Western Animation / Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot

The caring never stops, you've got a friend in Care-A-Lot!

Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot is an animated series based on the Care Bears franchise that was produced by Sabella Dern Entertainment for American Greetings.

The show centers around five main bears; Cheer Bear, Share Bear, Funshine Bear, Grumpy Bear and Canon Foreigner Oopsy Bear (first introduced in the movie Oopsy Does It!). No Care Bears show is complete without a villain of course, and the villain of this incarnation is Grizzle, a puny grizzly bear who spends most of his time in a robot suit and seeks to convert Care-a-Lot into part of his machine empire. It's a lot less scary than it sounds, owing to the fact that Care Bears incarnations of the new millennium have been toned down as to not give younger audiences nightmares. As a matter of fact, Grizzle is an ineffectual villain at most, with most of his plans hilariously backfiring on him one way or another, and in the final special of the series, Grizzle was removed altogether.

Aired on CBS from 2007 to 2010, the full series franchise for this incarnation consists of the movie Oopsy Does It!, 24 episodes and two TV specials split across two seasons over two years, and three more direct-to-video specials before the franchise was unceremoniously revamped.

It can be said that the franchise was ill-timed. Shortly after the release of the series, Hasbro acquired the master license to both Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake from both Play Along Toys and Playmates respectively. Hasbro then proceeded to sit on the franchise until 2012, when they launched another revamp in Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-Lot.

This page focuses on the TV specials and the TV series. The direct-to-video specials and Oopsy Does It! should be placed in their own pages.

---

Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot features the following tropes:

