Paw Paw, Michigan Shares A Name With This 1980’s Hanna-Barbera Cartoon

When I first got to Southwest Michigan when moving to Kalamazoo in 2017, I heard about the town of Paw Paw, but it took me a few months to be able to make it over there. Papa is a really cute area with a great downtown. that is thriving with many different businesses.

It also draws inspiration from the pawpaw fruit which was cultivated in the area from the indigenous tribes that once lived here in Michigan. But it wasn’t just this town that your inspiration from the fruit but also a 1980s Hannah-Barbera cartoon by the name of Paw Paws:

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Paw Paws is an American animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions that first aired in 1985 and 1986. It debuted as part of the weekday/weekend morning programming block The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera. The series name is a play on the paw paw, a fruit cultivated by Native Americans and indigenous to North America, and a play on words with a bear's paw. Reruns of the show formerly aired on Cartoon Network and later Boomerang.

 

The Show Paw Paws Had Some Regionally Local Talent

After looking into the cast, and who was a part of the show, I found that more than a few of the actors and actresses who did voices on the show were born in Indiana, so it’s possible, they understood the connection between the name of the show and the fruit.

What Was Paw Paws About?

The show itself is not bad, each bear has a name that describes our personalities, much like the Smurfs and was very short-lived as there are only 21 episodes, which were released between September of 1985 and February 1986.