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Transmitido en Espańol en SAP’
Those four words and acronym I have long associated with the Disney afternoon, a time of day when Walt Disney's TV animation would assert itself. The Walt Disney Company was no stranger to television, having created things like the Mickey Mouse Club and Davy Crockett during the fifties and so-on. However Club had mostly been an exercise in recycling theatrical shorts for TV audiences, leaving the majority of Disney’s television outpoint to be primarily live action.
The late seventies and early eighties hadn’t been great years for Disney; lower revenues from features, transitional takeovers and an uncertain future bared hard on what was a company in dire need of a new direction. Out of this came new executives and leadership and new entertainment wing Touchstone Pictures. The animation department was put under the control of Roy Disney (nephew of Walt), who would ultimately bring it to order and help it to produce some of the greatest films in the company’s history.
Yet even this new management looked at television with trepidation and, to be fair, Disney can hardly be blamed for this. By the Eighties most of the for-television animation being produced was either poorly disguised toy-based commercials, or otherwise boring middling nonsense. Hanna-Barbera and Filmation’s near monopoly of the industry had turned television animation into an entertainment graveyard of lacklustre programming.
Finally they came to the conclusion that television animation as it stood was not what they wanted to do, instead they would do their own version, with generally higher production values than what had been seen before. So in September of 1985, two new shows appeared on two networks: on CBS audiences could see the Wuzzles, on NBC the Gummi Bears; fate had put the two on the same timeslot and it was the Gummi Bears that ultimately won audiences over.
The world of the Gummi, the world that Disney created, is about as far away from the candy sweets that Michael Eisner suggested making a show around as one could imagine. Yes that’s right the same Eisner who brought the company into the stormy period of the last few years, also suggested making the candy sweets into a series. A bit dubious at first, the show’s creators eventually came up with this series, apparently after spotting some drawings of some cartoon bears on a packet of gummi bear candy. And so, taking some design elements from The Black Cauldron - mostly the fantasy element and settings - the team developed this cartoon series.
Right history lesson over with…
Set in and around the fictional lands of Gummi Gled, Dunwin and Drekmore, the Bears meet and befriend the human page Cavin and decide to help protect the good people of Dunwin against Duke Igthorn and his ranks of ogres. Along the way, the bears (and by relation the viewers), learn about their past, as well as various devices left behind by the Great Gummis. This gave a series a continuality that most American shows at the time didn’t really have, although the watching of Gummi Bears in order was not as necessary as it is in a true serial format.
One could argue that the bears were little more than Disney copying themselves, in effect the seven dwarfs in bear suits, that would be pedantic, though true. To an extent Zummi, Tummi and Guffi have personalities that you could point towards specific dwarfs (Zummi/Doc’s spoonisms for example). At least some of the stories are in part character, rather than plot driven and these ones tend to be the stronger types; indeed Disney would use character themed stories again in future series.
For the period it was made, Gummi Bears was a amazingly well produced show. With strong writing and animation, as well as a strong enough concept that, ahem, still bears up to close scrutiny. The characters, despite the slight recycling were well developed, from the bears themselves to their bombastic nemesis. In all it was a strong series for the studio to start a career in television with.
One has to remember that the majority of the Eighties, even with things like Gummi Bears, was pretty much a graveyard with decent cartoon being the exception rather than the rule. Animated product, while a touch above that of the previous decade, had gotten into a slump that it wouldn’t absolutely get out of until the animation boom of the near the decades end. Considering this then, the Gummi Bears must have been quite the revelation when it was first released in 1985, at least because Disney had entered in mainstream television. Featuring a higher – much higher – level of animation than most other animated show of the time, as well as wrapping its lessons into the fabric of well written stories; Gummi Bears set out to do Disney’s name proud.
In the oncoming years, The 'Disney Afternoon' - as it was known in the USA - would get even better.
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