel for the first half hour of a slim 76- minute running time.

This origin story is confusing in and of itself but from what I can gather, the Care Bears were much like our Pilgrims of the 1600s, fleeing persecution in a distant land and eventually making their way by boat to a heavenly bestowment of sorts (seriously, their boat is carried up in a beam of light towards the clouds where Care A Lot is ultimately established). They are endowed with personalities and powers and charged with watching over the world to see that people don't give up caring for one another.

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