Winnie the Pooh/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The Original Books:

  • Creator Backlash: A.A. Milne grew to loathe his Winnie-the-Pooh books as it typecasted him forever as a "writer of children's books", and he could never go back to writing adult fiction. He even tried to kill off Pooh at the end of the second book. (Of course, it didn't work.) E.H. Shepard, Pooh's illustrator, also suffered from this as it overshadowed his work in political cartoons. Similarly, Milne's son, Christopher Robin, grew to hate the works as well for he was bullied constantly for being immortalized in them.
  • What Could Have Been: At one point Gopher of the Disney adaptations would have been "in the book", according to Disney, who claimed that the real Christopher Robin saw a gopher in the garden and asked for it to be included in his father's stories. Fantasy author and animation historian John Grant, however, points out that gophers do not exist in Britain, and so this story is almost certainly false.
    • Also, Christopher Robin Milne's autobiography, The Enchanted Places, reveals that A. A. Milne had planned to include an American Gopher in his Pooh books, but his publisher nixed it (Enchanted Places reprints a short poem from the lost Milne version of Gopher). In other words, Gopher at one point would have been in the book.
    • In the introduction (or, according to Owl, the "Contradiction") to The House at Pooh Corner, Milne himself mentions other adventures, "more grand than any I have told you about," which he can't tell because they came to him in dreams and he's forgotten them. He only remembers one small part of one of them, with Pooh meeting 107 cows sitting on a gate, and claims that this was probably the best story of them all. Many fans of the books have lamented that we never got to read it.
  • Write Who You Know

Tropes Related to the Disney Canon:

  • Cross-Dressing Voices: Roo was voiced by Dori Whitaker in Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger Too and by Kim Christiansen in House at Pooh Corner.
  • Dueling Movies: The 2011 movie came the same weekend as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. The decision to set a film like this against the Grand Finale of one of the most beloved fantasy movie series of all time has Disney fans everywhere banging their heads. This decision is truly a head-scratcher, but there's a good chance fans of both would watch one and then follow it up with the other, assuming they're not planning to see Potter at midnight. (Preferred order most likely Deathly Hallows, then Winnie the Pooh.) It may also be a smart decision for Disney regarding families that have older and younger kids. Have one parent take the older kid to see Potter and then the other parent goes with the preschooler to see Pooh. Of course, that begs the question of what to do with the younger kid once Pooh is over, since there's no such thing as a two and a half hour Pooh film.
  • Genre Killer: Fans are worried that if Winnie-the-Pooh doesn't do well at the box office, it will spell the end of hand-drawn animation at Disney... again. Other fans know that it would need to take something bigger to do that. This film was modestly-budgeted ($30 million) and broke even at the box office thanks to overseas sales. DVD sales would only help.
    • Played straight, as the next Disney film, Wreck-It Ralph is in CG, and the one after that, The Snow Queen, not only had its title shortened to Frozen, but has gone from Hand-drawn to CGI. And with Glen Keane's resignation in light of Disney not having any hand-drawn movies down the line, this trope may very well be in effect!
  • Hey, It's That Voice!
  • Talking to Himself
    • Jim Cummings is currently Tigger and Pooh.
    • However, in France, Roger Carel is Pooh and Rabbit. He was also Piglet until the late 80s.

My Friends Tigger & Pooh:

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