Sunday Post - Week 5

Greetings from The Stuffed Animal Review, a publication dedicated to the analysis of stuffed creature design and their larger worlds.  You have stumbled upon what The Review refers to as its Sunday through Friday posts: random thoughts or images of stuffed animals doing silly things.  Feel free to dig deeper into the purpose of this blog by clicking on the “Philosophy” page. Or, just enjoy today’s post whose purpose is to induce a smile, giggle, or open guffaw.  Join us on Saturday for more substantive musings.

Sunday Silliness

The Review’s admiration of Snuffles, a classic bear line of the Gund company, is probably obvious to readers by now.  So let us make it official: Snuffles receives The Stuffed Animal Review’s first Stamp of Brilliance.

 

 

Gund has been making stuffed animals in the United States since 1898, and this particular creature debuted in 1981.  As described in an earlier post, Stuffed Creature Design Part I, legend has it the designer modeled Snuffles after the crescent moon and imagined his upturned head gazing at the night sky.  If true, the fusion of bear-moon works and is a wonderful example of The Review’s Axiom of Proper Abstraction.  This Axiom states: the most satisfying stuffed creatures abstract, modify, and distort the essential character of a “real-world” animal.  The designer's distortion was inspired by the moon, but never strayed from a bear’s essence.  The result is a brilliant abstraction and Gund’s longest-running bear line.

If this bear design is brilliant, then The Review is staffed by brilliance.  Eleven Review staffers are Snuffles Gund bears.

From left to right: [Back Row] Fudge, Otto, Gum-Ming, Newbie, Cinnamon, Sampson, Chubs; [Front Row] Ernie, Cocoa, and Burt.  [Not pictured: Paka] 

This week’s Sunday through Friday posts will show this brilliance in action…