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If you were around in the mid-1970s, you may remember the magnificently bearded Dan Haggerty in a popular movie and subsequent TV series called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. The TV version beat out Wednesday rival The Bionic Woman and became one of NBC's most popular shows of all time.

Dan Haggerty as Grizzly Adams

What you might not know is that even as the series came to an end in 1978, a franchise had already been born—one now known simply as Grizzly Adams Productions. Today, the company makes and markets what are, in their own words, "family friendly and faith-based" programs for film and television.

The Grizzly Adams franchise, adapted from a novel written by Charles Sellier, told the story of a real-life American frontiersman and explorer named James Capen Adams, a rough-hewn character who, among other things, had a strange gift for communicating with wild animals—including, of course, grizzly bears.

Naturally, for a mountain man like Adams, life was fairly modest and unsophisticated, and one might be inclined to assume the same about the production company that now uses his name—after all, family-friendly, faith-based, independent programming is not exactly the stuff of Hollywood glitz and glamour.

But consider this: Grizzly Adams is the second most financially successful provider of family-friendly entertainment there is—second only to Disney. In fact, vice president David Balsiger speculates that GA is "probably" more prolific than Disney in terms of the sheer amount of programming it creates.

Grizzly's programming has appeared on most of the major TV networks—the original Grizzly Adams show ran for two seasons on NBC, and they've also aired features on CBS, TLC, and the Sci-Fi Channel—and some of its films still rank among the most lucrative indie movies ever released in theaters. And they produce new content with an almost dizzying level of prolificacy—in TV specials alone, Grizzly Adams has over a thousand features to its name.

Charles Sellier

As Sellier tells it, the Grizzly venture began as the direct result of a personal religious experience. "In the 1980s I was working for Universal Studios as a supervising producer," he remembers. "I was on the set of Knight Rider 2000 in San Antonio. It was late at night and I had three people movers very high in the air with operators on them. All of a sudden, lighting began to come out of the sky, as it will in that part of Texas. I was very afraid for the crews in the air and began praying for their safety. I was shocked when God spoke back to me; that had never happened before. God told me he was very disappointed in me, that I was not doing his work. That I needed to stop doing 'car crash of the week' and begin doing meaningful shows.

"That was twenty years ago, and I am still in business doing shows that serve the Lord. We will not green-light any show into production if I do not see God and his purpose in that show."

Now, more than 34 years since the initial success of the Grizzly Adams story, Sellier is still involved as one of the two principal players in the company, along with Balsiger, himself a theater and TV veteran. The two men spearhead a company that prides itself in creating programming on a very small budget, but they're not exactly stingy—in the past decade, GA has made over 500 new shows, with an average of 40-60 hours of programming per year, including TV specials, series, made-for-TV-movies, and even theatrical releases. In the next five years, the company has committed itself to creating twenty feature-length, family-friendly movies; half of them are currently in development.

And though they've had success with major TV outlets, Grizzly's greatest success perhaps has been with evangelical audiences. But that's no big surprise—the company has its own in-house marketing and sales team that deals exclusively with religious groups. Thanks to these efforts, the company's most successful features are ones with a distinctly religious slant: Ancient Secrets of the Bible, George W. Bush: Faith in the White House, The Da Vinci Code Deception, and Evidence for Heaven. Not all of their films are expressly religious or faith-based, but such programming is a pivotal part of their franchise. Among their other award-winning features are The Case for Christ's Resurrection, Apocalypse and the End Times, Breaking the Da Vinci Code, and Secrets of the Bible Code Revealed.

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