• Art Shift: The movies and direct-to-video specials were CGI. The TV shows and TV specials use traditional animation.
• Art Evolution: The bears' designs were radically changed for this incarnation, creating a broken base over the new designs. This design was dumped when the licensee was changed over to Hasbro.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In the episode 'Growing Pains' Cheer Bear and Share Bear use magic glitter to enlarge their flower gardens, when their gardens get too long, they use the glitter on themselves, causing them to grow so tall that Care-A-Lot is as big as their own feet.
• Bears Are Bad News: Grizzle. Even if he doesn't successfully harm the Care Bears and receive his dose of Karma at the end, he still does cause considerable collateral damage to Care-a-Lot indirectly.
• Beary Friendly: Every bear except Grizzle.
• Birthday Episode:
  • "Present and Accounted For" for Love-a-lot Bear.
  • "Cheer Up" for Surprise Bear.
• Canon Foreigner: Oopsy Bear, Wingnut and Grizzle.
• Color-Coded Characters:
  • Cheer Bear: Pink
  • Funshine: Yellow
  • Grumpy: Blue
  • Oopsy: Green
  • Share Bear: Purple
• Demoted to Extra: Tenderheart Bear. This is basically one of the causes of the Broken Base in the fandom.
• Disembodied Eyebrows: Wingnut
• Egopolis: In "Here Comes McKenna" when the bears' belly badges were stolen by Grizzle, he orders them to tear Care-a-lot down and rename it "Grizzleton".
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: Remember, Cheer Bear is the leader in this incarnation.
• Evil Is Hammy: Grizzle, with his Fake Brit accent.
• Everyone Laughs Ending: The estimate is that as much as 90% of the show's episodes ended this way.
• Exhausted Eye Bags: In "Belly Ball," Share Bear wants to get a ribbon for winning at belly ball like Cheer and Tenderheart because she thinks it'll make everyone like her. She practices all night, but just ends up with these and so tired that she can barely play at all, let alone win a ribbon.
• Face Your Fears: Share had to do this in "Heatwave", knowing she's afraid of the thunderwhales and thus the only one who can lure them to Care-a-Lot to stop Grizzle.
• Feud Episode: "Erased" is this due to a side-effect of New-B's eraser ray. The bears only care about what their belly badges stand for and argue amongst one another because they think the other's caring mission is not the one at hand.
• Fooled by the Sound: In "Down to Earth", Share, Funshine, and Cheer think Good Luck is crying, so they walk up to him to give him a Care-Bear Stare. He explains that he was just laughing because he heard a joke earlier.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The Care Bear Stare can once again be used for this purpose in this series.
• Genre Shift: The final TV special of the series did away with villains and is completely Slice of Life.
• Growling Gut: A strange example in "Tell Tale Tummy", where Share's stomach making jingling noises.
• Harmless Villain: Grizzle, most of the time. In the times he does succeed however, he is quickly outwitted by the bears.
• Heavy Sleeper: Bedtime Bear. Wakes up, mumbles a short sentence, drops back off to sleep.
• Idiosyncratic Wipes: Concentric hearts filling the screen from outside to inside and back, a bear's belly badge or a trio of stars rolling across the screen in a white circle, or in the case of Grizzle, two metal panels closing and opening.
• It's All About Me: When the bears are zapped by the eraser ray in "Erased", it causes them to only care about what their belly badge stands for and insists their jobs are the only ones to do at hand.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The purpose of the Forget Me Ray in "Forget It" is to cause the bears to forget they ever knew Grizzle, but it is taken up to eleven when they forget everything.
• Licensed Game: One for a relatively unknown console called the V-Smile Baby
• Magic Feather: In "Luck O' The Oopsy", Oopsy is worried he'll screw up in the Care-A-Lot Grand Prix, so Good Luck offers him a lucky four-leaf clover which he puts under his hat, and manages to practice without trouble. On the day of the race, the clover blows out of Oopsy's helmet right when it begins, and Oopsy didn't know it, yet he manages to win the race fair and square because of his confidence.
• Mistaken for Brooding: In "Down to Earth", Cheer, Share, and Funshine think Good Luck Bear is crying, so they approach him so that they can give him a Care-Bear Stare. He then clarifies that he was actually laughing about a joke he heard earlier.
• No Antagonist: Grizzle doesn't appear in some of the episodes, but the final TV Special, Down to Earth, is fully antagonist-free as it focuses on an earth kid having just moved to a new place and feeling lonely from missing his old friends.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Grizzle seems to be only capable of this. Nontheless, the bears fall for it every time.
• Pep-Talk Song:
  • Share has "The Sharing Song" from "Broken", as she teaches Wingnut how to share.
  • Funshine has "Rain or Shine" from "Down to Earth", which encourages Jake that making new friends is fun.
• The Power of Hate: The malfunctioning result of New-B's eraser ray in "Erased"; it amplifies the negative side of the bears, washing out their colors and inverting their belly badges, only caring about what they stand for. When another bear interrupts, they disagree over whose mission is the task at hand.
• Real Dreams are Weirder: All the Care Bears share a dreamspace where they tend to have rather mundane dreams (where they do the same things they tend to do in their waking lives).
• Red Herring: In "A Little Help", Grizzle gets covered in sparkly glue and the bears mistake him for Surprise Bear's special surprise at the party. But then Surprise arrives and tells them her real surprise is a heart piñata, causing them to realize the truth.
• Short-Runner: Only 24 episodes (with 2 segments in each episode) and four TV specials across two seasons.
• Silicon Snarker: Grizzle's robotic butler UR-2 tends to make quips about his boss's ineffectual villainy.
• Slice of Life: The show drifts in and out of this, but the final TV special is straight up slice-of-life.
• Status Quo Is God: No matter how many times the bears try to reform Grizzle, in the end he always goes back to being a villain by the start of the next story.
• Start My Own: In the episode, "Whose Friend is Who?" a bit of a club war gets started because Cheer, Harmony, and Love-a-Lot reject Funshine and Oopsy's help in making a "project" with their human friend McKenna. So, with Grumpy, they make their own "project" and a subsequent club to go with it. The girls retaliate by forming their own club, and a montage of the two clubs one-upping each other in their projects ensues, with McKenna stuck in the middle, not wanting to pick a side. She eventually gets the two clubs to see how silly they're being by making a club with Wingnut, and calls them out when they band together to exclude her club.
• String-on-Finger Reminder: In "Forget It," Grizzle uses his "Forget Me Ray" invention to cause the Care Bears to forget who he is so that he can easily enact his evil scheme to take over Care-a-Lot. Unfortunately for him, it's rather too powerful and it causes them to forget practically everything. He tries this as a way to keep them focused on what he wants them to do. However, shortly after this, a couple of them overhear him talking about what he did to Wingnut and so Funshine uses his as a distraction ("What did you say this string was for again?"), while Tenderheart gets the Forget Me Ray and uses it to reverse the effects on himself and Funshine.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Heavily flanderized, where the Bears (particularly Share) constantly inform each other just what emotion they're feeling at the time.
• Theme Tune Roll Call: The extended version of the theme released as a music video has this.
  What do Cheer and Share and Oopsy do? / Bring smiles, give gifts and help you, too / Funshine's a fun one, Grumpy's blue, ooo-wee-ooo...
• Toyless Toyline Character: Some of the bears have not had plushes released for this incarnation, especially Tenderheart, Champ, Laugh-a-lot and Friend.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Harmony becomes one in "Share and Share Alike"; her noticing Share's giant rootbear plant and deciding to spread the news causes thousands of bears to show up at the sweet shop, and Share never gets any rootbear floats for herself by the time the machine has run out.
• V-Sign: Most official artwork of Oopsy depicts him doing this.
• Washy Watchy: Justified in "Down to Earth." The mother of the boy that Funshine Bear is helping, Jake, tossed him in with the laundry, believing him to be a plush toy. Fortunately, this won't harm Funshine because he isn't a normal bear, something that he assures Jake of before actually going into the washing machine. At dinner, Jake has a bad case of the giggles because from his seat at the dinner table, he has a view of Funshine's antics in the washing machine— wearing goggles and a snorkel, as well as a bathing cap and scrubbing as if he's taking a bath.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: In "Heatwave", Share suffers from an intense fear of the thunderwhales, given how big and loud they are.
• Zombie Apocalypse: One episode, when a Love Potion goes wrong, turning the other Care Bears into creepy "love zombies" bent on apparently hugging Oopsy to death.