Santa and
the Three Bears

(1970, U.S.) color live-action/animated 76/63/45 minutes
Ellman Enterprises / Key Industries / Tony Benedict Productions
Cinepix Film Properties / R&S; Film Enterprises
Cinematography: Ted C. Bemiller, Gene Borghi
Music: Doug Goodwin, Joe Leahy
Produced by Tony Benedict, Barry Mahon, James Kernodle
Directed by Barry Mahon (live-action)
Directed by Tony Benedict (animation)

With: Ken Engels (the Ranger), Lenard Keith, Kathy Lemmon, Roxanne Poole (the children)

Voices: Hal Smith (Santa Claus), Jean Vander Pyl, Annette Ferra, Bobby Riha (the 3 Bears)

In this affable low-budget, hour-long musical holiday cartoon from Florida, with live-action wraparounds, a real, live forest ranger tells his bored grand-kids the story of Santa and the Three Bears, which is then unreeled in so-so animation with a bunch of songs to pad out the minimal story.

SANTA AND THE THREE BEARS was first released in theatres (where it did well, due to the perfectly generic title), and then found a home on TV, and ended up on USA Network, where it ran for years as their token holiday special.

The not-uninteresting film can now can be found on video and DVD in at least two different formats: the complete theatrical feature, and a short version with the live segments snipped out.

There was also a soundtrack album released of the not-bad score. On the back of the album were cut-out figures of Santa and the bears.

-Rob Craig

featuring the live action wrap-around, in color, mono, fullscreen, DVD-R comes packaged as shown in color DVD case, wrapped in plastic.