THE BEAR MUSEUM

The Berenstains Before the Bears: It's All in the Family

This is a regular series of features at the Bear Museum which focus on the early career of Stan and Jan, before they created the Bear family in 1962. These works are part of a traveling exhibition, Child’s Play on the Crabgrass Frontier, organized by The Strong Museum of Play. Accompanying the exhibition is a lavishly illustrated book, Child's Play: The Berenstain Baby Boom, 1946-1964: Cartoon Art by Stan and Jan Berenstain.

As television replaced the weekly magazine as the primary family leisure time activity, Stan and Jan moved from gag cartoons to a new cartoon series, It’s All in the Family, which first appeared in McCall’s magazine in 1956, and later, in Good Housekeeping until 1988. It lasted so long that the final few years the series were ghost-written and drawn by Mike Berenstain.

“It’s All in the Family took the mom, the dad, and the daughter from Sister [an earlier cartoon series by Stan and Jan],” writes Mike in the new book Child’s Play, “bookended the girl between an older and younger brother, and settled them down in a Leave-it-to-Beaverish suburbia tailored to the traditionally domestic McCall’s. These kids, by the way, had ‘real” names: Michael, Janie, and Billy. They even had a last name: the Harveys.”

"This feature—seven panel cartoons or more on a single theme once a month for thirty-two years—became the background to our family life while my brother and I were growing up. That fact is that I identify with these characters more closely than the infinitely better-known Berenstain Bears. People often ask if I am 'Brother Bear.' I never bother to explain that I am actually 'Billy' of the Harvey family—an obscure remark at best. Each It’s All in the Family feature was a little story taken from own experience."

This series provided Stan and Jan a proving ground for ideas they would explore at greater length in Bear Country.

Top: Dinosaurs

It's All in the Family

Published in McCall's, January 1962

See other exhibitions in the Bear Museum: