Subscribe!Old Bear Stories (1993)
Originally posted on 27 June 2026First episode title: Old Bear
How familiar with the show am I?: It seemed vaguely familiar.
In another one of those coincidences, just like last week we will be looking at a British stop-motion series about normally inanimate objects moving around while their human owners aren't around. In this case, though, it's about stuffed toy animals.
This show features three teddy bear characters: the titular Old Bear, Little Bear, and a brown bear called Bramwell Brown. There are also toys called Duck and Rabbit who are what their names would suggest.
The episode's short and simple plot is as follows. Bramwell, Little Bear, Duck, and Rabbit are just hanging around on the windowsill when Bramwell remembers Old Bear, who had been stored away in the attic many years ago when the children had been too rough with him. Since the children were older now, it should be okay to bring him back. The hatch to the attic is too high for any of them, though. First they try making a tower of building blocks, but it falls down. Then they try bouncing on the bed, but they can't reach high enough. There is a tall plant in the corner, so Little Bear tries climbing it and swinging from the top leaf, but the leaf breaks and he is flung away. Finally, a comment from Duck about not being able to fly reminds Bramwell of the toy plane in the room. Rabbit steers the plane and Little Bear rides on the back to enact the rescue. He makes it into the attic and explores the dark space, finally finding Old Bear stored in a box. Bramwell has given Little Bear two handkerchiefs to use as parachutes, and so he and Old Bear float down to the ground below. At night, they are all tucked into bed together and dreaming sweet dreams.
This is one of those shows where narration substitutes for having multiple voice actors, and in this instance he doesn't even change up the voice for each character. I'm not a huge fan of that, since there's so much you can add to a character's personality with the way they speak.
The animation here is very nice. The characters being toys means they can look exactly like they would in real life, and there are lots of little touches to the way they move too. I always appreciate when even the characters that the scene isn't focusing on are still moving realistically rather than staying still as if waiting for their cue.
Right at the start, Bramwell has a feeling that today is going to be a special day, and then at the end in bed he's satisfied that his feeling came true. This is sweet. Bramwell is the one who seems to get treated as the leader of the group, although I do wonder if that role passes to Old Bear in other episodes now that he's reunited with them all.
Other than Bramwell... well, Duck and Rabbit don't get tons of characterisation, but Little Bear gets well-established as brave and eager. The block tower is his idea, but he's also the one who falls off of it when it fails. That seems to sum him up.
The conversation on the discovery of Old Bear hints at how bleak a prospect it is to be a living toy abandoned in an attic, a couple of years before the Toy Story films started to explore similar themes. Little Bear asks him if he's been lonely, and he says that he's spent a lot of the time asleep. Aww.
The narration, and the plans the characters already made, indicate that both Old Bear and Little Bear would land from their parachute jump in a blanket held up by the others. I guess the animators realised too late that they'd picked too small a blanket for this to work, so in reality it's only Old Bear that gets caught, and Little Bear just lands on the carpet himself. At least it was just a gentle float down!
Well, this was sweet. I am however forced to compare it to the similar show I covered last week, and this show suffers in that comparison. Although I slightly prefer the animation in this one, it needs something more to distinguish the characters in their performance. Overall though, it's certainly not a bad one.
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