This page serves as something of a supplement to the about page, only with the phases of Teddy Bear World explained in a slightly more "in-universe" manner.

The Early Days

One of the first things I remember imagining about Loodie, the main character of Teddy Bear Wars (and my first teddy bear), was that he'd "run away". I was watching an 80's live-ish adaption of Corduroy, and thought Corduroy was Loodie, and had gone and gotten lost in a department store. In-Universe this could be assumed to be some antics baby Loodie got up to, escaping his parents and getting lost in a huge shop. I did a fair bit of that myself as a kid. I remember going through the store room of a DIY shop and getting to the loading dock at the back.

Of course, I came up with a bunch of other adventures for the bears to have when I was little, but I don't remember any now. There are pictures of me carrying him on my bike, or sliding him down the slide... on the other side of the world.

School

My brother and I thought, if we have to go to school all day, so should our teddy bears, and stuffed them in the airing cupboard. This can, of course, stand in for the bears going to school... though with the continuity greatly time-compressed!

At another time, my brother and I were sleeping on bunk beds in the same room, and he came up with some sort of club or organisation our teddy bears joined, They got bags of stuff like ID cards and that. I don't remember much else about it. It could perhaps have been a school club, or else some other club kids join, like out of comics and whatnot.

Training

The first real beginning of Teddy Bear World (then called Teddy Bear Wars, in the vein of Cart Wars, Kart Wars, Bus Wars etc), with the bears as cops or secret agents, began some time around 1993 or 1994. At first there was stuff about them "training". One "bear", called Penguin Fellow (who was actually, surprise surprise, a penguin) was training to fly a jetpack... by being tied to string and swung up and down the stairs. this made it into the first (still-existing) Teddy Bear Wars comic.

I vaguely remember some other stuff about them learning advanced driving techniques, in hover cars (empty tissue boxes). Some of the bears were clumsy, and would ram into walls all the time, eventually crashing. This was also the time the setting began to be "sci fi". I remember I was going to stay around my granny's house, and had some bears in a sports bag, which I pretended was a futuristic suspended monorail. The kind of thing British cities might have in 2058, Chiba had in 1988, and Wuppertahl had in 1901.

This setting had occasional ill-defined "baddies" to fight. It was still "cute" at this stage, using stun lasers and with characters always parachuting out of blown-up vehicles in time. This could be interpreted as more training (even though it wasn't in the comic!), using harmless weapons.

Scar / Meteor Rain(s)

One morning, I was waking up and saw a teddy bear laying in a pile of clothes, with a flower-like plastic fruit bowl on top. I imagined that was the cockpit of a VTOL "heavy lift" plane thing (some small toy we had), and that the bear had crashed it. When I woke up more, I imagined a rain of meteors falling onto Teddy Bear City, blowing up buildings and cars. The Teddy Bear military had to fly into space in their very Star Wars-ish "VTOL planes that 'just' fly up to space", and blast the asteroids before they hit the planet. They find out the asteroids are coming from a hijacked mining ship, which is crunching up a huge asteroid and spitting a rain of smaller ones at the planet. This they blow up, and the day is saved. This was made into a now-only-partially-extant comic, with the bad guy Scar. One of the first "named" characters of Teddy Bear World who was not based on an actual bear we owned.

I played a ton of Asteroids on my Game Boy, to "simulate" this. It was the beginnings of the "mind repurposing" of other things into Teddy Bear Wars settings. I also played Missile Command, to simulate defending the city. Later on, the fireworks around November 5th were "mind repurposed" into an annual meteor storm, supposedly the orbiting remains of the big one, though which the planet passes every year. This is now retconned into a meteor storm that's been happening annually for over a century, after a big planet-killer was blown up, long before Loodie and the other characters were born.

Squatters

The Gun, particularly the weapon of the title, was inspired by the notorious turkey Robocop 3. Well that stinker didn't just inspire one of my stories, it shows up in Teddy Bear World, too! Basically at the start there's squatters who the "cops" (not actual cops, it's ...silly) are fighting. They're the good guys in the movie, but my brother and I briefly made teddy bear "squatters" the bad guys in Teddy Bear Wars.

In-Universe, they could be scummy rebels trying to resist a slum clearance (their kind call slum clearances "gentrification"), who the police have to move on. An early activity for Loodie and the other characters to do, once they've finished training and joined the police. Also, in the main comic, there are slums outside Teddy Bear City, perhaps the rebels set up there, building homes in scraps.

Droids

After the squatters, the enemy bears became droids. All of the teddy bears we owned were "main characters", so, in order to explain why the ones they were fighting looked the same, we made them robot copies! It was never very clear what these identical-looking droids were meant to be doing, other than causing chaos.

In-universe, I've now retconned them to not be infiltrators into the police / secret agents, but simply robots built by a crime syndicate to do their illegal activities, while shielding the actual bosses. If the robots get caught they just wipe their own memories and completely shut down, leaving no evidence. This will be the first main storyline in the re-made comic, so I can't go into much more detail over it than that!

