Summer is right around the corner! Here are ten things The Bear Family Loves to do during Summer Vacation.
We hope you have a wonderful summer!
Children’s books
Behind the Scenes: Under the Sea
Our Newest Book The Berenstain Bears Under the Sea Comes out this month on April 19th Through Harper Collins. Check out all of the prep work behind Under the sea, and some of the featured creatures!
Before starting on a book, Mike Berenstain does some research. In Under the Sea one of the stops the Bear Family makes is to visit a coral reef, and he wants to make sure every creature is depicted accurately. After some preliminary research a sketch is created.
In the Coral Reef scene there is a lot going on. The sketch is a good way to layout how the animals will interact with each other and create the composition of the page . Once the page is laid out it is time to add color!
Once the final watercolor is finished, text is added digitally, and the spread is ready to print.
Below are some of the animals featured and their real life counterparts. You can see how the animals are depicted to fit into the world of the Berenstain Bears!
These are only a few of the many animals featured in Under the Sea, keep an eye out at your local bookstore for Under the sea, or pre-order online today!
Back to School with the Berenstain Bears
With just a few weeks of summer left, back-to-school season is almost here! Whether your cubs are starting a new grade or attending school for the very first time, the Bear family has stories to help get them through all the troubles, triumphs, and new experiences they may face this year. Click on the images below to view them at full size!
The Berenstain Bears Go to School
The Berenstain Bears and the Excuse Note
The Berenstain Bears and the Homework Hassle
The Berenstain Bears Come Clean for School
The Berenstain Bears Sick Days 
The Berenstain Bears’ Trouble at School
The Berenstain Bears’ Class Trip
The Berenstain Bears and the Big Spelling Bee
The Berenstain Bears Get Ready for School
Good luck, and happy reading!
The Berenstain Bears’ Summer Reading Guide
With the changing of the season comes summer vacation, warmer weather, and lots more time for little cubs to get reading! Here are our picks for the books most suited to the long, hot days of the next three months. Click the pictures to view them at full size!
The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Car Trip 
The Berenstain Bears’ Lemonade Stand
The Berenstain Bears’ Dinosaur Dig
The Berenstain Bears Gone Fishin’ 
The Berenstain Bears’ Seashore Treasure 
The Berenstain Bears God Bless Our Country 
The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Vacation
The Berenstain Bears Go to Camp 
Happy reading!
Behind the Scenes: The Berenstain Bears Hospital Friends
On April 21st, HarperCollins Children’s Books will release a special new Berenstain Bears book: The Berenstain Bears Hospital Friends. Hospital Friends represents the fulfillment of the Berenstains’ long-cherished dream of adding a story about visiting the hospital to the Berenstain Bears series. All author’s royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to the Stan and Jan Berenstain Healthy Kids Foundation, which is devoted to the funding of children’s health and well-being initiatives!
In order to make Hospital Friends as accurate and informative as possible, Mike Berenstain based the book’s illustrations on sketches he made while visiting a local children’s hospital. Read his account of the process below, accompanied by a few sneak peaks of the finished book alongside the sketches that inspired it!
Being given the run of a children’s hospital to do visual research by on site sketching was crucial to making The Berenstain Bears’ Hospital Friends as medically accurate and authentic as possible. It was also very satisfying for me as an artist to be able to directly experience and record the behind-the-scenes workings of this great institution. An additional personal reward for me was the opportunity to witness my wife, Laura, in action in her professional role as anesthesiologist–something I would not, otherwise, be allowed to do–there is no normal provision for “Spouse’s Visiting Day” in the OR. Over many days, I visited and sketched several ORs, pre-op and recovery rooms, Radiology, Physical Therapy, the Emergency Department, waiting rooms, a patient unit, and an outpatient surgery center. In addition to using this experience for the general background of the book, I tried, wherever I could, to use the literal scenes, poses and situations of the patients and medical staff I sketched as the basis for the characters and scenes in the book. The only difference is that instead of people–they’re bears! Everyone at the hospital was immensely gracious and cooperative in making this possible. They all seemed genuinely pleased to have me there, constantly getting in their way, as they went about the immensely demanding and exacting work of providing care for those children who need it the most.
– Mike Berenstain
Behind the Scenes: Making Thanksgiving All Around
The Bear Family has a new Thanksgiving adventure this year in Thanksgiving’s All Around, a Lift-the-Flap book recommend for children ages 4-8. In it, Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister, and Honey stroll through lush autumn landscapes. In search of a wild turkey after stumbling upon his tracks, the Bears find many surprises along the way.
