For those of you just tuning in, Naughty Neighbors will not be seen today. In its place, we are airing something more violent and rural.
Content Warning: This episode contains scenes of and verbal references to suicide, domestic abuse, and brutal slapstick all played for comedy and coming from a different time. Viewer discretion is strongly advised, just like it is with all the other episodes. As I've said before, this is a censored cartoons blog, and a lot of what's been cut will trigger, disturb, and unsettle those who can't handle it because they're not used to seeing animation of this caliber.
Director(s): Chuck Jones (credited as “Charles M. Jones”)
Summary: While reading the newspaper over breakfast (and clocking his son in the face for sticking his nose in a Bugs Bunny comic in the back of the newspaper he’s reading), Papa Bear happens upon a “Wanted” ad looking for circus bears with a fresh, new act. The rest of the cartoon (up until the end) are the failed attempts of a dysfunctional bear family coming up with a circus act (none of which ends with “The Aristocrats”. Look it up).
Fun Facts:
- Probably the biggest continuity goof in this short: the story takes place on August 1st, 1949, but the newspaper Papa Bear finds the ad in is from April 1928 (21 years too late) and there’s a Bugs Bunny comic in the back. Bugs Bunny wouldn’t be a full-fledged character until 1940 with Tex Avery’s “A Wild Hare” (there were cartoons before it, like “Hare-Um Scare-Um” and “Porky’s Hare Hunt” that had a wackier version of Bugs Bunny, but those are considered “proto-Bugs cartoons” and their standing as part of Bugs’ filmography is tenuous, at best) and his first newspaper comic strip wouldn’t come out until 1943. Either this is a major printing error on part of the newspaper or Michael Maltese (the short writer) screwed up.
- The five cents in the “Hit My Son — 3 Tries for 5 Cents” game, in today’s money, would be 70 cents. Not as outrageous as some of the prices I’ve covered here, but five cents for three hits is cheaper and something you’d expect from carnival games of this caliber.
- Since the shorts didn’t credit anyone who wasn’t Mel Blanc (at least until the later ones and the television compilation shows) due to a deal Mel Blanc had to take since Leon Schlesinger wouldn’t give him more money for his work, the voice actors for this short are Billy Bletcher (Papa Bear), Stan Freberg (Junyer/Baby Bear), and Bea Benadaret (Mama Bear).
Letterboxd Says The Darndest Things: Despite the 3.4 out of 5 rating, the reviews are good, mostly outlining how Chuck Jones is diving headfirst into dark comedy, even though he’s done it before in such controversial shorts as “Angel Puss” and “Fresh Airedale.” However, the Three Bears (or, as I’ve been calling them, “The Dysfunctional Bear Family”) is probably the first where it’s more consistent and obvious that Chuck Jones isn’t going back to being an ersatz Walt Disney with his Sniffles cartoons and cutesy one-shots like “Tom Thumb in Trouble.”
A reviewer named Brayson Reece gave it a heart rating (no stars, but it does count) and said this:
Now this is podracing!
Jones's Three Bears shorts are some of my favorite stuff from him. They're beyond mean, beyond misanthropic. This is the kind of cynical bile you usually only get from old Mark E. Smith interviews that were conducted after Manchester lost a soccer match.
It's not pleasant per-se to watch a tiny screaming bear take swings at his wife and son (who- best case scenario is a giant baby, but is more realistically a full-grown man in a diaper who needs round the clock supervision) but it is exhilarating to watch Jones pull back the mask of cuteness and embrace his inner sadist. Like stripping away the powder pink exterior of a Mary Kay car and turning it into a hot rod that you drive drunk.
This short ends with Papa Bear so fed up with his family that he runs off of a cliff, attempting to commit suicide. As he falls he shouts "I'M FREE! I'M FREE! I'M FINALLY FREE!" Baby Bear saves his life by placing a bucket of water under him only to get punched in the face. The short irises out on Baby Bear crying and shouting "WHAT'D I DO!? WHAT'D I DO!!?!?" I saw this in a theater full of families. Kids were upset.
As they should be, as a lot of people have been conditioned to believe that the Looney Tunes cartoons are just as kid-friendly as Disney’s. They started out that way, but everyone got bored of that and wanted something more. Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones (eventually) gave audiences that “more.”