Clones

Now we're getting into it. By this time our "main character" bears were definitely in a secret agency, having graduated through the police and a SWAT-type team. Once again, the enemies were called "clones" mainly to explain why they looked the same as the "main characters". This time they were from another planet, and quietly infiltrating Teddy Bear world, in order to spread corruption, crime and generally "soften up" the planet prior to an invasion. They did this by the means of using huge mechs, tanks etc which they'd either stolen, or smuggled in, and went on rampages with. Or else they'd "take over" an era of the city, and need to be "cleared out" in a badass action scene. My brother and I were getting into gore at this stage, fired by the controversy over games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. To this end, the difference between the clones and teddy bears was, the clones had red blood inside, while real teddy bears had "fluff".

It was never properly decided what exactly the "clones" were. Maybe they were aliens that happened to look exactly lke teddy bears (and thus, not "clones" at all). Maybe they were clones of teddy bears, made by aliens who don't look like teddy bears, though I never decided what those aliens would look like. Another possibility was that they were made by a small group of normal teddy bears, who had gone to another planet and used cloning to build themselves an army, so they could take over the world later.

The main comic strip used bits of both of these. There was a "Union of Clones" who were "helping the revolution", according to an ID card Loodie finds. Also the extensive slum outside of Teddy Bear City is awash with clones, who act like cheesy gangsters from an 80's movie. These clones also have some normal bears helping them, suggesting some sort of underdog, revolutionary intent. But they're also described as a "semi-military race" (an awkward way of saying they have a militaristic dictatorship, perhaps), and attack the planet with a huge spacehip called a "Megasteroid", which brings us on to...

Megasteroid(s)

The Megasteroid (or Megastroid, as it was sometimes spelled) was the "final boss"; a giant spaceship built by the clones, to bring an invading army to Teddy Bear World. In keeping with it's name, it was actually built into a large, flat asteroid. This was inspired by a flat sculpture with a scratched-in pattern, which my brother or I (I don't even remember) had made from clay at school.

There were actually multiple Megasteroids, the clones sent an entire fleet, though they arrived one after the other. Some were (rather easily) defeated by the fighters of the small teddy bear military. Others were infiltrated by bears, who sabotaged them and caused them to blow up or crash. One of them crashed just offshore somewhere on Teddy Bear World, and was presumably plundered for it's parts.

The main comic petered out just as the first Megasteroid was arriving. I did a lot of space battle comics at the time, just nameless characters blasting enemies and making quips. Maybe I didn't want Teddy Bear Wars to turn into another of those, so paused it while I thought of a better way to depict the Megasteroid battle... or I was just lazy and lost interest.

The Megasteroid idea grew out of the earlier idea of a hijacked mining ship "throwing" meteors at Teddy Bear World. The one that crashed in the sea was "set" during the 1999 eclipse at Plymouth. I stayed with my aunt and imagined the fireworks displays, as part of the long party leading up to the eclipse, were defending against a wave of smaller asteroids it had sent ahead of itself to "soften up the defences".

Time Travel

In between the long series of Megasteroids and clone wars, and around the time of another holiday that we went on, I imagined some of the teddy bears time travelling back to the "1970's", or the equivalent of it in their world's years, anyway (I hadn't come up with such a thing yet). Back then, they didn't have flying cars, they used electric cars which connected to electrified grids above the road... as seen in that cinematic gem, Super Mario Brothers! Boy I sure knew how to pick quality entertainment to get ideas from, eh? Anyway, as well as those, there were huge 5-storey high buses and trucks, which ran on their own special roads, and were powered by gas turbines. These were inspired by wheeled suitcases.

I have no idea what the bears were actually doing in the past, now. I know I imagined them being in this world for months. Maybe they had followed some clones back, who were trying to change history. Or, maybe they'd just been accidentally sent to the past, and were trying to stay out of the way and await rescue by another time machine.

After seeing some 90's action movies, I briefly had them time travel again, to a "1990's" setting, with some good car chases (now battery electric, apparently), before finally getting back to their own time.

FF7-Esque Wierdness

This was a brief period of a kind of "turn based battle" "game" I came up with, based on the battles in Final Fantasy 7, a game I'd become rather obsessed by. The basic idea was to use body-slams, "lasers" (poking with a finger) etc, in order to push the enemy bears off a table, or out of the room. My brother said "Isn't this a bit like Final Fantasy 7?". Of course, I insisted it wasn't, because that didn't involve pushing enemies off a table, so was totally different. In-universe, I guess it could be more "training", in between the ongoing clone wars.

Bear Force One

The clones took a back seat for a short time, or maybe changed their tactics, and droids were back! At least for this one storyline. We'd taped the film Air Force One off the telly, and watched it several times. As with other movies, it fed into Teddy Bear World as Bear Force One (this was the time that terrible bear-related puns began appearing, like a city called Bearlin). This also had aspects of Die Hard.

