It's a bear!

With my little boy three months shy of his second birthday, my reading habits have changed a bit recently. The current favourite bedtime story is We're Going on a Bear Hunt (the pop-up version). It's becoming engraved on my heart, like Calais. One more time....

We're going on a bear hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared....

From Teddy Roosvelt's original "Teddy" bear, through Pooh, Paddington, Rupert and Bungle, most bears intended for small children's consumption over the last century tend to be cuddly, nonthreatening creatures, so the bear in Bear Hunt is a bit of an exception, being big and scary. It reminded me a little of another children's bear classic, The Teddy Bear's Picnic, a song which presumably wasn't intended to be frightening but always seems to me to have slightly threatening and sinister undertones. Especially in this version by Henry Hall and his orchestra. See what you think - vaguely unsettling, or just the product of some suppressed childhood trauma I must have had with a stuffed toy?