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So now we’ve been out to the country, we’ve met a talkative city kid, and we’ve witnessed the quiet desperation of the suburbs. And that’s it, right? Everything from now on is just going back to the same places. There’s nowhere left to go.
Except for, maybe, the CIRCUS!
For real! Bear has a ringmaster’s hat, and he’s singing the theme song in front of a big red tent. Today, he’s visiting Christopher, whose parents are actual circus people, and they live in a trailer at the actual circus. Christopher is a happy kid, with a wild mop of curly hair and a permanent smile. He can’t take his eyes off Bear, and he communicates mostly in enthusiastic shouts. Bear gives him a hug, and then his first question is: Do you often have trouble waking up in the morning?
Which is my first clue that maybe there’s going to be a problem with this episode. Here’s a fun, appealing kid, and he probably has the most exotic and interesting childhood you can think of, and Bear is strapped so tightly into the show’s format that the question he asks is the same one that he asks every other kid. Of course Christopher doesn’t have trouble waking up in the morning! There’s a circus right outside his door every single day!
They do the Morning Mambo, and Christopher bounces around and grins his face off. Bear asks what the most important meal of the day is, and Christopher says BREAKFAST! and then they go inside the trailer for breakfast. Which is more than a little disappointing. There’s a whole circus right next to them, and we’re going inside the trailer to make eggs? It better be, like, Pee Wee’s Playhouse in there.
Guess what: It’s not. It’s just a trailer. We might as well be anywhere. Bear asks what Christopher likes to eat, and Christopher says EGGS! and Bear says LET’S MAKE BREAKFAST! and Christopher says YEAH! and they do a high five. Bear sings the breakfast song while they help Christopher’s mom to make scrambled eggs and waffles. Back at the table, Christopher shows Bear how he pours syrup on his waffles. “Oh, you just pour it right on!” Bear says, as if that’s something.
So, basically, are you kidding me? I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but Bear’s hanging out with circus people, and all we get to see is eggs and toothbrushes. All the important questions go unanswered, like: Is your mom an acrobat? and Is it fun traveling all over the place, or do you get tired of it? and Can we go see the elephants? This might as well be a trailer in any given trailer park, except that Christopher isn’t dead inside.
The only real circus content we get is when Christopher juggles at the end of the episode, and he doesn’t even juggle very well. He has three little juggling balls, same as I do, and he can only do two passes before he stops. He doesn’t juggle like somebody who lives at the circus with professional jugglers from Serbia. He juggles like a preschooler. I can juggle better than this kid.
So that’s where I really take issue with this structure. These days, a lot of the early childhood shows have an incredibly strict format like this, with the same pieces in the same place every time. Elmo’s World is like this too. Elmo always says “Let’s ask a baby” at the same time every day; you can set your watch by it. The producers always say that kids like structure, and they need repetition in order to learn, but that just feels like an excuse. If they showed Bear and Christopher exploring the circus together, it would have been a lot more work. I’m sure editing this show is a breeze — once they have the rhythm of the questions and the songs, then it’s just a matter of putting the pieces in place. Which is great for them, and I’m sure it saves them money, but it makes for a boring and repetitive show.
I personally would like to see the research that proves that kids like these heavily structured shows. Do they really need to hear “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” every single morning? Couldn’t we just write that down on a postcard and hand it to them, and then go check out the acrobats or something? What’s so great about pancakes that kids need a daily infomercial about how to eat them?
This show proves that Bear is one of the sweetest, most adorable characters of all time, and that Noel MacNeal is amazing at having improvised conversations with kids. If this was a real show, with Bear going out into the world and having adventures, then it would be one of the best kids’ shows of all time.
Bear could be doing a high-wire act every day, hanging out with kids and performing without a net. Instead, they’ve got him locked up in a cage, forced to do the same dance over and over. Now that we know he can do this dance, let’s take him off the chain for a while. I bet he could do anything.
