YMMV / Bear in the Big Blue House

• Awesome Music:
  • The title theme (specifically the one from seasons 1 to 3) is one hell of a catchy, sing-along bebop/jazz tune.
  • "The Goodbye Song" is fondly remembered by kids of the late 90s and early-to-mid 2000s as pure Sweet Dreams Fuel, with Bear and Luna singing about how their day coming to an end doesn't negate the fact that the viewer will get to see them very soon.
  • "Come on In" was introduced as an introductory theme towards the end of the final season and only used a total of three times, yet is so fitting it feels like it could have been there from the beginning. It's a lovely, lively song in which Bear sings about how he has "a long list and a full day ahead", but the viewer is nevertheless welcome to come inside the Big Blue House.
    Bear: The door is always open, so just come on in. / The Big Blue House is your house when you come on in! Yeah!
• Broken Base: The show's Retool in Season 4, in which we get to see more locations and characters. Either it was a good way to expand the world beyond the Big Blue House or it took away the charm of the show's Bottle Episode nature. One thing people can agree on was that they didn’t like the new intro or Ray's redesign. At least the titular house didn't become The Artifact.
• Friendly Fandoms: Many fans of this show also love Donkey Hodie, which also involves puppetry and shares a few cast members with this show.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This series was huge in the United Kingdom. It consistently topped preschooler television polls when it aired and continued receiving DVD releases long after the show ended. It even got a kiddie ride made by Fun2Learn.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Lynne Thigpen as Luna can really sing. It's especially poignant if you knew her best as The Chief, who never sang (though The Chief was a performer before joining ACME, and clips of Thigpen's performances were occasionally used).
  • Noel MacNeal deserves a lot of credit for his performance as Bear. While it's impressive enough that he's operating a highly sophisticated full-bodied puppet, he still has to do so as a nuanced physical performance that's gentle, inviting and, most importantly, sincere, all simultaneous to an equally nuanced vocal performance, and no amount of technology could make up for that. To say he accomplishes both without fault on a regular basis would be an understatement.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This wouldn't be the only Playhouse Disney program created by Mitchell Kriegman and produced by his company, Shadow Projects, to star a bear. Funny enough, both The Book of Pooh and the final season of Bear aired on the same channel during the same time period.
  • In the episode "Water, Water Everywhere", Bear poses the question "What is The Shape of Water?"
  • In "Oops, My Mistake", Pop makes a sandwich that consists of bologna on the outside and bread in the middle. In 2022, Pixar would revisit this idea.
• Ho Yay: Take Tutter's quote "Thank you, Beaaaar!" out of context and you'll likely get this.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The now seemingly lost Bear in The Big Brown Poop (as it's name suggests, it's a YouTube Poop), has a purposely done mondegreen from the Once an Episode closing song: Tomorrow just died today... (granted, though, many of the fans felt this way when the show ended)
  • Bear's dancing◊. There's just something strangely hypnotic about Bear when he does the cha-cha and the suit jiggles as shown.
  • The insanity of Bear With A Dfuck House. ProZD's voice-acting helps add to the weirdness.
  • This never-before-seen outtake of Ojo and Tutter cussing at each other caught on in October 2022, if simply because of the audacity of the whole thing.
  • Crisp Rat^note not to be confused with Chris Pratt, a kid-unfriendly parody of Tutter, has become an online celebrity for making skits and parody videos based off of pop culture and internet memes.
• Moe:
  • Ojo is just plain adorable. As is Treelo.
  • Flashbacks and photographs show that Treelo was quite adorable as a baby.
• Narm: The Toilet Training Plot episode got a number of books made out of it, intended to potty train toddlers, and while they're by no means considered bad (in fact, several articles were written at the time praising how the show handled the subject), they're also highly popular targets of deliberate misuse among teens and adults who are fond of Toilet Humor, especially the sound module that plays the sound of a toilet flushing and the sticker of a medal proclaiming "I'm a Toileteer!". According to Noel MacNeal, the cast and crew of the show were not above laughing at the subject matter, as they were encouraged to "get all their giggles out" the day before they were set to film the episode in question so as not to be distracted.
• Older Than They Think: Treelo's Verbal Tic of referring to bananas as "bananananas" was coined in a much earlier Jim Henson Company production, The Muppet Show, by the Swedish Chef while trying to make a banana split.
• Periphery Demographic:
  • Not surprisingly, plenty of older Muppet aficionados love this show.
  • The show's quiet atmosphere and Bear's gentle demeanor also makes it very popular with people on the autism spectrum.
• Popular with Furries: The show's lead is a huge, fluffy, huggable bear who's technically also a fursuit character. What did you expect?
• Retroactive Recognition: Tutter and Pip are Theo Lion and Snook, as well as Walter and the current voice of Ernie. But, you'll only find out if you Google the credits, since Pigeonholed Voice Acting was averted and their voices are at very different pitch levels. Ditto Treelo and Pop, who are Dr. Nitwhite and Louie, as well as Hawlucha and Incineroar. Additionally, Whoopi Goldberg was a guest as "The Great Bandini", but viewers might not have realized it if they didn't see the credits, as she spoke in a low, calm voice that may not have been immediately recognizable to some as her.
• Squick:
  • From the "Brush Brush Bree" song with the characters' brushing their teeth, Pip's "Look, Pop, I found a clam!" Even the other characters other than Pop are grossed out.
    Pop: Cooool.
    Bear, Tutter, Treelo and Ojo: Ew!
  • Several moments from "When You've Got to Go", including Ojo having a Potty Failure, having a club called the "Toileteers", mentioning animals pooping, and several moments from the "Potty Chair" song.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: The show had a very easygoing and relaxing atmosphere to it and was calming and gentle. This was part of the reason why Bear had a major impact on many kids on the autism spectrum.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Most people weren't too fond of the Season Four intro.
  • Same can go for Ray's redesign in that season.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: There were a number of regular guests that they probably could have developed more or even become regulars, but on the whole they generally stuck with focusing for the most part on the main cast.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Ojo's a girl?! (This is especially confusing for most audiences, because the Ojo puppet was built with no "feminine" qualities, she's often seen participating in "masculine" activities, and her voice, provided by puppeteer Vicki Eibner, resembles a "cartoon young boy" voice at times.)
  • Treelo's a boy?! (His high, Elmo-esque voice, provided by Tyler Bunch, doesn't exactly help matters.)
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Par for the course of Jim Henson Productions, the show features some amazingly sophisticated puppetry, especially Bear, with his highly expressive eyebrows and ability to move his arms independently from one another^note Traditionally, full-bodied walkaround puppets only allow for one arm to be controlled at a time (notice how Big Bird's right arm is always resting on his belly) since the other is busy operating the head, save for shows like Fraggle Rock and Dinosaurs which use remote-controlled heads operated off-camera by a second puppeteer. thanks to a counterweight mechanism in his suit. Occasionally, the show would even do simple in-camera optical effects to make Bear look as if he's holding something in one hand while moving the other independently^note Bear would be filmed from an angle that would allow for another puppeteer's hand wearing a disembodied Bear arm to hold the object out of view, who would then disappear from view when the camera pulled back to sell the illusion that everything was being done by one puppeteer., which adds an incredibly subtle amount of believability to the performance. Combined with Noel MacNeal's excellent performance, it's incredibly easy to forget that you're watching a puppet. Even more impressive, all of this carried over into live appearances that MacNeal made as Bear, which always used the same costume from the show (notably, Bear was the only Muppet to appear on The Hollywood Squares who could step out of his square and take a bow before the show like the other celebrities).

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