Stan Berenstain, co-creator of the children’s book characters The Berenstain Bears died on Saturday.
I grew up in the house he and Jan his wife built in the early 1960’s. When we moved in, we found literally thousands of large white oak tag card publisher proof printings of their line drawings. I used them as art and craft project stuff for years. Some of their early Colliers and other magazine cartoons depict the house in serious detail. Not enough to show where they lived, of course. Still, fun to see the living room or back yard in print.
It always struck me as a pretty harmless series. Not a fave, but pretty good. Any big fans out there? Anyone else remember the cartoons based around Stan and Jan’s family life, pre-Bears?
My neice absolutely loved the books. The nice thing was there were zillions of them and they were cheap, so it was easy to treat her to a new book regularly. She took real pride in her Berenstein Bears library.
They’re not to bad to read over and over either, not like some other books I had to read with her.
A friend of mine and I were always planning on doing parodies of the books, like Beerstein Bears and Too Much Bourbon or Beerstein Bears and Too Much Sinning.
I did not care for their drawing style. One of the Berenstain books had to do with the family going to the beach and the rocks on the beach were drawn quite large, sharp and pointy. As a boy all I could think about was how much it would hurt to accidentally fall onto one of those sharp rocks.
I’ve read some anti-Bears rhetoric on these boards before, but I was always a big fan of their stuff – those books were a staple of my childhood; they were read to me, and I read them to my little brothers, including some of their later chapter books. I always thought they were great.
Too bad to hear about Stan’s passing; at least he lived to a good age and had a lot to be proud of. I wonder how Jan’s holding up. That’s pretty cool about having lived in their house; if you still have any of those left over drawings I bet you could make a bundle selling them on Ebay.
I loved those books as a kid. I was just thinking about them the other day!
The drawings were neato and I dug the subjects.
I remember wanting to own more books than I did, but I don’t remember why I didn’t have more. I think they were still being released when I was a kid.
I did have an older hardcover BB book which wasn’t as good as the square paperback ones.
sighLute … I wish you wouldn’t have posted that link. I would have been much happier going through life not knowing the Bernstein Bears went all Christian on me like everyone else seems to be
It’s All in the Family was the series that ran in McCall’s.
It was an unusual series in that each issue had six or seven cartoons on a particular subject: “Sibling Rivalry,” “Little League,” and “Two-Wheeler,” for instance. Though the cartoons told a sequential story, like a strip cartoon, they were drawn as a series of panel cartoons, and were large enough to hold all the members of the family in many of the scenes. IIRC, they were stacked vertically on two successive pages, taking maybe two columns of a six-column format. McCall’s at the time was a large-format magazine (smaller than Life, but much bigger than Time) so that each panel was perhaps four inches wide.
Many of the cartoons were collected in paperback format. A quick rummage in the paperback cartoon section of my bookshelves turned up a Dell paperback first printing of Oct. 1963 of “It’s STILL in the Family,” a sequel to the first, self-titled collection. Copyrights on the individual cartoons therein run from 1958 to 1963, and the cover has a caption at the bottom edge which reads “More home-brewed humor from the delightful series fetured in McCall’s magazine.”
Later paperbacks by Bantam include “Never Trust Anyone Over 13” (1970) and “Are Parents for Real?” (1971)
There’s a reason publishers picked them up for reprints - they are very good indeed at showing the foibles of family life, with well-defined characters (kids Janie and Billy and Mike plus the parents) in ways both hilarious and warmly charming. They are somewhat dated, but the art is definitely more detailed than in their many children’s books. Worth hunting down, IMHO.
Yep. Got both of em, found them at yard sales as a kid. ( Well, teen. We moved in when I was 13.) I might have a third one, one of the other titles you listed there. Agreed, the art work IS more sophisticated but then these were not aimed at small children, but at the adult readership of the aforementioned publications.
All of those large publisher’s proof cards are gone. I think. When I go down there in a few weeks I’ll look around my old room in the closet. I suspect all of my stuff was removed by myself when I got married but thin things like that, who knows. Might be neat to find a few of those.
I’m not sure eBay is appropriate. These were never released and are very likely the private property of Mrs. Berenstain ( as Mr. has just died ). I might keep on, but probably would not sell one. One does not sell what one does not rightfully own, IMHO.
We were a Dr. Seuss family; my bookshelf was full books like Hop on Pop and Sleep that were handed down from my siblings. I recall a Christmas-themed scrach & sniff book featuring a family of bears but I don’t remember if it was Berenstain’s or not.
They weren’t awful books, but I didn’t like the way that only MamaBear was the moral guider and always right. I also didn’t like the not so subtle “dissing” of Papabear’s contribution to parenting and the community. Mama was the only adult, or so it would seem. And her outfit sucked-big time. My kids enjoyed them.
They beat Richard Scarey (who truly is) hands down, though.
I had several of those old family life/sex education comedy paperbacks from the 60’s, too, but they’re long gone. I’d like to read them again, and am checking out e-bay, but so far just keep coming up with buttloads of the Bears books.
Those were my favorite books growing up-I had a huge stack of them.
The only thing that bothered me was that apparently, their first names were Brother and Sister-even their friends called them that. Way to be creative! And not only that, but in one book, when Sister is born, Brother’s original name was Small Bear.
Oof, that bugs me too! Will Sister still be her name when she’s a grandmother? Did Mama’s parents address her as such when she was a toddler?
A couple of kiddie TV shows have this problem as well. On Franklin the title character is a turtle, but all his friends have generic animal names (Fox, Bear, Snail, etc.) Why is Franklin the only one with a proper name? On **Little Bear ** you have Little Bear, Mother Bear and Father Bear which, again, raises the Berenstain Conundrum described above. Either that, or Little Bear’s family are the only bears in the world. I won’t even try to figure out why there’s a monkey living in the forest…
