Card Sharks

Put a bonnet on it: How American Greetings created a farm system for original kid-friendly characters

The early 1980s are often seen as the heyday of animated TV shows, and for good reason. The concepts were creative and vibrant, if not quite so educational. Plus, they had the nice side effect of creating a halo around which millions of dollars worth of toys could be sold.

But that also meant identifying properties that could actually translate to a TV setting. And surprisingly, the greeting card industry was extremely well-positioned to take advantage of the growing popularity of cartoons.

While the industry wasn’t exactly known for animating stuff, it did foster numerous graphic artists, including a few that found significant success in popular culture. Most famously, Robert Crumb parlayed his early career as a staff artist for American Greetings to build a second career at the forefront of the underground comix movement. He took advantage of the company’s lax remote-work standards to build a name for himself. (Admittedly, the animated feature based on his Fritz the Cat character would not be a good Saturday-morning option.)

Meanwhile, Crumb’s boss Tom Wilson had found huge success—and a merch opportunity for his employer with Ziggy. And not to be outdone, former Hallmark artist Russell Myers had launched a strip of his own, Broom-Hilda, which had already been adapted in animated form more than once during the 1970s.

Put simply, there was already evidence that the greeting card industry could generate ideas that might have a life beyond greeting cards. The sector just needed to lean into the opportunity.

The Cleveland-based American Greetings, as highlighted by Wilson’s existing success, had the inside lane. On top of Ziggy, the company had already seen success with Holly Hobbie, a young girl dressed in rags and a bonnet who loved cats. (Presumably she helped popularize the “crazy cat lady” meme.)

The company soon doubled down by taking those two characters and developing a third from the ground up. The idea started off in the early ’70s as a simple, cute illustration on a greeting card meant for a granddaughter. Holding a giant daisy and wearing a bonnet with strawberries on it, it evoked a certain kind of cuteness that made it hugely popular. Clearly, it was something a smart greeting card company had to capitalize on.

And capitalize American Greetings did. After a bit more R&D, along with a redesign to make the bonnet more central to the character’s whole vibe, that drawing became Strawberry Shortcake, which first appeared in 1977. It quickly outpaced Holly Hobbie, growing so successful that by 1979, the company had already set up multi-million dollar marketing deals with Kenner and General Mills. A Plain Dealer piece from that year noted that Kenner predicted that Shortcake toys would outsell Star Wars toys, which sounds like a bold bet, indeed.

In a recent interview with Cleveland Magazine, Muriel Fahrion, the artist who designed Strawberry Shortcake, credited General Mills’ Bernie Loomis for the question that led Strawberry Shortcake to blow up. His ask, per Fahrion: “What do you have that’s for girls which will be just as big as Star Wars is with boys?”

The gritty B-movie that inspired the series Breaking Bad.

It paid off quickly: Per one 1981 story, Strawberry Shortcake drew more than $100 million in sales in its first year and $300 million in its second year, much of that coming from toy sales.

A bolder bet came in March 1981, when, on the heels of Strawberry Shortcake successfully raising the glucose levels of the American public, American Greetings launched a sub-brand just for product licensing called Those Characters from Cleveland. Wilson, who arguably kicked off the trend, was made co-president of the endeavor.

It turns out, a big part of the reason they did this is that they had something huge on the horizon, way huger than anything the company had ever launched before.

A bull market for bears: The huge bet American Greetings made on the Care Bears

A few weeks before the creation of Those Characters From Cleveland, American Greetings executives met with officials from Kenner to show off a new set of characters it was working on. The Care Bears effectively were a bet that teddy bears could be updated for the ’80s, one developed with a toy company, Kenner, and a food company that also made toys, General Mills. And it basically nailed its audience to a T.

When Kenner saw the bears, developed by cartoonist Dave Polter and greeting card artist Elena Kucharik, it immediately felt like a slam dunk.

“They loved it right away. It was an undeniable concept,” recalled Ralph Shaffer, the subsidiary’s co-president, in an interview with Cleveland Magazine.

But a successful concept is one thing. The secret to making it all work is the execution. And for the Care Bears, the plan was surprisingly complex.

A 1982 Cleveland Plain-Dealer piece described a complex, high value plan to launch the concept to the public. American Greetings wasn’t just launching it themselves, but had already gotten a number of other companies on as licensees. Rather than putting all its eggs into a single basket, American Greetings was flooding every retail channel it could.

It didn’t even matter if you liked the Care Bears. In 1983, you knew everything about them. Their various cartoon series, starting with a pair of specials before expanding to a full series, aimed for a particularly young audience of viewers, perhaps the same audience of youngsters that might have watched Sesame Street.

An R-rated scene from the action-packed, brutally violent movie Pulp Fiction.

That meant that when the inevitable movie came out, it created an interesting set of circumstances. It turns out that in the mid-’80s, in the years immediately before the Disney renaissance, there just weren’t many movies targeting six-year-olds. (Anyone who knows the history of the MPAA’s G rating probably isn’t surprised.) And as a result, the film’s release became a relative hit in the spring of 1985, scoring $22 million in the U.S. alone, about $68 million with inflation.

(Not to get all Professor Coldheart over here, but like many young boys of the era, I didn’t see the appeal.)

