Review: We Bare Bears “Fire!” ; “Ranger Norm”

We double up on the bears and it pays off.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

“Fire!”

Grizz puts out a fire during a friendly barbecue and it inspires the local fire department to give him a plastic badge. This causes Grizz to grow an ego and act as a bit of a parody for “Smokey the Bear”, running around putting out fires that he has no business doing. It eventually gets a bit much and as such Grizz hangs up his spurs and becomes a spokesbear for the local Hibachi restaurant’s grand reopening after being burned to the ground thanks to Grizz’s shenanigans.

“Ranger Norm”

Tabes goes out of town for a RangerCon and leaves another ranger named “Norm” behind to watch the bears. Eventually, the bears catch wind of the new ranger’s intentions to bulldoze the forest for some sort of profit. Fortunately, Tabes and her team of international rangers return and put a stop to the commotion and the bears are just happy to have their ranger back.

Our Take

In the recent history of Cartoon Network, there’s been a void left behind from the exodus of Regular Show where we got a series that was a welcome throwback to the time where we could just be silly as fuck and not give a damn. We Bare Bears is slowly filling that void. Between the shirtless firefighters showing up to save the day or the team of Rangers looking to mess shit up, Mikey Heller’s fingerprints are starting to show up quite a bit on We Bare Bears and that’s a good thing. Granted, “Fire” is a premise that wouldn’t look strange on either The Simpsons or Family Guy, but I’m willing to look away from the occasional cliche in favor of a series that’s taking chances on a network that desperately needs to be funny again.