To get an insider’s look at how this book came together, check out our Q&A with author and illustrator Mike Berenstain below.
Thanksgiving All Around is a Lift-the-Flap book. Could you talk a little about the mechanics of illustrating a book in this format?
Lift-the-Flap books are very difficult to design—they’re like putting together an elaborate puzzle. The story has to be planned around a series of hidden surprises, these hidden elements must be logically worked into each illustration and each flap that covers the surprise must be created as a separate illustration which much line up precisely with the illustration underneath.
The book takes place, of course, in November. What sort of adjustments do you make when illustrating the Bear Country landscape in autumn?
Everything needs to take on a mellow autumn tonality—the greens are a warmer, yellower hue, autumn leaves must be a variety of yellows, oranges and reds.
Do you make any changes to the characters to reflect the season?
The Berenstain Bears are quite cold-tolerant—after all, they have thick fur. So, they only wear jackets and scarves when things get very chilly.
In addition to Bears, Thanksgiving All Around features all sorts of animals, like a woodchuck, kittens, turkeys, and more. How did you decide which animals to include?
The decisions about which ones to include was based on what would work with the flap book format. For instance, the idea of making a cloud in the sky into a flap suggested having a flock of geese flying by underneath.
What is your favorite thing about Thanksgiving?
Pumpkin pie, without a doubt!
Thanksgiving All Around was published by HarperCollins on August 26th.
You can purchase it online here.
Celebrating 50 Years
Our blog this year has reflected on the Berenstain Bears and their creators Jan, Stan, and Mike Berenstain as they mark their 50th Anniversary.
In celebration of our anniversary, HarperCollins Children’s Books and Random House Children’s Books worked with Jan and Mike to document the creation of the Berenstain Bears. Filmed just 3 weeks before her death in February 2012, Jan never saw the completion of the five videos. Now, for the first time ever, Random House and HarperCollins have released excerpts from this phenomenal interview for all to see.
We are very grateful to Harper Collins and Random House for these wonderful and very timely videos of our beloved Jan Berenstain.
The interviews are available on the Berenstain-ology tab of the Parents Den on our website:
50th Anniversary Interviews
Team Berenstain – Part 4
Adapted and excerpted from Mike Berenstain’s Child’s Play: Cartoon Art of Stan and Jan Berenstain, published by Abrams in 2008.
The explosive popularity of television rang the death knell of the general interest weekly magazine. Folks were not content to sit around reading when they could partake of the wild hilarity of Uncle Milty or Sid Caesar on the dimly luminous tube. The Saturday Evening Post survived in truncated form by going from weekly to monthly publication. But Collier’s went under at the end of 1956.
Surprisingly, Stan and Jan survived this catastrophic loss of their principle source of income quite nimbly. One area of magazine publishing that continued to thrive in the new multimedia era was the venerable monthly woman’s magazine. Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s had been around since the turn of the century and were showing no signs of going the way of the buggy whip. Stan and Jan shifted their focus to this alternate venue and thrived.
McCall’s quickly snapped up their new series, It’s All in the Family (no connection to the later TV sitcom), which graced its pages from 1956 to the new-broom regime of Shana Alexander in the early seventies when it migrated to Good Housekeeping, where it continued until 1988. This feature, in fact, lasted so long that for the final few years of its existence it was ghost-written and drawn by Stan and Jan’s son Mike.
It’s All in the Family took the mom, the dad, and the daughter from Sister, bookended the girl between an older and younger brother, and settled them down in a Leave-it-to-Beaverish suburbia tailored to the traditionally domestic McCall’s. These kids, by the way, had “real” names: Michael, Janie, and Billy. They even had a last name: the Harveys.
This feature–seven panel cartoons or more on a single theme once a month for thirty-two years–became the background to the Berenstain family life while Mike and Leo were growing up.
Mike’s (temporary) obsession with dinosaurs, for instance, was immediately seized upon and turned into cartoons.
Dinosaurs; It’s All in the Family; McCall’s; January 1962
It was older son, Leo’s, attempts to master a two-wheeler that provided the model for Janie’s bike riding experiences–though, he, no doubt, dispensed with the stylish beret.
