A Sunshine Coast bear with a taste for Orange Crush has made it big! In the April 20 airing of his late night show, Stephen Colbert poked the bear (or at least its story) for laughs.
It all started in the early hours of April 13, when a bear broke into a vehicle and began drinking the six cases of pops left inside. He drank 69 cans before leaving three diet pops and a sticky mess behind.
The bear’s antics first debuted on Facebook, when Earls Cove resident and Grill-It! food truck owner Sharon Rosel shared the slurping ursine’s pre-dawn sugar high. Then Coast Reporter picked it up, and the word got out.
In his “Meanwhile” segment that makes cracks about a variety of news, Colbert said, “Up in Canada, a black bear broke into a vehicle and guzzled 69 cans of pop. That’s insane. They call it “pop”? It’s soda… What is this, the Archie comics from 1954?”
He joked about the woman trying to reason with the bear.
Jokes online related the Sunshine Coast bear’s sugar high to the infamous Cocaine Bear (whose drugged state has been fictionalized in the 2023 movie Cocaine Bear).
As for Rosel, she said, "You know you've arrived when Stephen Colbert roasts you... The only way it could have been better is if it could have been my hero, Jon Stewart. I would do cartwheels — at my age — to be mentioned by Jon Stewart."
She's been fielding interview requests from national outlets and as far away as England. She was up at 4 a.m. on April 21 for an interview with an LA news network, and people have made her posters of "soda pop bear" in the style of a Cocaine Bear movie poster.
"It was so much fun," she said. "I never knew social media could move so fast.
"It's going to be my 15 minutes of fame, it just keeps going."
