Adventures of the Gummi Bears: Volume 1, Seasons 1–3

The gummi! It burns! It burns! My eyes may never recover from being exposed to this most hideous example of children's programming (in both senses) from the 1980s. Adventures of the Gummi Bears is a horrifically crass series “inspired by” the candy of the same name (as if there were something profound and mysterious lurking in sugar-bomb jellies and this wasn't designed with malicious aforethought specifically to sell junk food to kids). Compiling the first three seasons from 1985-1997, this insipid series (with voices by June Foray and Lorenzo Music, among others) serves up enchanted forests and fairy-tale critters with superpowers in stories bathed in rainbow-colored watered-down medieval tropes: 47 episodes in all—feel the pain—of poor, sketchy, cheap animation and magical dragons and magical “gummiberry” juice and magical flutes and the magical village of Gummadoon, all without a single drop of anything approaching real storytelling magic but presented with large dollops of, unsurprisingly, saccharine syrup. There are no DVD extras in this three-disc set, for which we can be thankful, as overexposure could induce diabetic coma. Not recommended. (M. Johanson)