The Care Bears Movie Came From a High-Trust Society. We Don't Live There Anymore

I fully understand this might seem like a weird topic, but I watched the Care Bears Movie (1985) as an adult. Thanks to YouTube, I watched something I hadn't set eyes on since before puberty, and I have some things to say. I accept your confusion, but walk with me here.

Like many films of the 1980s, The Care Bears Movie could not be made today, and the reasons aren't what most people would assume. I rewatched it late at night, wired from too much caffeine too late in the day, and expected a charming remembrance of my childhood. Instead, I watched 76 minutes of moral lessons from a high-trust society that no longer exists, prompting a wistful sadness.

If you're too young, or you came from a home where you weren't allowed to watch TV (the horror!), The Care Bears Movie was released in March 1985 by The Samuel Goldwyn Company. Every major American studio had already passed on it. The studios kept saying animated features wouldn't sell if they weren't Disney. Well, joke was on them because the film grossed $23 million domestically, $34 million worldwide by 1989, became the highest-grossing animated feature not produced by Disney, won Canada's Golden Reel Award, and saved Nelvana Studios from bankruptcy. Mickey Rooney narrated, Carole King and John Sebastian wrote songs, and Jackie Burroughs voiced the villain. The thing was a hit, and deservedly so. It also sold a metric F-TON of toys to both boys and girls.

I had a Sunshine Bear plushie, thank you for asking.

But watching it as an adult, I can see how this children's movie succeeded because of the time and place it was produced. It couldn't be repeated now because every bit of that movie took for granted a list of things our culture has since dismantled.

Plot summary, for the uninitiated: Mr. Cherrywood runs an orphanage with his wife and tells the children a bedtime story before lights out. The story features the Care Bears, a group of pastel bears who live in a cloud kingdom called Care-A-Lot and monitor Earth through telescopes for children in distress.

Two of them descend to befriend Kim and Jason, siblings who've lost their parents in a car accident and stopped trusting anyone. A third Care Bear is sent to help Nicholas, a lonely teenage magician's apprentice who finds an old spell book in his master's trunk. The spirit inside the book promises Nicholas friendship and revenge on the people who've ignored him. He accepts the deal. The spirit corrupts him into casting spells that remove caring from people across the world, which threatens to collapse Care-A-Lot itself.

Kim, Jason, the Care Bears, and a related group called the Care Bear Cousins set out to defeat the spirit and save Nicholas. That's the whole movie and, as expected, it features several songs.

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The Voice of Malice

The villain is a sentient spell book with a woman's face inside, voiced by Jackie Burroughs. She's found in a trunk of magical supplies, opened by Nicholas, the lonely teenage magician's apprentice, and she gets to work on him immediately.

She tells him she'll help him. She tells him the world has been unfair to him. After all, he's never had a friend in his whole life. Why don't people like him? The movie sidesteps the pressing question of how Nicholas could have gone so long without ever having a single person like him. As we adults have all come to know, if a person never has friends and is estranged from his family... it's likely he's the problem.

When Nicholas's stage debut goes wrong (because she's secretly sabotaged it), she tells him the laughing children deserve punishment. She walks him through the spell that makes them attack each other, and they both laugh at the resulting mayhem.

Tenderheart, the lead Care Bear implores, "Nicholas, what have you done?"

"Only what they've done to me. They deserved it!"