From MadCap's Couch - Tales from the Darkside: "Ursa Minor"

Teddy Ruxpin strikes again!

Portrait of a family, a young couple -Richard and Joan - and their daughter, Susie, living in a happy home...or trying to, at least. Richard's got some problems with drinking and smoking, as well as a bum leg, and Joan is doing her best to make ends meet, working on her masters' degree and trying to make a better life for their daughter.

But there are good moments. Right now, it seems that Richard has gotten her a teddy bear for her birthday...although he doesn't recall giving her the gift in question. As time goes on, strange occurrences take place around Susie. A shattered flowerpot here...some very bear-like pawprints on the wall there...all of which Susie attributes to her teddy bear. At first to Joan's irritation...

Richard, of course, tells her not to worry. It's just a phase that little girls go through, and Susie will soon grow out of it. Nevertheless, he consents to trying to dissuade her from that train of thought with a bear rug. After an argument with Richard and going to bed later in the night (following a waltz into Susie's room where Joan just misses the bear's eyes glowing blood red), Joan wakes up to find Susie in the kitchen...with Teddy, and a bowl of split porridge, and begins to believe that there may indeed be something to her stories about the bear.

After all, Susie couldn't have made porridge on her own...



Joan consults with a Professor Stillman, an authority on magic and myth. He talks about theology behind bears in various cultures and even does a title drop as well, in a rarity for Tales from the Darkside, giving the vaguest attempt of an actual explanation for what is going on! I'd joke here, but this is actually a red-letter thing for a show that is so very, very afraid of giving exposition.

He suggests, if she is so afraid of it...to simply get rid of it, and give Susie something else to obsess over. So she does...a little blonde doll, Goldilocks. Throwing Teddy into the trashcan and burying it under several bags in her husband's shop, she thinks nothing of it afterward.

With her husband now at the clinic due to an infected leg, it seems that Joan and Susie are alone to adjust to Goldilocks...and it seems that Teddy is none too happy about being replaced, Goldilocks being slashed up as if by a bear's claws...

Truth be told, this scared the living daylights out of me when I was a kid, though as I've grown, it's done much less so. Though that just comes with age and laughing a little bit at the over the top cheesiness of the final segment...until the twist. I will give credit that they don't actually show the bear moving at any point until the very end, only letting us see the after-effects and really building up the tension to the final twist at the end...and it's a pretty damn good one.

Let's just say, it's important to remember that when it comes to baby bears...the mother bear is never far behind...

Next time, we head out of the woods and suburbs we've known...and head out into one of the most cherish of childhood amusements: the Circus.

And I guarantee you, it might not be the Greatest Show on Earth...but you've never seen a show quite like this one...

Tales from the Darkside: The Complete Series is available on DVD from CBS.

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