Walter White loves the infamous one-eyed pink teddy bear in Breaking Bad fan-art inspired by Despicable Me. Viewers of AMC’s acclaimed drama about a chemistry teacher’s transformation into a drug kingpin first glimpsed the show’s symbolic pink teddy bear in a flash-forward before season 2’s debut episode. The full significance of the bear would later be revealed in Breaking Bad season 2’s shocking finale. Fans didn’t realize it at the time but the titles of the four episodes featuring the pink teddy bear actually spelled out the single phrase “Seven Thirty-Seven Down Over ABQ.” In retrospect, it was realized that this clever title trick - and indeed the repeated appearances of the floating, charred teddy bear throughout season 2 - foreshadowed one of Breaking Bad’s most harrowing and traumatic moments: the mid-air collision of two planes over Albuquerque that led to a rain of debris – including the pink teddy bear - upon the homes of Walter White and others. Of course White himself was indirectly responsible for the plane crash, as his failure to save Jesse’s girlfriend Jane from choking to death led to her father, air traffic controller Donald, being distracted on the day of the accident. White would later symbolically carry around his guilt over this event in the form of a glass eyeball, the only remnant of the teddy bear after it was taken away by the police as evidence.
Breaking Bad’s pink teddy bear is laden with darkly symbolic significance. But fan artist Zascanauta decided to lighten things up a little bit by creating an image in which Walter White incongruously embraces the mangled bear and symbol of his lost innocence with the glee of a child, specifically the stuffed-unicorn-loving little girl Agnes from the animated film Despicable Me. The “It’s so fluffy” reference in the above image of course comes from a scene in 2010’s Despicable Me where the movie’s villain Gru wins a stuffed unicorn for young Agnes at a carnival. Replacing Agnes with Walter White and the stuffed unicorn with the pink teddy bear from Breaking Bad obviously puts an ominous spin on what is otherwise a cute scene. At the same time, there’s something extra-appropriate about mashing up Despicable Me with Breaking Bad, as their stories in a way mirror each other. Despicable Me of course is about a bad guy who turns good, while Breaking Bad is about a good guy who turns evil.
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Perhaps if Walter White had truly embraced the symbolic meaning of the pink teddy bear in his pool he would have saved himself and others a lot of grief. Unfortunately the guilt Walt felt over the plane crash he indirectly caused did not force him to change his evil ways. Unlike Gru from Despicable Me, White did not receive a happy ending, though he did at least get a measure of redemption in the Breaking Bad series finale.