Two-Wheeler; It’s All in the Family; McCall’s; January 1959
But we haven’t touched Juniper Street or Wellington Road,
and there’s that whole new development down by the park.
Trick or Treat; It’s All in the Family; McCall’s; October 1957
And for the witch with the tallest hat.
Halloween Party; It’s All in the Family; McCall’s; October 1959
It’s All in the Family migrated from McCall’s to Good Housekeeping in the 1970s, where the feature was finally retired in 1988.
Of course, by then, the hugely popular Berenstain Bears children’s book series, which made its debut in 1962, had come to dominate the creative life of Stan and Jan. The transition from cartoons about children to books for children was a natural one for Stan and Jan. As parents themselves, they were interested and critical consumers of children’s books.
Their professional interest was aroused, as well, when many former cartoonists came into prominence in the children’s book field during the early sixties. Most prominent of all was Theodor Seuss Geisel, also editor and publisher of the new Random House Beginner Books line, an outgrowth of Geisel’s groundbreaking early reader, The Cat in the Hat.
And, “the rest is history” as they say. As the Berenstain Bears celebrate their 50th Anniversary during 2012, you can read how this loveable family of bears who live down a sunny dirt road began in “How it all started” http://wp.me/p2duMi-8
Team Berenstain – Part 3
Adapted and excerpted from Mike Berenstain’s Child’s Play: Cartoon Art of Stan and Jan Berenstain, published by Abrams in 2008.
At the same time Stan and Jan were laboring over their larger cartoons, they continued to produce a flood of regulation-size gag cartoons chiefly, now, for Collier’s. They began to focus their efforts on a tomboyish, wise-cracking little girl they thought of, simply, as “Sister”―a cartoon everyone could connect with.
People sometimes ask, suspiciously, where the idea of naming the Berenstain Bears by their family roles, “Papa,” “Mama,” “Brother,” and “Sister,” came from. They seem to assume it has some subversive ideological import relating to their origin in the turbulent 1960s. But the truth of the matter is that came out of the innocent world of 1940s American family magazines―a world where kids were generically dubbed “Butch” or “Skip” or “Sis”―just another average all-American kid. The humor of the Sister cartoons could be sweetly cute and charming. But it could also verge into the slightly edgy and subversive.
My ears are killing me!
Sister; Collier’s; March 1951
We were going to make you something real nice but there were too many hard words.
Sister; Colliers; 1949-1952.
Stan and Jan’s ever-rising professional profile drew the attention of an editor at Macmillan. Since they were so good at creating cartoons about kids, he wondered, why not try their hands at a book on the subject, as well? Dr. Spock’s Baby Book was, of course, the Bible of child-rearing in the early Fifties and seemed a natural target for a disrespectful spoof. Thus the Berenstains’ Baby Book was born, soon to be followed by a sequel, Baby Makes Four, and several other childrearing-themed books.
Much of the humor of these books centered on straightforward satire of the “by-the-book” and “he’s-just-acting-out” school of parenthood. Stan and Jan were particularly adept at mimicking the pompously professional jargon of the early self-help tomes.
“Back to the sea!!!” shouted the brave puppet.
Berenstains’ Baby Book; 1951.
… Thiamin, Thinness, Three month colic, Throat infections’ … there it is! “Thumb sucking!”
Baby Makes Four; 1957.
Sister, the on-going panel cartoon they had produced for Collier’s, was the nucleus of the project. It was popular―a book collection was published in 1952―and many of the gags had already taken on a sequential form similar to that of a comic strip. Why not, schemed Stan and Jan, extend this successful magazine cartoon into a daily newspaper comic?
So, the intrepid couple set to work. The Register and Tribune Syndicate picked up the new strip for 1953 and 1954. The strip version of Sister highlighted the tomboyish, mischievous aspect of the character who was, in some ways, a female sibling of Dennis the Menace.
Sister, Daily Strip
Sister, Daily Strip
In the Sister Sunday features, Stan and Jan were able to loosen up with some elaborate and ambitious comic art. They were also able to explore more complex subject matter and follow up on their baby book successes by offering a little parenting advice.
Though similar in some ways to Dennis, Sister did not resemble the Menace in the extent of its newspaper distribution. The plain fact was that, in spite of all their efforts, it was not paying off. After about seven hundred drawings, Stan and Jan decided the newspaper business was not for them. They fled, sweat-soaked and ink-stained, not much richer but a little wiser, back into the welcoming arms of Collier’s, who happily, reintroduced their work in the original format they had pioneered: full-page feature cartoons.