Bear Force one was a huge "plane", it worked the same way as the flying cars, which I guess could theoretically be driven across oceans, but most bears left long-range travel to huge, fast flying ships. Loodie was aboard Bear Force One for some reason, when robots unfolded themselves from disguised luggage / decorations, and took everyone hostage. Loodie had to creep around in the air vents, deprive one of the robots of it's powerful plasma gun, then defeat the rest.

This led into a battle against some enemies, presumably those who had sent the robots, in the snowy climes around a defunct, abandoned luxury ski resort. This was partly inspired by a story in the Action Man comic, which my brother was getting at the time.

In spite of the ending of the movie making it pretty clear, I had no idea "Air Force One" was the designation of the plane (or helicopter, I guess) carrying the President. I never thought much about the government of Teddy Bear World, to be honest. The whole planet was united under one government, but this had been done long since, so people were used to countries just being "regions". We had a big, grey bear we called Gund, because that was on the tag in his ear (it's actually a German toy company that makes teddy bears). In the main comic strip, Gund was depicted as the head of the secret agency our bears worked for. There was an even bigger, pink-and-blue bear, when we were young. Our parents told us that one, and a bunch of other odd ones that had been kicking around, were "in a bag in the loft". I don't know if they actually were, or if they'd just been thrown out. Anyway, we decided that one was a nebulous "leader", and left it at that.

Although..., the main currency was called "Gundians", sort of implying that Gund was the president. Maybe he got a later promotion.

Curlyfur's Ice Army

Curlyfur was the Teddy Bears' version of Hitler, and had been the leader of a side in a war long ago, the same "time" as the 1940's to the teddy bears, which was maybe 300-400 years before the time of the stories. Anyway, somehow he was revived in modern times. Perhaps by cloning, once again!

This wasn't, for once, a story about the clones, though. This was another holiday adventure. We were staying in a static caravan, probably in Weymouth. This was mind-repurposed into a large spaceship which the cloned Curlyfur had hijacked. He was building an army of "Ice Guards", with which to launch a new conquest of Teddy Bear World. He was also, inspired by Abe's Oddysee, turning kidnapped teddy bears into food, or other biological matter, with which to make the Ice Guards. Ice Guards themselves were basically barely-sentient blocks of living ice, which could keep themselves cold and solid somehow, and slid around like Daleks, blasting people with eye-lasers.

Ice Guards were a mind-repurposing of a Happy Meal toy we'd got on the way to the holiday. It was based on the Disney Hercules film, the range of toys had a big one which served as case for the small one, the Ice Guards were based on the Ice Titan from the film. The character inside was... somebody else. These sometimes showed up as mysterious "angels" to melt Ice Guards with magic, but that kind of got retconned out, even while we were still making up the story.

After a huge climactic battle, where our heroes were trapped on top of the main reactor of the spaceship (read: the living-room table) and surrounded by thousands of Ice Guards, they finally detonated the reactor and took to an escape shuttle just in time.

Some time after this, our mum got a teddy bear with curly fur, so we decided he was Curlyfur... He'd survived the exploding spaceship somehow, and continued to plot in the shadows (of a cabinet in the living room)!

Clones As Terrorists

The Clones continued to menace Teddy Bear World, though their threat was apparently "winding down". No more Megasteroids! They would raise a small terror cell and take over a building, which the bears needed to "clear out". I was getting out of playing with toys at the time (and was already way too old for it!), it was more like going through the motions of having a battle.

Tomb Raider 3 was around at the time. I dreamed of making a Teddy Bear World game like that, only with more shooting, fewer puzzles, and ziplines.

Super-Clones, Mecha Suits

Right at the end of my interest in playing with toys, I'd seen a fighting game on my cousin's Dreamcast, where you could have "ring outs". I'd also watched The Matrix, and bits of the 80's version of the anime The Guyver. This all mixed into the Clones creating "Super Clones", by stealing DNA from the super-powered bears Mighty Bear and Speedy Bear. To combat these, the Teddy Bears created robotic suits that give anyone wearing them super-speed and strength. Gory hand-to-hand battles ensued... which I imagined turning into something like a 3D, blood-soaked Streets of Rage mixed with Robotron.

...

And that was it! Once I got a PC I got into "serious stuff like politics" and quickly dumped things like Teddy Bear Wars and The Gun as "pro-police" and "pro-military". Though I do remember having some vague thoughts of continuing Teddy Bear Wars, as it's "cartoony" art style suited the characters (and the best I could do, in Insanity Please, was not much better!). In 2015 I revived the idea again and... now it's 11 years later, and I've still not really done anything much with it. How'd that happen, eh?

The new version will begin with Loodie's first day in the police, and will include several of the plot points listed above, though they'll be heavily altered, and not necessarily in the same order! I also have an actual origin for the Clones thought out now. Aliens? Created by aliens? Part of a crime syndicate of otherwise-ordinary teddy bears? ...er, a little of all three, actually!