> Oh, Commander Bear sounds so cute! He'd probably like to meet Mister Bear, our family
> stuffed bear. Mister Bear's job around the house is to make certain that the bed is safe for
> sleeping in and to get the humans to go to sleep.

Reminds me of a science fiction story I read once, where there's a children's cuddly companion called the Fat Monster Eater(TM).

[quote]
Essentially it was a big floppy sphere slightly over a metre in diameter covered in short dirt-resistant fur. Its mouth had been designed using the latest kinderpsyche profiling to be large enough to give small children just the right frisson of fear when it opened all the way without scaring them witless.
Inside, the Fat Monster Eater was filled with a foam comprising billions of tiny bubbles a few millimetres across, each one containing its own heating element, actuator and pinbrain. The actuators moved the bubbles around in concert to create facial expressions and interesting and playful lumps on its body; the heating elements varied the temperature within the bubbles to allow the Fat Monster Eater to achieve buoyancy at average room temperature and float around a child's bedroom in an amusing fashion.
[end quote]

The Fat Monster Eater in the story belongs to the daughter of a Presidential candidate, one of whose rivals sends assassins to kill her family. This is when we find out that this particular Monster Eater is a custom job that really does eat monsters.

Paul