Tim Brayton gave this three-and-a-half stars and said this:
I'd say that this is the Three Bears short where Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese get the tonal balance right, but really I think it's more that this one is more successful at embracing the dark energies of Pa Bear so hard that the results feel more genuinely like dark comedy and not just slapstick that has gone terribly awry. At least, the protracted gag at the end where Pa decides to fling himself off a cliff, savagely declaring his joy at the thought of his imminent death, plays pretty well just in terms of how fearlessly unpleasant it is. That's the best part of the cartoon if only because it is the most uniquely fucked part of the cartoon, though I do also love the drawn-out timing of a gag where Junyer sends Pa flying into the sky, and the excellent inevitable-yet-shocking final joke in the sequence.
The other big strength: some really fun animation in this. There's not a lot of subtlety to it - these aren't subtle characters - but the various ways that Pa's compact body has been pressed into different acrobatic tricks that he's not equipped for leads to some awfully enjoyable images of modest absurdity. It's a little sugar to help with the caustic taste of the rest, a pleasantly rounded silliness that gains salience from the giddy nastiness of the script.
Pretty much the same sentiment as the last review, though this one implies that Chuck Jones has officially entered his “sugar and tar” era (heavy on the “tar” in this case) where sweetness and cruelty are shown in somewhat equal measure (this was the name given to Walt Disney’s first five feature films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi, and for good reason, as you’ll hear a lot of reviews, both on- and offline, saying that those movies made them cry or scared the crap out of them as children).
In the interest of fairness, there’s one bad review of this from logege, who gave this one-and-a-half stars and said this:
This is the 300th review in my diary foooooooor fucking shame
I...don’t know where the shame is supposed to be directed, but it’s obvious that the person didn’t care much for the short, so...yeah. Moving on...
The Channel(s): The WB/Kids WB
Part(s) Edited: The ending where Papa Bear, after finding out that the circus act wanted ad is from an outdated newspaper, becomes so despondent that he jumps off the cliff (only to be saved by Junyer with the tub of water, with Papa Bear punching his son in the face for saving him from suicide) was cut, obviously.
What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): Outside of an abrupt ending (assuming the censors ended after Papa Bear’s lament on what he ever did to deserve such a family and not cut off after he runs out of the house, making it look like he’s abandoning his family and not heading for the cliff, or ending the short after “Well, there’s still one way out” [which has the same energy as some edited versions of 1950’s “The Scarlet Pumpernickel” ending the short after Daffy says, “Is that all?!”]), the edit itself is innocuous.
However, what does grind my gears is the fact that the same channel that edited this short also banned “The Bee-Deviled Bruin” (released the same year as “Bear Feat” and was directed by the same man, though “The Bee-Deviled Bruin” was released first on May 14th [the meat in a Friz Freleng sandwich that consisted of “High-Diving Hare” and “Curtain Razor” as the bread] while “Bear Feat” was released on December 10th, in between Freleng’s “Which is Witch” and Jones’ “Rabbit Hood”) for being too violent and having too much reckless behavior that could drive impressionable viewers to imitate it. Wouldn’t make more sense not to air any of the Three Bears/Dysfunctional Bear Family cartoons due to being too violent and showing a child character being abused? Most American TV channels didn’t air the Pepe Le Pew cartoons or the Speedy Gonzales cartoons due to them being problematic (or because Nickelodeon was airing them ad nauseum on their network at the time. I should know. I’m old enough to remember it happening), so why couldn’t The WB take the same hint? Also, the usual cry of “The ending wasn’t cut on any other channel that normally edits for suicide references, like Cartoon Network and Boomerang,” but I’m kinda tired of pointing that out. Just know that Cartoon Network and Boomerang didn’t edit the ending. As for MeTV? “Bear Feat” actually aired on the “Rockin’ Rockers” episode of Toon In with Me (a cartoon show that’s similar to the older ones from the 1950s and ‘60s where they have presenters, puppets, and funny bits introducing the shorts) on July 6, 2023 during its third season. It also aired on the season four episode “Off to Sturgis (South Dakota)” on August 2, 2024. Far as I know, the ending was uncut on both occasions. Otherwise, the Looney Tunes Fandom Wiki would have said something.
