The program teaches simple life lessons by following the title character and his puppet friends as they go through their day.

Bear in the Big Blue House is a television program for young children produced for the Disney Channel by The Jim Henson Company. The program teaches simple life lessons by following the title character and his puppet friends as they go through their day.

The gentle, soft title character of Bear in the Big Blue House is a talking, seven-foot (213 cm) orange bear who lives in a house and who loves to help children learn. Despite his enormous size, Bear is child-friendly. He addresses the kids at home directly, talking to them as if they were all his close friends. Bear in the Big Blue House was created for the very young, teaching concepts like shapes, gravity, helping, seasons, and even toilet training. Joining the ever-curious Bear are an assortment of woodland creatures—excitable lemur Treelo, headstrong mouse Tutter, peppy otter twins Pip and Pop and imaginative little bear cub Ojo—all of whom help illustrate the day’s lesson. At the end of every episode, Bear goes out on his balcony to talk about what everyone has learned with his friend Luna, the wise moon.

Bear interweaves learning with playtime. After the musical call, "Where oh where oh where is Shadow?", Bear's friend Shadow appears. Together with other shadow friends, the girl puts on shadow plays of brief, amusing stories— often with grown-up humor lurking just under the surface.

Bear in the Big Blue House became a long-running hit on The Disney Channel. The program was initially produced from 1997 to 2003. After a three-year hiatus and the spin-off Breakfast with Bear, new episodes returned to the Disney Channel in April of 2006. The show attained such popularity that Bear himself sometimes appeared on Hollywood Squares.

Tom Fulp, the owner of the Flash entertainment site Newgrounds, once made a parody game in which Bear was abducting children and Pico, Newgrounds' mascot, had to kill the bear. However, the graphics were changed after Newgrounds faced legal threats from The Jim Henson Company. However, the original game can still be seen by users who gain enough Gold Grounds points on the site.

The show is also shown in the United Kingdom on five, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and on RTÉ Two in Ireland.

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