Bamse - Films and Other Media

Films and Other Media

Six animated black and white short films were produced for television in 1966. In 1972, seven more animated shorts were shown in colour. In 1981, another two shorts were released. And in 1991, a direct-to-video movie became available.

The later colour films have aired frequently on TV in Sweden and have been released on VHS and DVD. The black and white films had been unavailable to the general public for a long time, but were released on DVD by late 2006. The color movies were low budget productions with actor Olof Thunberg narrating and voicing all characters, but they are considered to be classics and the musical theme is easily recognized by most Swedes.

In 1993, a Game Boy game (in Swedish) was published loosely based on the Bamse characters. The game received generally poor reviews. The game was in fact little more than a sprite replacement of Beam Software's Baby T-Rex, which does explain the game's setting and the "Bamse version" is not the only time this happened but the game went through the same procedure for other regions featuring other characters. The "Bamse version" however has not been officially released outside Sweden.

In October 2006, forty years after Bamse was created, Ola Andréasson, the son of creator Rune Andréasson, announced that an animated feature film will be made, featuring better animation, a full voice cast and having a budget of SEK 25 million. The movie's release date is undetermined, although an estimated date of 2012 has been proposed.