Video Comparison:
Availability Uncut: This actually has a pretty good run on home media, if you can believe it. “Bear Feat” first appeared on the fifteenth volume of the Looney Tunes Video Show VHS collection (which was only available in Canada and countries outside of North America [which is Mexico, Canada, and the United States — both the 48 continuous and the freak states, Alaska and Hawaii]) in 1984. Nine years later (1993), the short was released on the “Looney Tunes: Assorted Nuts” laser disc that was part of the Authentic and Original Looney Tunes home media collection from Warner Home Video. Three years after that (1996), “Bear Feat” went to the UK and appeared in volume three of the Looney Tunes Special Bumper Collection VHS. It stayed there until 2008 (that’s 12 years, for those counting at home), where it appeared on the final volume (volume six) of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set. A year after that (2009), “Bear Feat” appeared as a bonus feature on the Turner Classic Movie Spotlight DVD collection centered on Doris Day. As of this writing, it hasn’t been released on Blu-ray.
Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: No digital download, but it was on streaming. From 2021 to 2024, it was on the Latin American/Brazilian feed of HBO Max. As of 2025, it’s on Tubi.
VS.
Director(s): Chuck Jones (credited as “Charles M. Jones”)
Summary: In this, the final Three Bears/Dysfunctional Bear Family short, Papa Bear (as possible punishment for his antics on “The Bee-Deviled Bruin” and “Bear Feat”; not so much “What’s Brewin’, Bruin?” or “Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears,” though there was abuse in those) is forced to go through his wife’s and son’s cringeworthy attempts at celebrating Father’s Day, from breakfast in bed (which is actually a Mother’s Day thing. Kinda wished they did a Mother’s Day spin on it) to a low-rent showbiz extravaganza in the comfort and privacy of their own cave.
Fun Facts:
- This is the only Three Bears/Dysfunctional Bear Family short where there is no narrator to introduce the trio.
- Papa Bear whining about not wanting breakfast in bed for Father’s Day is based on Chuck Jones’ experience, only it didn’t end with his wife or kid slipping on a roller skate and sending the tray flying into the air and onto his head (I don’t think).
Easter Egg Hunt: There are some interesting background details in the opening pan showing the Three Bears as they sleep (if these are their beds, I can’t imagine a version of this where Goldilocks would willingly want to sleep on those):
Mama Bear doesn’t have much, just a box of chocolates and some pink slippers. Her bed is made from a delicatessen awning, a piece of a tree, a plank of wood with some nails in it attached to a furniture leg (which piece of furniture, I don’t know. It could have come from a bed that was better than what’s she’s sleeping on), a white picket fence, and a brass pole (not the stripper kind; the kind that also came from a better piece of furniture than what’s depicted).
Papa Bear has a bit more: a box of prunes, a smaller box of cheese, some apple cores, and a peach book with the title, Kinsey Report. The Kinsey Report is one of two books published in the late 1940s and early 1950s (the first one came out in 1948; the second in 1953) about human sexual behavior. Since this cartoon came out in 1951, Papa Bear actually has the one about male sexual behavior, which was the one that was published first. The bed is made from a 1920s jalopy (a lot of which were melted down for scrap during WWII. This one still has its “Oh, You Kid!” graffito on it) and two belts tied to what I’m guessing are the bottoms of two metal coat racks. Not as elaborate as Mama Bear’s bed, but it is interesting to see a 1920s jalopy find new life in post-World War II America.
While Junyer/Baby Bear’s bed is the typical rocking baby bed that was around at the time, there’s a lot of foreground and background detail. There are a lot of comic books strewn about. The titles I can make out include: Comics, Speed Ace, Looney Tunes Comics (with Bugs Bunny on the cover), Dare Devils, Mystery Man, Lone Ranger, Border Patrol Comics (what?!), Sadist Mao’s (double what?!), F31 Crime Stories, Flying Tiger, Porky Pig, another Lone Ranger comic, Amazing Adventures, Cat Calls (must be a spicy comic. Definitely not for kids), Marine Adventures, Hero Stuff, Crime Time III (with the words, “Crime Doesn’t Pay” on the back), Smut Stories Deluxe (another age-inappropriate comic), The Raider (I think that’s what that says. Even in high-def and remastered, it looks illegible), Daffy Detective, another one that just says Comics, and Rum RMF (another illegible one). In the background, there’s a behavior chart, showing that Junyer is at least raised right, despite having a physically abusive father and a extremely passive mom who just lets the abuse happen.