Don’t miss Part 1 and Part 2 of Team Berenstain.
Stay tuned for Team Berenstain – Part 4
Team Berenstain – Part 2
In Down a Sunny Dirt Road: an Autobiography, Random House, 2002, Stan and Jan Berenstain describe an early professional breakthrough.
“Shortly before the turnaround in our magazine cartoon fortunes, we took a job teaching a Saturday morning children’s art class at Settlement School, a well-known institution in South Philadelphia. Working with kids, age five to eleven, was more like herding cats than teaching.”
“But teaching that class took us back. It reminded us of ourselves when we were kids. We began drawing upon our own childhood experiences for cartoon ideas. Kid jokes became our strongest suit.”
“Our cartoons were so small in print, though―about four by three inches. Not only that, they appeared in the back of the book and were limited to black-and-white. Why couldn’t cartoons be big-space features and appear in the front of the book? And color would be fun. With the headlong optimism of youth, we began noodling around with a whole new kind of cartoon. It would be about our new specialty: kids. It would occupy a full page and be in full color. It would show at least a hundred members of the skinned-knee set engaged in every kind of activity known to the schoolyard: kids running, jumping, fighting, wrestling; little girls with holes in their socks strutting past little boys, who were stopping off all the outlets in the bubbler fountain except one, which arced like a geyser onto other little girls swinging on railings. It would be a mad, multitudinous moppet mob scene, the apotheosis of childhood, a modern counterpart of Brueghel’s Children’s Games.”
“We worked it up and sent it off to Gurney Williams, Collier’s cartoon editor, who snapped it up and published it under the title Recess―in front of the book and in full color.”
Recess: the Berenstains’ first full-page, full-color cartoon in Collier’s, 1948. It recalls the many forms of play and mischief they participated in during their days in Philadelphia-area elementary schools and contains no fewer than 209 (count ‘em) figures, all but eight of them depicting children at play.
Moreover, Williams wanted more. He urged them to create a sequel, immediately. This became Freeze ― a winter version of children at play: skating, hockey, sledding, skiing, snowball fights―you name it, it’s in there.
Freeze, Collier’s, December 1948.
Freeze was followed by Gymnasium, which was followed by Saturday Matinee. For many it summed up a whole era of popular culture and one that was soon to disappear―the world of that afternoon-long, multilayered entertainment extravaganza, the Saturday matinee. Stan and Jan again produced a crowd scene of tots on the rampage. They drop things off the balcony, they take good aim with pea-shooters and squirt guns, they blow bubbles, climb on seat backs, play the kazoo, drip ice cream and, in the left foreground engage in something resembling major combat.
There are a few oases of peace in the theater, as well. One with a personal connection is the little boy in the front row, right, standing on his seat calmly sucking a lollipop while observing the chaos around him. This is a portrait of their son, Leo, who had just turned one.
Saturday Matinee, Collier’s, March 12, 1949.
Stan and Jan continue …
“We could hardly believe it when Collier’s ran our Saturday Matinee as a cover. The response was remarkable. Saturday Matinee struck a chord deep in the hearts of everyone who had ever tormented ushers, whistled through candy boxes, and dropped water bombs from the balcony. Thousands of letters poured into Collier’s editorial offices in New York, paeans of praise were read into the Congressional Record, Newsweek came to interview us in our ramshackle apartment over the Woodland Army and Navy Store.”
“We were twenty-four. We had gone from being a couple of struggling cartoonists too dumb to come in out of the rain―or at least too dumb to realize that toothpaste and burnt-lamb-chops were what magazines wanted―to being cover artists for one of the world’s leading magazines.”
Over the next two years, Stan and Jan produced ten Collier’s covers and one more interior full page. One of them, Art Museum, was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a world exhibition of cartoon art.
The scene and collection depicted in Art Museum is an amalgam of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, two of Stan and Jan’s favorite places. The scene approximates the grand hall of the Philadelphia Museum with its large Calder mobile. The Lachaise sculpture is in the Met collection, as are other depicted works. Velázquez’s Court Jester with Glass of Wine is in neither collection, nor is the portrait of Gurney Williams, Collier’s humor editor, which they incorporated into the painting.
If you missed Part 1 of Team Berenstain, you can read it here.
Part 3 is now available.
The Berenstain Bears Blog 