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Teddy Bears began as a marketing campaign for Theodore Roosevelt. He was out on a hunting trip with some journalists and his aides tied an old black bear to a tree as a photo op. Old Theodore didn’t like that too much. He refused to shoot it. Thought it was unsportsmanlike. Didn’t have the thrill of the chase. And those journalists ate it up and turned it into a legend. A weird cultish display of character and mercy. It didn’t matter that the aides put down the bear behind the journalists back. Truth wasn’t important, but the story was.. and the story kept spreading until it turned into a line of toys.

So a few years later William Taft wanted to one up Roosevelt, but didn’t have much of a flare for story telling, but what he did have was a… discerning palette… You see, Taft was fond of a dish known as possum-n-'taters. Liked to scarf them down and lick the opossum fat from his mustache. Liked it so much that the White House chef got sick of cooking them and begged him to stop. But he never stopped. Made them hunt down opossums from the edge of town and slaughter the screaming bastards fresh for each meal. It got to the point where visitors would gift him live opossums to try and curry favor and sometimes it was a very successful bribe! So it was only logical that he would decide to make the “Billy possum” as an answer to Roosevelt's Big stupid bears. 

Unfortunately for the idiot public, nobody cared about the Billy possums. They slowly disappeared from the public eye… Or so most people think…I work in the factory’s toy division and so I know the truth! The truth is that our company founders were ardent Taft supporters. They hated the brash showmanship of Roosevelt and ached to spread the gospel of Taft… But they couldn’t quite change the public’s taste… So they took more clandestine actions…

At the factory we take foul and divisive teddy bears and cut them open. We pull out their stupid teddy bear stuffing until they become empty vessels. Tabulae rasae for whom the future possibilities are endless. Next we take the vessel and carefully insert the organs and circulatory systems of an ideologically pure opossum, and then we sew them back up. We’ve perfected this process over the decades. We’ve gotten so good that we’re able to reconnect enough tissue to restart the heart and pump air into the brain… Unfortunately the process is so traumatic for the opossum-bear hybrids that their natural instincts kick in and they immediately begin to play possum…Paralized in fear, they fake their deaths for the rest of their natural lives, but their suffering is worth it as a means of slowly converting the masses towards the gospel of Taft.