Letterboxd Says The Darndest Things: Much like “Bear Feat,” this one does have good reviews, despite the middle-of-the-road rating (though it does rate higher than “Bear Feat” at 3.5). Since all the reviews sound similar, I’m going to pick two reviews. Here’s Tim Brayton’s review of this:
The final Three Bears short is easily the best, and I think I knew that was coming from very early on: extremely near the start, one of the sauciest gags the Chuck Jones unit ever got away with has been squirreled into a background painting, in the form of a copy of the Kinsey Report lying just within reach of Pa Bear's bed. Though this does find Jones maybe getting a little too big for his britches: some of the reaction shots are held for so long that it ends up breaking the spell of those wonderful pauses that were becoming a central component of his style.
Still, there's a lot of wonderful madness here, particularly when the short abandons the usual Three Bears formula for an utterly bizarre floor show where Ma and Junyer engage in one of the most nonsensical Father's Day tributes known to man or bear. Absolutley floored by some of the character animation here: the incredible flexibility and rubbery poses of Junyer as he tortuously recites his awful poem, the mixture of stillness and flailing kineticism in Ma's dance. And through it all, the belligerent Pa has been reduced to a helpless prisoner, so infuriated by how much he despises his life and his family that he can no longer even express it, but just sits paralyzed in an agonizing personal hell of mortification and cringe, captured through some wild drawings of bug-eyed rage. Honestly the only way that character could go out, and if Jones and Maltese actually knew this was the end of the line for this sub-series, what a brilliantly dark-hearted way to approach it.
Not much I can add to this or argue against, except that, if Jones and Maltese really wanted this to go out on a dark-hearted note, they could have stopped at “Bear Feat” (or possibly “The Bee-Devilled Bruin,” as that one ended with Papa Bear getting whacked in the face with a shovel because Junyer/Baby Bear hates bees). But that would have been too dark, which is why I think ending the Pepe Le Pew series with “The Cats Bah” is a bad idea.
Here’s one from Miguel, who gave this five stars and reveals some interesting points about this one:
The final of the Warners shorts starring The Three Bears (due in part to extremely negative audience reception towards them), A Bear for Punishment is the kind of brutal skewering of the American household that only Chuck Jones could deliver to animation as effortlessly as he did. That really describes the entire subseries well. They are cartoons that couldn't play well at the time as they were directly mocking their target demographic, yet can pack an even greater punch decades and decades after their release.
I never knew audiences didn’t like this one (though it does explain why there’s only five of these shorts). I figured it was because either Eddie Selzer hated them (and Chuck and Mike didn’t defend the series the way they did with the Pepe cartoons) or there wasn’t enough money in the budget to keep making the shorts and only focus on the more popular ones, like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. And it is true that, despite being short-lived, they did have an impact. Look at the early episodes of The Simpsons, where the main schtick is Homer strangling Bart after Bart plays a prank on Homer or says something insulting about him. In some of the behind-the-scenes documentaries about Chuck Jones’ cartoons and the WB cartoons that have lesser-known characters, some have compared this series to All in the Family, though Archie Bunker didn’t use violence against his meathead son-in-law or his whiny daughter; he just said things that were politically incorrect both in the early 1970s and now. Edith wasn’t as passive as Mama Bear, but there were times were she felt powerless to stop her husband.
The Channel(s): ABC and Nickelodeon
Part(s) Edited: The cuts to these...yeah, I only understand why one of the edits had to be done. Here are the cuts:
- ABC’s version cut the “Let’s Give a Cheer for Father” song to remove Ma and Junyer/Baby Bear firing their rifles to the tune of the song and added an extra “Duh” from Junyer for...some reason (I guess to cover a faint gunshot on the audio track).
