Happy ‘Winnie the Pooh Day’! These kinds of holidays often seem to be plucked out of thin air but this one is actually due to the fact that today is AA Milne’s birthday. Because of this I don’t feel quite as bad about making a post out of what, at first, appears to be yet another nonsense ‘holiday’. Winnie the Pooh spans generations and thanks to Disney’s long running depiction we’re now at a stage where Grandparents, Parents and Children alike all typically picture the little yellow guy, we see in the picture above, when they’re asked to think of Winnie The Pooh. (Remember, if you fancy trying your hand at some character voices from the hundred acre voices you can pop along to my post here for some pointers.)
One of my mum’s favourite toys as a child was her Winnie the Pooh slide projector, which she passed on to me when I was old enough to use it. Simple as it was, it was a great and diverting wee toy which projected scenes from Disney’s original Winnie The Pooh movies onto the wall with captions so that you could follow the story. I’ve a feeling that it was sadly lost in a house move when I was about 7 but I still remember it as being brilliant fun. It was apparently very durable to, aside from Lego, Playmobil, and perhaps a handful of other brands, plastic toys don’t often last long enough to pass on to the next generation.
Both of my kids were dressed in the ever-present sets of Winnie The Pooh baby clothes when they were babies (in fact both of them came home from the hospital wearing a Winnie The Pooh character). Some might see this as over-commercialisation of a beloved character but I love the characters and their underlying notion that, despite vastly different personality types, a group of individuals can still find a way to get on with one another.
We see the gruff and bossy rabbit clash with the mellow ‘laissez faire’ attitude of Pooh bear, or piglet’s crippling fearfulness juxtaposed with Tigger’s excitement, flamboyancy and zest for life. Not to mention the bookish, rambling, often wildly uninformed, ‘expertise’ of Owl and the lovable sad-sack Eeyore. Joined later on by Kanga and Roo, a single mother and her child adopted into the wider family of the hundred acre wood.
These are the ‘real’ Winnie the Pooh and his friends, owned by Christopher Robin Milne. For the origins of these characters follow this link
Disney’s depiction of these characters is often critically compared with the original but when you look at some of the original stories you see that some less-than-lovable traits have been edited out by Disney. For a good example lets look at chapter 7 of ‘Winnie The Pooh’ (Milne’s first book dedicated to the hundred acre wood), which is sub-titled ‘…in which Kanga and Baby Roo come to the forest, and Piglet has a bath’. Frightened at the prospect of newcomers to the wood, Pooh and the gang formulate a plan to scare Kanga and Roo off by kidnapping Roo and replacing him with piglet in order to bribe Kanga into agreeing to leave. “We’ll tell you where Baby Roo is, if you promise to go away from the Forest and never come back.” (really friendly huh?!)
The story has a happy ending (of sorts) with Kanga treating Piglet as though he’s Roo, until Christopher Robin turns up and mistakes the uncharacteristically clean Piglet for a newcomer to the woods. The general gist of the ending is that everything gets sorted out, Roo gets back to his mum and they’re all friends in the end. If you compare it to some of Disney’s own stories, you start to see that, in terms of the overall message, not much has been lost from the original apart from some slightly less savoury behaviours from the gang. (NB Disney has made at least a couple of versions of this story which was shown, amongst other places, in their ‘Mini adventures of Winnie the Pooh’ series, but the kidnapping plot absent, instead replaced by the gang helping Roo to avoid bath time, and the emphasis was on the humour of Piglet’s bath). At the bottom of this post you’ll find two versions I’ve tracked down on youtube:
Which version of Winnie the Pooh do you have the most fond memories of? Do you think Pooh bear and his friends have become over commercialised or do you like them just the way they are? As always I welcome comments both here in the comments box below and over on twitter. Thanks for reading, Cheers, John
John the toy shop guy 