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With new movie Ted (read our review here ) introducing us to a foul-mouthed teddy bear brought to life after a wish, SFX assesses a few other toy bears of note…
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For most of us, a teddy bear was a childhood companion we carried everywhere like a talisman, treated like a living creature and hugged tightly as we fell asleep. In film and TV, however, teddy bears are a little shiftier. Some are gits. Some are evil. Some are even zombies…
Jayne Nelson takes a look at all Teds great and small.
(By the way, our definition of “teddy bear” may not necessarily be your definition of “teddy bear”. Read on for details…)
Lotso
Toy Story 3
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Name: Lotso (as in “Lotso hugs”)
Played by: Ned Beatty
Inclination: Wicked
Lotso proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that teddy bears should never be taken at face value. He may be pink and smiley with a jolly demeanour, but underneath there’s a heart of solid coal, bitter and twisted and determined to make other toys suffer…
In fact, Toy Story 3 ’s furry villain, as you can see from his flashback origin story in this clip, was once a little girl’s much-loved cuddly pal. After being rejected, the shock was so great the unfortunate bear went full-on Dark Side. While we can understand his response to being lost and replaced – and we sympathise – the sheer level of evil Lotso embraced definitely makes him the Darth Vader of the toy-verse.
SuperTed
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Name: SuperTed
Played by: Derek Griffiths
Inclination: Heroic
The ursine star of this popular and very, very silly ’80s TV show was an ordinary toy who was brought to life by Mother Nature. One minute he was a lifeless bag of Nylon fur and stuffing; the next he was pulling on a cape and calling himself SuperTed! Ta-daaa!
SuperTed and his pals brought us a whole heap of chuckles as kids, mainly down to either the show’s tongue-in-cheek narration or to its fun little touches, such as the fact that Ted is a teddy bear who sleeps with his own little teddy bear. The rest of the cast were good fun, too, from Jon Pertwee’s enthusiastic performance as Ted’s alien pal Spotty, to an (allegedly) evil skeleton who was so camp you could pitch him in a forest and sleep in him like a tent.
However, we never quite got over the one thing about SuperTed that was unintentionally disturbing: the fact that when he changed from Ted to SuperTed, he would remove his skin . There’s something about a bear unzipping his fur and stepping out of it that seems just wrong…