Nickelodeon’s version left in the rifle part, but cut two scenes before that:
- The beginning part where, after Papa Bear gets woken up by the many alarm clocks by Junyer/Baby Bear’s bed, he tries to shut them off with no success. Papa Bear asks his son how to shut them off and Junyer/Baby Bear shushes them quiet. Rather than congratulate his son or ask how he did that, Papa Bear gets angry and slams the alarm clock in his hand into Junyer/Baby Bear’s face. Nickelodeon’s version cuts off after Junyer shushes the clock and Papa Bear looks stunned (the scene of Junyer/Baby Bear staring at the camera with a clock parts face was cut for continuity reasons), then resumes at Mama Bear going, “But Henry...”
- The next scene edited was during the sequence of Papa Bear whining that he doesn’t want to sit in front of a roaring fire (“...all nice and cozy”) while smoking a pipe. For whatever reason, Nickelodeon cut the part where Junyer/Baby Bear spells out the word on a can of gunpowder and thinks it spells “tobacco,” then congratulates himself on being a good speller as his spells “dog” as “c-a-t” and “Rhode Island” as “b-a-t.”
What Wasn’t Cut But Should Have Been: Isn’t it obvious? The shaving part where Junyer/Baby Bear chases after Papa Bear with a jagged razor as Mama Bear makes a cake, followed by a loud crash, Junyer/Baby Bear coming out of the room telling Mama Bear that “Pa won’t talk to me,” Mama Bear putting a kitchen towel over the cake she just finished decorating as a somber version of "What's The Matter with Father (He's All Right)" plays on the track, and a very much alive Papa Bear pulling his son back and beating him off-screen. That has everything a network censor in the 1990s (from both ABC and Nickelodeon) would object: kids handling dangerous weapons, comic threat and violence that has potential to be imitated in real life, and dark, gruesome comedy involving patricide and child abuse and yet, they looked the other way. Not even CBS did this, though I feel CBS may have skipped this one because of excessive violence. If they hated “Long-Haired Hare” so much for it, then they probably didn’t care much for this, either.
What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): It’s a mix between the shaving part not being edited, despite being such an easy target for censors at that time, and the fact that the only justified edit in all of this is Papa Bear punching his son in the face with a clock.
Video Comparison:
Availability Uncut: It started off on the Looney Tunes: Assorted Nuts laser disc from 1993 (which also has “Bear Feat”), then was on the Looney Tunes Collector’s Edition VHS (volume six, “Supporting Characters”) seven years later (2000). Four years later (2004), “A Bear for Punishment” was on the second volume of the then-new Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set. A year later (2005), it was on the repackaged version of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD that was available overseas called Looney Tunes Collection: Best of Road Runner (volume 1), available as a DVD or a VCD (a VCD is a DVD that’s available in most parts of Asia, barring South Korea and Japan. It’s like a DVD, but the storage is smaller and the video quality is a step down). 2011 saw “A Bear for Punishment” on the Wile E. Coyote disc as part of the Looney Tunes Big Faces box set (available in the United Kingdom). In 2012, “A Bear for Punishment” was released in Australia as part of the Looney Tunes 3 Feature Collection Best Of that includes a disc for Porky and Daffy cartoons and a disc for Sylvester and Tweety shorts (all of them are recycled from the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, volume two, just so you know). 2013 saw “A Bear for Punishment” come back to America and be released on the Best of Warner Bros. 50 Cartoon Collection: Looney Tunes DVD. Finally, the short was released three times in 2014: on the DVD and Blu-ray version of the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection (third and final volume) and on volume eight, disc two of the Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection (which is a scaled-down, more family-friendly version of the Golden Collection DVDs).
Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: Yes to streaming, no to digital download. It was on the American feed of HBO Max (and its short-lived rebrand “Max”) from 2020 to 2025 (with a year off in 2023) and now it’s been on Tubi since 2025.
So, Who Won?: In terms of which is the better cartoon, “A Bear for Punishment” isn’t as dark as “Bear Feat” and can be enjoyed by those who don’t think suicide should be made light of. In terms of TV censorship, “Bear Feat” won, because the edit didn’t leave me wondering why the censors cut the part in the first place. In this case, it’s a draw.
‘Til next time: Stay Looney and Be Merrie!
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