Mauling here and there and everywhere.
Right around the time that Saturday morning cartoons were leaving us high and dry on our weekends, making way for sitcoms for preteens (California Dreams? Hang Time? Really?), Disney made a solid push into doing a whole line-up of cartoons that were such high quality and spanned well beyond simple toy tie-ins, boy bands, and even what they’d been doing with their movies at the time. I got hooked into it when a certain masked mallard went quack in the night, but I started playing catch-up with some other ducks, a few rodents, and this group of bears I’d never actually heard of before.
I still, to this day, wish I knew what Gummi Berry juice tasted like. Although I’d rather bounce than get strong.
Still, when Levi and I started talking out the plot of the Früms and the berries being a key part of it, the wheels in my brain started turning on a connection between what the little blue guys all harvested and if they had the same magical properties as the bears. And what if they’re picking from the same batch. Granny doesn’t seem to be the sort who enjoys sharing.
This page was one I couldn’t wait to throw at Levi, and, fortunately, he loved it as much as I did, and, as usual, he knocked it out of the park in execution.
I do wonder though… if the berries are the source of the magic for the bears, and the Smurfs eat them, is that magic why Gargamel can turn them into gold? And if so, what could he do with some Gummi Bear pelt?
So many possibilities.
Also, the Früm-fruit song is, of course, a callback to this.
