Being five or six years I watched, taped and re-watched almost all of the episodes of "Bamse - världens starkaste björn!" ("Bamse - the world's strongest bear!") when they where aired on TV. I was a great fan of the Bamse comics and I enjoyed the cartoon series.
Back in the late fifties or early sixties, Swedish comic strip drawer Rune Andréasson decided to make a comic about a bear who gets strong when eating a special kind of honey. The bear was to be named Bamse. Most of the characters in the Bamse comic was inspired by characters in Andréassons older works. The adventures of Bamse ran for several years in weekly magazines. In 1972 were the first TV episodes created and one year later the Bamse comics earned their own monthly magazine. In the nineties more TV episodes were aired.
The TV series is about Bamse, the strongest bear in the world. Unfortunately he is only strong after eating Dunderhonung, a special kind of honey that only Bamse's grandmother can make. Bamse's best friends are Skalman, the clever but lazy invent-all-thinkable-gadgets tortoise, and the shy little rabbit Lille Skutt. The bad guy of the series is Vargen, a wolf that is not really evil but truly misunderstood.
Bamse, Lille Skutt and Skalman travel on various adventures in the cartoon: They search for a sunken ship with a treasure, they find a flying carpet, they visit the jungle and the castle of a malevolent magician, they even shrink themselves to ant size and nearly get eaten by a spider!
The main point of the Bamse cartoon (and the comics) is that you get nowhere by being hard to your enemies, instead you should make them your friends. And it is also good entertainment for the kids.
