Help!... It's the Hair Bear Bunch!

Nothing about this weird addition to the Hanna-Barbera canon made sense. The bears had an invisible motorbike, which they hopped on seemingly at will. As a child, I found this confusing and weird, and not very funny at all. The inside of the bears' cave was spartan and 'realistic', until buttons were pressed and it turned into an ultra-modern pad with a fridge, a TV and lavish beds. This wasn't funny either, just a bit of contrived 'hi-tech' business that now seems so embarrassingly dated, as passe as jet-pack travel and monorails. One set piece I remember was one of the bears holding a switched-on vacuum cleaner in the air, explaining "this is my solution to the pollution", before one of the keepers jammed the nozzle on his nose. But his nose didn't stretch, it turned into a spear-shaped appendage which he then used to pick up rubbish. WHAT?! The bottom line is, this series was a ragbag of surreal ideas and low-brow comedy that didn't gel, let alone make one single scrap of sense. Nobody's finest hour.

In September 1971, two shows went head-to-head with each other--CBS' "Help! It's the Hair Bear Bunch," and ABC's "The Jackson Five." (In Saturday morning terminology, that's a "clash of the titans"!) ABC's "J5" was the apparent ratings winner, as "Hair bear" didn't survive past the first season while "J5" got to make a few more episodes the following year.

Some neat, inventive storylines here, from the likes of Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, who later formed their own successful studio. The three principals were voiced by Daws Butler (reusing his Hokey Wolf voice) as Hair Bear; Bill Callaway as Square Bear; and Paul Winchell (reusing his Jerry Mahoney voice) as the diminutive Bubi Bear. They always tried escaping the watchfulness of head zookeeper Peevely (John Stephenson) and his dumb assistant Botch (Joe E. Ross, using his ooh-ooh! Voice!) Worth watching for just the interplay of the above-mentioned voice actors. A cast of cooperative (to the bears) zoo animals are the able supporting cast. Ultimately, it was hard to give a damn about Peevely as he was such a sourpuss.

And in mentioning modern times, one could just about count the title characters as TV's First Gay Threesome! (Of course, this is me with my subversive fantasizing.)

This was a compilation of about 18 different successful shows of the previous decades, all shuffled together and redistributed as a revamp of the previously loved Yogi & Boo-Boo. There was Hair Bear who was the bad influence in a fro, Square Bear who was the goody-two-shoes Southern Baptist, and Bubi who basically was Yogi's sidekick in virtually every way. Oo!Oo! Botch, and Mr. Peeveley the Zoo manager. After bedtime, the bears would sneak out into the world to see what they could get into and then try to get back into their habitat by the time the sun came up and Mr. Peeveley would be back on the grounds. All in all it was pretty cute, and I have fond memories of watching it as a child. I can't say today that the stereotypes would be entertaining, or that the premise of sneaking out at night is a good thing to teach a kid. So much for the memories. Cheers!

It rates a 7.6/10 from...

the Fiend :.

The Hair Bears were hippies / beat nicks and swingers (as much as a kids cartoon character can swing) They would have gotten along very well with Shaggy Norville, Austin Powers, and The Beach Boys. If the bears where the hipsters, then the zookeepers were the establishment, and the bears did a fine job of taking on "the man". As a kid of the late 60's / early 70's (with very square parents) I remember this as very funny at the time. In 1971 their "batachlor pad" cave was cool, and to me, The Hair Bears sneaking out of the park to go on some groovy adventure was a lot like us sneaking out of the house or cutting school. I don't know if 30 + years later the jokes, hair and clothing will have aged well or not. You might have had to have been there. Then again it might get that much funnier.

Ah, yes the 70s! Afros, nehru jackets and that cool jive talkin' in the air. And Yogi Bear is getting to be stale. Why not an update? A bear with an afro, two dumb sidekicks and a zoo keeper with an even dumber assistant. It's McHale's zoo with the groove on, almost. Hair Bear is the top bruin in the zoo, he escapes to party outside and is mightily afraid of the forest (a threat by the keeper to make his bunch stop all that loitering). It could have been fun, considering kids get their those of pop culture from cartoons. But the animation style offers nothing new and the stories were picked up off from Flintstone plot rejects. The animators should have watched Sesame Street and learn from it.