Just in case the Netflix original production offices didn’t taste enough like 80’s brand diabetes, the streaming giants have gone ahead and commissioned a revival series of children’s classics the Care Bears.
Joining Popples in that particular part of the online streaming stable, new show Care Bears and Cousins is a cartoon set for Netflix premiere in 2016, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The format will join other children’s content to arrive on the platform in the coming years such as Dinotrux, Kong: King of the Apes, and 90’s adaptation The Magic School Bus 360˚.
Speaking in a recent interview with CNN Money, Netflix’s ‘chief content officer’ Ted Sarandos claimed that the continual decisions to bring well-known children’s franchises to life on screen or back from the dead is down to their status of being “trusted brands” which by implication require comparatively little time or effort to promote.
He said of the overall goals from their recent original content drive: “At no point do I think the originals will dominate the acquisitions. I think Netflix is a channel, and it’s a different kind of channel for every one of our members. To a 12-year-old boy, Netflix means something completely different than it does to a 5-year-old girl or a 40-year-old. When you look at almost any content channel, the audience ages out of them. I watched it happen with my own children, who started with PBS and migrated to the Disney Channel and then Nick and then back to the Disney Channel and then ABC Family and then into mainstream television. The site can, in a very automated way, age with you, based on the things you’re watching.”
The Care Bears, a 1980s creation of American Greetings, are a toy and media empire which encompasses numerous movies and TV iterations, amongst other formats. Character-wise, the franchise in the world of Care-a-lot originally carried a set of 10 ‘care bears’ each bearing their own unique colour and logo – but later expanded to a number of other bears, characters, and creatures, including the ‘Care Bear Cousins’, which is where this new series comes in…
Having gone through two revivals over the past decade (with Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-lot on CBS between 2007 and 2008, and CGI version Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-lot on The Hub Network in 2012), will American Greetings’ next efforts at a Care Bears series be a more successful one now it has Netflix on its side? This is the platform, of course, which probably helped contribute to the unexpected out-of-demographic popularity of another toy-selling franchise’s official cartoon, so… will ‘Carebros’ become a thing in 2016? Apparently not, because the creators have their own ideas on what that name should be.
