Category: Podcast

Do you like turning points? I do! And “The Bears’ Picnic” – darn that apostrophe; trips me up every time – is a major turning point for not only the Bear Family but for Stan and Jan Berenstain as artists, writers and collaborators. We’ll get into that in this episode as well as new locations in Bear Country!

I want to give a big shout out to berenstainbears.com who found us through Twitter and posted about our show on their Facebook page! Thank you so much, you guys! Also, thanks to everyone who has rated and reviewed us on iTunes – it really helps to get the show out there.

Also, don’t forget to join us on Twitter @BStainBearcast. We’d love to hear from you!

It’s a bonus episode! Holy cats! What brought this on? I wanted to cover “Nothing Ever Happens at the South Pole” before I lost my enthusiasm for it. It’s a clunky, weird, kinda terrible book BUT it’s super important in the history of the development of Stan and Jan Berenstain as writers. Super important. So, I’m not covering it just to knock it, but to examine it within the context of the Berenstains’ career.

Looking back, I think I got a couple of dates wrong in my retelling of the story of this book’s inception. If you can find it in your hearts to whistle past that . . . do so?

I’ll be back in a few days – fingers crossed – with “The Bear’s Picnic” which is AWESOME and I’m very excited about singing its praises!

Finally! An actual book!

“The Big Honey Hunt” marks the introduction of the Bear Family – Papa, Mama and . . . Small. Notice how many ideas that would carry over into later books are already in place: the tree house, the outfits, the attitudes of the bears. This was due to Dr. Seuss’s very exacting editorial hand. He insisted that Stan and Jan build these characters from the ground up; that the Bears exist as fully realized characters before the Berenstains begin writing about them. And, it shows. The Bears arrive fully realized as characters. Not, of course, as the characters they would eventually grow into, but as characters in their own right.

Now, there is a strong Seussian influence on these early books. Specifically, the ramping up of craziness and the physical comedy perpetrated by Papa Bear. This intentional “zaniness” will lighten over the course of the early books, but never fully leave until we get into books for younger children. For now, it’s all zaniness, all the time.

Hello! And welcome to the first episode of “Deep In Bear Country: A Berenstain Bearcast.” In this episode, I take you through the whole reason this thing even exists. I give you a little rundown of the history of authors Stan and Jan Berenstain and hopefully prepare you for the long LONG journey to come.

All of the biographical information in the episode comes from “Down A Sunny Dirt Road – An Autobiography” by Stan and Jan Berenstain. It’s an invaluable source of information and I’ll be covering it specifically in a later episode.