Adventures of the Gummi Bears: Volume 1 Seasons 1–3 (review)

The gummi! It burns! It burns! My eyes may never recover from its inadvertent exposure to this most hideous example of “programming” for children from the 1980s. It’s horrifically crass: it was “inspired by” the candy of the same name, as if there were something profound and mysterious lurking in sugar-bomb jellies and that this wasn’t designed with malicious aforethought to sell junk food to kids. It’s stultifyingly insipid: it’s all enchanted forests and fairy-tale critters with, dear god, superpowers and rainbow-colored watering down of mythological tropes. It’s 47 episodes -- feel the pain -- of poor, sketchy, cheap animation and magical dragons and magical “gummiberry” juice and magical flutes and the magical village of -- *sob* -- Gummadoon and magical magic, all without a single drop of anything approaching storytelling magic but with large dollops of, unsurprisingly, saccharine syrup. There are no extras in the set, for which we can be thankful: overexposure may induce diabetic coma.

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