This month, there is a brilliant new animated comedy premiering on Cartoon Network: We Baby Bears. A spin-off of the hit Cartoon Network show We Bare Bears, We Baby Bears follows the adventures of three beloved bear siblings – Grizz, Ice Bear and Panda – as they travel through imaginative worlds, searching for a place to call home. Along the way, they meet new friends, learn a few lessons, and discover that “home” can mean wherever they are, as long as they’re together.
We’ve been telling you all about this super new series as part of the We Baby Bears takeover this week. You can read more about the show via the main hub page by clicking here. But first, keep reading – the team at UKMums.TV had the opportunity to chat with We Baby Bear’s writer Mikey Heller and director Christina Cheng.
Can you sum up We Baby Bears in just three words for our readers?
Three other words than We Baby Bears?! Energetic, wholesome, shenanigans. Yes, I think shenanigans really sums up the show nicely. We have that balance of things being cute and sweet, but also high energy and bombastic and it’s always fun to try and straddle that line.
For parents who haven’t heard of We Baby Bears and We Bare Bears, what would you say to try and entice them to encourage their kids to tune in?
These are both shows that are very fun for the whole family to watch and they promote good, healthy values for children and adults alike. I think it’s always important for families to absorb stories about positive dynamics and good lessons and we always have these in our episodes of We Baby Bears and We Bare Bears.
We Baby Bears is a spin-off of We Bare Bears, which was praised for tackling modern millennial anxieties and representing racial minorities. Does We Baby Bears carry the same kind of underlying messages?
We wanted to include these themes in We Baby Bears, but the show is a little different, in that things are more magical and fantastical. You see, the main characters travel to different worlds with a magic box that teleports them wherever they want to go. But at the same time, since we get to explore different worlds, we had the opportunity to explore different worlds that are culturally inspired by ones in the real world, and we were able to still include the kinds of themes that we were playing with in We Bare Bears.
How do you ensure these messages are delivered sensitively, in a way your little viewers will understand?
When it comes to things like this, we take it very seriously, and there are a lot of people who make sure that everything reads correctly and that everything can be understood by both adults and children, so that nothing is lost in translation.
An episode that was really fun to work on was Fiesta Day, which is a Groundhog Day kind of episode in which Grizz wanted to experience a wonderful fiesta that they stumbled upon every day, forever! It was just a really wonderful Mexican influence story that we wanted to approach really authentically. Our showrunner Manny Hernandez put a lot of love into that story to make sure the little details rang true and that the story was still very fun and that was a very special episode, I think.
Love the sound of We Baby Bears? Tune into the series weekdays at 5:30PM, only on Cartoon Network, available on Sky 601 / Virgin Media 704 and NOW.
To continue the fun with We Baby Bears, head to the main takeover hub HERE.