The reported initial spend on all that Care Bears merch? An eye-watering $122.5 million, well above that of Strawberry Shortcake’s initial outlay. A solid $6 million of that alone went to advertising in print and broadcast mediums. American Greetings bet on Care Bears like it was a sure thing, and the American public responded by proving them right. By the time the first movie came out (there were three during the original ’80s heyday), it was already a billion-dollar business all on its own.

Why did Care Bears pop off so much? It’s worth noting that, at this time, a desire for personalization was starting to creep into our toys. Another major trend picking up speed in 1983 was the Cabbage Patch Kids. That doll’s signature feature was that each face was unique and came with a certificate and name, playing into the idea of adoption. Care Bears didn’t go quite that far, but the many types of bears meant that there was one for every disposition. Plus, it’s worth noting that teddy bears were the archetype of the modern toy, so there was already a built-in market of people ready to buy lots of stuffed animals.

A scene from Care Bears: Unlock the Magic, or as I like to think of it, Inglourious Basterds.

As juggernauts go, it made Ziggy seem kind of like a ripple to the massive splash the Care Bears made—one strong enough that there have been constant revivals over the years, both in film and on television. There was even a long-running recent revival of the series, Care Bears: Unlock the Magic, which ran for over five years.

While other American Greetings properties have had success over the years—Strawberry Shortcake has also seen a number of revivals—it’s Care Bears that have set the high watermark for greeting-card franchises.

Unfortunately, that means that the rest of the industry had to pick up the scraps.

Raccoons with shirts: Why Hallmark’s greeting-card characters never hit Strawberry Shortcake’s heights

It’s worth noting that Care Bears got much of the attention in the 1980s, but there was already a similar line of well-established characters on the market by then, the Shirt Tales.

That set of characters, created by Hallmark around 1980, was the company’s first real merchandising success after a number of attempts. And unlike American Greetings’ own properties, which relied on Canadian animation houses, one-off specials, and TV syndication for much of their run, the Shirt Tales had a Hanna-Barbera pedigree and were surrounded by a similar megahit: The Smurfs.

Behind-the-scenes of the band GWAR hanging out in their dressing room.

Unfortunately, while successful greeting cards, the Shirt Tales series didn’t quite connect in the long run. The show ran for two seasons—paling in comparison to The Smurfs, which ran for eight and were taking up a 90-minute block of NBC’s Saturday mornings. And while I did own a Shirt Tales drum kit as a kid, I’m sure (like Josh Groban) I’m part of the only generation that had one of those.

In his 2018 book on Hanna-Barbera, cultural historian Jared Bahir Browsh slagged the series and pointed out that American Greetings more or less beat them at their own game—while giving Canadian animation houses an inroad into the U.S.:

The low-quality animation and the basic if not illogical storylines that often found the characters wandering into precarious situations with no one, although they lived in a populated community hurt the series. Shirt Tales was also scheduled against Pac-Man and Warner Brothers shorts, The series was largely ignored during its surprising two-season run on NBC.

Adding true insult to the injury that was the failure of the Shirt Tales cartoon series was the fact that The Care Bears, a series created by the “Those Characters from Cleveland” division of American Greetings, starred in their first special in the Spring of 1983 in conjunction with a highly successful plush toy line produced by Kenner.

One reason the Care Bears blew up and the Shirt Tales ripple was a bit less pronounced, according to Browsh? “These series, particularly the Care Bears, attracted young females, an afterthought for many animators.”

But another factor might actually be that the concept of the Shirt Tales wasn’t built from the ground-up to be a media empire in quite the same way the Care Bears were. American Greetings essentially built the franchise from the ground up to include cards, toys, and cartoons. Meanwhile, Hanna-Barbera essentially had to invent a storyline for a bunch of animals who had nothing in common other than that they wore T-shirts. That led to some left-field choices to fill in the gaps, like making Bogey Orangutan talk kinda like Humphrey Bogart.
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To be clear, if cartoons made out of disparate intellectual property were going to work, the early ’80s were the time for it. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, built around a collection of toys, had the thinnest of source material before Filmation got its hands on it—and it still became one of the decade’s biggest media franchises. But put simply, Those Characters from Cleveland more or less killed it because its animators and business team treated the process of character development like an R&D shop, not as a happy accident.

An old horror movie that they only pull out when Svengoolie needs a break.

That said, Hallmark had other properties it was more than happy to lean into. Its Rainbow Brite franchise, launched with a model closer to the Care Bears, saw somewhat more success in mediums outside of cards, in part because it actually had a story and a coordinated marketing strategy. Anything to prevent a world without color, right?

But while it has seen revivals over the years (a fresh one is apparently in the works), it’s no Strawberry Shortcake or Care Bears on the public-perception front. Unlike Care Bears, which lasted numerous seasons, Rainbow Brite found an audience based on just a 13-episode run and a 1985 movie. Shirt Tales had more episodes, but Rainbow Brite is the product line Hallmark still makes.

I can’t make any good jokes for this one, so you’re stuck with a boring old cutline.

More recently, Hallmark has found success with the Flash-era personalities Hoops & Yoyo, which were big enough in the 2000s and 2010s to have prime-time holiday specials. But Hallmark’s brand has traditionally been less character-driven than American Greetings.

Which is to say that, while other greeting card companies tried building brands, this was really American Greetings’ lane. The company had successful launches later in the ’80s with My Pet Monster and Popples, and American Greetings even created its own successful line of toys, Madballs.

But you know one thing that American Greetings never had that Hallmark does? A hugely popular, widely viewed cable channel—one that Rainbow Brite has barely appeared on.