I had to do this for English... a lot of what I write has to do with English (-_0)
Don’t you just love teddy bears? They are the absolutely most adorable stuffed animals that the world has come to face with! They have a rich history and there was more than one person who was inspired to make the teddy bear. The impacts teddy bears have today are very great and they have advanced so much throughout the years, and still have managed to be a mania.
This obsession began when Theodore Roosevelt was having a hard time hunting bears in Mississippi. Somebody found a black motherless cub, tied it to a tree and told the president he could shoot it. Theodore refused, claiming it was not sportsman like. The news got around and Clifford K. Berryman drew a cartoon about it. It got immediate attention and in Brooklyn, New York, a shopkeeper named Morris Michtom placed two stuffed bears in his window. They were made by his wife from black fabric and were finished with black button eyes. When he noticed how popular the bears got and requested permission from Theodore Roosevelt to call them “Teddy’s Bears”. Demands increased and Morris Michtom moved his business to a bigger area and with the aid of the Butler Brothers, he opened the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company, which is one of the largest toy companies today.
At about the same time as it was born in the United States, the Teddy Bear was also born in Giengen, Germany. The Steiff Company of Giengen first introduced the stuffed jointed bear BAR 55PB, christened “Friend Petz”. A New York Toy Importer, Hermann Borgford of George Borgford & Co. ordered several thousand of the Steiff bears for shipping to the USA because of the popularity of the “teddy’s bear” toy there.
Today there are still many stories of how the ”Teddy’s bear” came to be.
Teddy bears have held a significant place in the hearts and homes all over the world. Long ago they were used as child play things, something that everybody wanted: a perennial fad. Today, they are still used as child playthings but they are also highly overdressed Valentines, Easter, Christmas, and Halloween gifts, decoration, mentors (like Smokey the Fire Bear) and collectables. There have been television shows based upon bears, such as Winnie the Pooh, which Disney claimed the rights to in 1959 and released their first Winnie the Pooh movie in 1975. Care Bear Bears have made it with their plush selves and some movies. All of these possessions make people smile and laugh throughout the many years it has been around.
Teddy bears have advanced throughout the time they first began. There have been machine washable teddy bears such as the Doodle Bear. (You could write on it with a marker then wash it off.) There have been singing bears for Valentines Day, which subliminally promote a certain love song with the squeeze of a hand. They shake, they sing, they talk, they can probably walk if we put our minds to it!
The hundredth anniversary of the Teddy bear was in 2002. Imagine a world without them, all of their handmade fabric gone unknown, it just wouldn’t be the same and millions of people wouldn’t be able to tell somebody that they loved somebody without the magic of the technological singing bear.
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