Care Bears/YMMV

• Ass Pull: Secret Bear making another MacGuffin key out of nowhere in the first movie.
• Anvilicious
• Broken Base: Was Adventures in Care-a-Lot an okay show, or the worst thing to happen to the franchise?
• Complete Monster: The Evil Spirit from the first movie is the closest contender for this trope that this franchise has, as she's the only villain to be wholly lacking in any comedic qualities or redeeming features, her Satanic magic powers and predatory manipulation of young Nicholas is on a different level from the villainy normally seen from evildoers in the Care Bears franchise, and her goal of wanting to make the entire world "stop caring" comes with a shit-ton of Fridge Horror that the movie itself glosses over.
• Crack Ship: Some fans pair Beastly and Shreeky together.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Many a girl has admitted to having a crush on Dark Heart from the second movie.
  • Hell, even No Heart has fangirls!
• Ear Worm
  • The Giving Festival Movie - "Care Power on-- rainbows, sun, stormclouds and lollipops. Care Power on!"
  • Adventures in Wonderland - "Rise and shine, get a glow, cause you know you're gonna shine like the star you are, you are..."
  • Care Bears Movie II: The Next Generation - "Flying My Colors" and "Forever Young"
  • Care Bears Countdown
• Ensemble Darkhorse: For the bears, Grumpy Bear. For the cousins, Brave Heart Lion.
  • For some, the Care Bear Cousins over the actual Care Bears (in part because the Cousins all had distinct designs and personalities, whereas outside Grumpy Bear, all of the Care Bears were too similar)
    • The bears are similar only because most people collapse being nice into generic love. Aside from explicit personalities like Grumpy or Secret, the bears are more unique when you realize that romance, friendship, enthusiasm, gaiety, generosity, mediation, hope, and competition are unique traits.
  • Bright Heart Raccoon pretty much also qualifies. He was actually upgraded to being a part of the main Cast Herd in the Nelvana series' final seasons.
  • Christy and Dark Heart are the most well remembered part of the second film.
• Fashion Victim Villain: Dark Heart, lord of all evil, wears.... a red track suit.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: After the film Braveheart came out, jokes between that movie and Brave Heart Lion were inevitable.
  • Christy and Dark Heart's relationship in the second movie gives off some funny Twilight vibes now. Dark Heart even transforms into a wolf at one point so Christy can ride on his back.
  • Professor Coldheart looks and acts almost exactly like an ice-themed version of I.M. Meen.
  • Towards the end of the first movie, the possessed Nicholas exhibits spiral eyes much like those of Lord Genome.
  • The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland featured a Jafar Expy evil wizard as the Big Bad, who tried to abduct Alice and had Tweedledee and Tweedledum working for him. Years later, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland was made.
• Idiot Plot: As with many children's shows, the plots frequently revolve around characters making decisions that would defy common sense. It's more acceptable when it's the younger characters making these mistakes, but it's somewhat jarring when the more mature Bears, as well as the villains, act like idiots. Never mind, the Bears don't seem to physically age, so all of them have been around for at least decades. So that means none of them have an excuse for their stupidity.
• Jerkass Woobie: Beastly.
  • Christy from the second movie becomes a Jerkass when Dark Heart makes her good at sports, but beforehand the poor girl didn't think she was good at anything. This is why she ends up assisting Dark Heart in his plan, 'cause if she doesn't she'll go back to how she used to be.
• Memetic Mutation: "The Caring Meter dropped! Two whole points!!!"
  • "Time for a game of disappearing bears."
  • "Daaaaark Heeeaaart!!"
• Misaimed Fandom: Subverted with Grumpy Bear; for a lot of people, Grumpy Bear's anti-social attitude and contempt for his fellow Bears and their at times Stepfordized personalities make him their favorite. Which ironically was mentioned in his original bio, as far as Grumpy's bio stating that his personality wasn't wrong and that it's ok to be grumpy sometimes, as opposed to casting Grumpy Bear in the "The Complainer Is Always Wrong" direction.
• Nightmare Fuel In the TV special The Care Bears Battle the Freeze Machine, Baby Tugs and Baby Hugs frozen in star-shaped blocks of ice. And to really top it off, Baby Hugs crying a tear and the tear trickling down to the ground. Oh ... God!
• Replacement Scrappy: For older fans, Oopsy Bear, the chronically clumsy bear, who replaced both Good Luck Bear and oddly enough, Tenderheart Bear.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The Second film from the 80s, compared to the first film.
• Tastes Like Diabetes: Played with in the Nelvana series. The villains themselves are often far darker than what you'd expect, and the more overt displays of cuteness are often Played for Laughs.
• Tear Jerker: The song Forever Young. Especially if you've lost a loved one.
  • In The Care Bears Battle the Freeze Machine, Baby Hugs shedding a tear after she and Baby Tugs get frozen by Coldheart. See also Nightmare Fuel above.
  • The ending of The Long Lost Care Bears, where Perfect and Polite Panda decide that their true home is in the valley and not with the rest of the bears. Made so, so much worse by Good Luck Bear's reaction -- he and Polite had developed adorable little crushes on one another.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: As described at the trope entry, it's often been unclear which bears belong to which gender over the years. The 2007 line is the first to specifically delineate gender.
  • Seriously! When the Star Comics comic adaptation was translated to Norwegian, Cheer was consistently referred to as male in the translation. Nobody noticed.
  • And Love-A-Lot was male in one of the books.
  • Good Luck Bear has gone all over the place with voice style changes.
  • Lotsa Heart Elephant apparently gets hit with this trope.
  • Swift Heart Rabbit and Cozy Heart Penguin apparently run all over the place with this trope.
• Villain Decay: After the first season of the Nelvana series, No Heart generally stopped being an active threat and usually sent his incompetent minions Shreeky and Beastly to do the dirty work.
  • This was probably done because No Heart's animal transformations were too scary. After Shreeky was introduced his transformation power was only used for comedic effect, with him involuntarily transforming whenever Shreeky shrieked in his presence.
    • Also, Professor Coldheart was actually menacing and had a pedophilic subtext around him in The Land Without Feelings. In Battle the Freeze Machine, he got a goofy sidekick and was less menacing than before, and then in the DIC show, he suddenly had a high-pitched voice and was generally a bumbling joke of a villain.
      • Any villains after the 2000 relaunch are bumbling villains at best. This probably stems from complains that the old movies and series were giving the target audience nightmares.
      • Dark Heart, fully in-movie. The guy can turn into a dragon or a menacing cloud...and spends most of his time in the form of a young boy, apparently gaining the weaknesses of that form too since bumping his head on a canoe knocked him out and almost made him drown
• The Woobie: Grumpy Bear.
  • Oopsy Bear is supposedly designed to be a woobie judging from his personality traits, but it didn't turn out quite as American Greetings had expected.