We Bare Bears Research Presentation

As you may or may not be aware, the Humanities Core course at UCI culminates in a final humanistic research paper focusing on a primary source of the student's choice. I chose the popular childrens' cartoon series We Bare Bears. Being a childrens' show on the Cartoon Network, the series obviously has a very young target audience but has managed to grow a fan-base far beyond what the network could have expected. Not only does the show appeal to children, but has also captivated people who are often thought to be "too old for cartoons." I argue that the secret behind the show's broad appeal is it's use of the funny animal and multilevel storytelling for humor that is both accessible to children and stimulating for adults.

Even beyond the Western audiences that the show was originally made for, We Bare Bears has developed a substantial following in East Asia and has made a place for itself in its pop culture. It is arguably more popular in East Asian countiries like South Korea and China than it is in the US. This is clearly apparent in the scholarly discourse, or lack thereof, surrounding the show. While there were essentially no English secondary sources covering We Bare Bears, there were more sources available in Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian. As such, my work with the source is now one of the very few pieces that is accessible to the English-speaking world and generally one of a limited number of sources that exist on the topic at all. I hope that the work that I have done on the show will spark an interest in other scholars and that a larger scholarly discourse on the cartoon would develop.