Studio: Ub Iwerks Studio (ComiColor Cartoons)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Ub Iwerks
Short Synopsis
Papa, Mama and Baby Bear live in a cottage in the woods, where the morning's porridge is too hot to eat, so they go for a walk while it cools. Goldilocks, a small girl with ringlets, finds the empty house and goes in. She tries the three bowls of porridge, too hot, too cold and just right, and eats Baby Bear's; tries the three chairs and breaks the smallest; tries the three beds and falls asleep in the little one. The bears come home. They find the porridge touched, the chair broken, and finally the intruder in the bed, and Baby Bear's indignation wakes her. Goldilocks leaps up and flees through the window, and the bears, in the Iwerks version, are more startled than angry, with Baby Bear the loudest of the three. Wikipedia has only a stub for the film, so the account above follows the fairy tale as Iwerks staged it.
Why It Matters
- The Three Bears was filmed by nearly every cartoon studio, and this is the Iwerks version, with the bears as a comfortable middle-class family and the gags on the three sizes of everything; Baby Bear, a squeaky-voiced small bear with a temper, is the film's best character and the one the studio clearly liked drawing.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and it circulates in public-domain fairy-tale compilations alongside the Fleischer and Van Beuren versions; the Cinecolor palette gives the bears' cottage a warm, orange glow that suits the story.
Notes and Trivia
- Disney's Silly Symphony version, with the bears singing, came in 1939; Tex Avery's, with the Three Bears as a dysfunctional family, in 1944.
- The ComiColors were sold to television in the 1950s as part of a package of Iwerks and other independent cartoons.
- See also: Sinbad the Sailor (1935), Simple Simon (1935), Humpty Dumpty (1935).
