The highly popular children's cartoon first emerged as a series of television short films as well as a weekly half-page Sunday strip in 1966, before being published periodically in its own comic magazine since 1973.

Several new writers and illustrators were hired in the early 1990s, including Claes Reimerthi, Olof Siverbo, Johan Wanloo and Tony Cronstam.

He had a fourth child in 1986, and his friend Lille Skutt had one at the same time; this saw the series focus more on family, while also discussing other values such as gender equality.

In 1989, the character Skalman noticed that Bamse's fourth child Brumma had some intellectual disability, later defined as her being on the Autism spectrum,[1] which again brought up the subject of equality.

While shown as on the edge of society, Reinard is intelligent but uses his skills and efforts at disrupting the social order as a good in itself.

By enjoying turning people "on the edge" to a life of crime he displays outright antisocial characteristics, roughly mirroring Batman's antagonist The Joker or Shakespeare's Iago in this regard.

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 colour films were low-budget productions with actor Olof Thunberg narrating and voicing all characters, but are considered to be classics.

The game was little more than a sprite replacement of Beam Software's Baby T-Rex and received generally poor reviews.