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THE BEAR MUSEUMThe Big Honey Hunt 1962 In 1962 Stan and Jan published their first book about a family of bears who live down a sunny dirt road in Bear Country. It marked the beginning of an American institution, the Berenstain Bears, the first major series of children’s books built around the family unit. The early books were influenced by their editor, Theodor Suess Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Suess), who wanted antic engaging stories to help children learn to read.
After achieving success writing humor books for adults, Stan and Jan decided to write a book for children and knew it would be about a family of bears, ”We don’t know how we knew, but we knew.”  In their first meeting, Geisel asked them who they saw in the roles of Papa Bear and Small Bear. Having worked in Hollywood during the war, Geisel knew film producers often felt “if you cast your show well, you were more than halfway home.”
Stan and Jan started to think more about the internal workings of the bears. Who are they? Why do they live in a tree? What does Papa Bear do for a living? What kind of tobacco does he smoke? They believed that with a keen sense of their characters, they would be able to breathe life into them on the page. Stan and Jan always knew that bib overalls and a plaid shirt would be Papa Bear’s uniform, which he has worn in all of their books. He is a “benign dreamer, a bumbler, a bit forgetful, ebullient, over-reactive and overzealous” said Stan, who admitted that he was the primary role model for Papa Bear. They “cast” Wallace Beery in the role of Papa Bear. Beery was famous for playing a tough, dim-witted slob, but with an easy-going, lovable persona. Beery’s Academy-Award winning performance in 1931’s The Champ, [link to Amazon product page for all references to the film] in which he played a washed up boxer who is spurred on by his son to win one last fight, was the role Papa Bear was modeled after.  Papa Bear and Small Bear draw on one of the great themes in literature: the father and son relationship. The tension between the know-it-all father and the smart mischievous boy is the theme of almost all the early Bear books.
For Small Bear, the Stan and Jan “cast” Jackie Cooper, who in The Champ helps his gruff but lovable father save the day. Today Cooper may be best known for his leading role in the “Our Gang” comedies of the 1930s. In the early bear books, Small Bear is forever getting his father untangled from messes. He has a sense of adventure but also respect for his father, even if he thinks his father is going about things the wrong way. Closer to home, Stan and Jan based Small Bear’s character on their eldest son Leo. While another editor worried that Mama Bear did little but stand around in the first bear book, Ted Geisel saw no problem with it. “Ted sometimes saw solutions where others saw problems,“ wrote Stan and Jan in their autobiography [link to Sunny Dirt Road]. Geisel encouraged Stan and Jan to focus on the father and son relationship.  The role model for Mama Bear did not come from Hollywood, but from the Berenstain home. Jan was the inspiration for the wise quiet mother who always wears a blue dress and cap with white polka dots. Mama Bear supports her husband and nurtures her son. She would not start to play a significant role until the emergence of the First Time Books in 1973.
Originally Stan and Jan did not chose names for their bears as they had not planned on writing 250 books with the bears. That oversight has become an asset to the long running success of the bears. “These stories are about Everybear,” said Stan. See October’s Bear Museum. |
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