Does a Bearanstain Shit the Bed in the Woods? Yes.

Jan Berenstain, one-half of the couple who created the Berenstain Bears, died from a stroke at the age of 88. She met her husband Stan on their first day of art school, they married 5 years later. They developed a domestic comic called “It’s All in the Family” that was syndicated into several women’s magazines for almost 30 years. Their first book, The Big Honey Hunt, was published in 1962, and with the help of the head of Random House’s Beginner Books (some hack named Theodore Giesel), they developed the story of a simple family of bears into an internationally published series. The stories showed how the Bear family (whose members bore the imaginative names of Papa, Mama, Brother and Sister) approached the day to day problems they encountered in the also inventively-named Bear Country. It was like the Waltons, if they were bears and John Boy ate most of his siblings. Critics would deride the series for not tackling weightier issues or being more reflective of the times, but their simple approach would lead to the publishing of over 300 titles, two TV shows, and a variety of other outlets. More recent entries did address bullying, on-line stalking and, in a book where Papa Bear takes a dislike to Asian-looking Pandas, racism.