We’ve spent many happy hours racking our brains to try to come up with as many famous polar bears as possible. There are quite a few well known and recognized polar bear characters in the world, we’ll give you a rundown of the ones we came up with…but let us know if you can think of more!
So here’s our list of the famous polar bears we were able to come up with:
Bely Mishka was one of the mascots for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.
Fans of video games may think of Bark The Polar Bear, a character from Sonic The Fighters.
Polar Battlebear from Battle Beasts. He serves as the Ice Field Combatant for White Leo’s forces. His English name is Pillaging Polar Bear.
Breezly Bruin – a popular cartoon polar bear from the 1960s. He starred alongside his friend Sneezly Seal in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series Breezly and Sneezly.
Polar Bears are often used quite successfully for advertising campaigns. One of the most famous examples is Bundy R. Bear – the Bundaberg Rum Bear.
Another famous advertising use of polar bears is the Coca Cola polar bear. The polar bears used in the marketing efforts for Coke became so famous within their own right that they even have Coca-Cola Polar Bear merchandise! Everything from phone covers to magnets to soft toys can be found here.
We’d never heard of it, but our research looking for famous polar bears brought up lots of references to “Eisbär” – apparently German for “polar bear”. It’s a famous 1980’s song about wanting to be “a polar bear in the cold polar”. Sounds intriguing! Anything that gets people to notice polar bears is good in our book!
Hidy and Howdy – more Winter Olympics mascots, this time from the 1988 Winter Olympics held in Calgary, Canada.
Peppy (short for peppermint) is the polar bear mascot for Fox’s Glacier Mints – a product from Fox’s Confectionery, a company in the UK. Peppy has been helping to sell mints since the 1920’s!
Another one for the video game enthusiasts, “Polar” (original name!) is Crash Bandicoot’s pet polar bear cub. From the Crash Bandicoot franchise, Polar makes his appearance in Crash Bandicoot 2.
Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? Is a classic picture book by Bill Martin, Jr. and Eric Carle which continues to bring polar bears into toddler’s worlds. The iconic front cover with its illustration of a polar bear by Eric Carle may be the most famous polar bear among our younger community.
Rupert The Bear – this one caused many discussions amongst us polar bear lovers – was Rupert a polar bear? He’s a white bear – does that mean he’s a polar bear? Decide for yourselves but, according to Wikipedia, he was originally designed as a brown bear but was pictured as a white (therefore potentially polar) bear to save on printing costs! So, can he be considered a famous polar bear? We’re saying probably not, but we’ll leave him here for you to decide for yourselves!
One for the Manga fans – Shirokuma Cafe or Polar Bear Cafe is a Japanese Manga series about a group of animals who all hang out at a cafe run by a polar bear!
Ice Bear is a polar bear character in the American animated TV series We Bare Bears – all about three bears trying to navigate the human world and trying to make friends.
So, there you have it, that’s our list of the best known famous polar bears so far – we’re happy to add to this list if you think there’s a famous polar bear we’re missing, just let us know. Obviously these character polar bears aren’t as important as real, live polar bears which is what our website is all about, but, we think anything that draws attention to and makes people think about polar bears has got to be a good thing for the conservation of our worlds polar bear population.
