Headscratchers / Winnie the Pooh

Books

Pooh's Anatomy

So...why would Pooh, a stuffed animal...need to eat honey, or even feel hungry?

• The power of Imagination. He's not really eating honey.
• The same magic or whatever that makes him able to walk and talk?
  • Imagination. At one point, we pretended our stuffies were real and so had them act like such. As far as the obsession with "hunny" goes, it probably comes that, when a lot of people think of bears, they think they'd eat mostly honey.
    • So none of the events of the stories are real even in-universe?

So what does "ther" mean?

• Well, we know that it seems to imply that Winnie-the-Pooh is male and/or should never be called just "Winnie", and that it seems like an emphatic "the", but the author doesn't really explain.
  • A couple of things:
  1. "Ther" seems to be an inflection on "the"
  2. A.A Milne couldn't really explain the origin of "Winnie-The-Pooh" because he didn't really remember, though, "Winnie" is a reference to Canadian bear named "Winnipeg" (affectionately known as "Winnie") and "Pooh" was, apparently, the name of a black swan that Milne saw on holiday, though more so a reference to the sound ya'll would prolly make when you blow something off of your nose.

Works by Disney

The Release Period

Why would Disney release a movie like Winnie The Pooh in the middle of Summer Blockbuster season? Nothing against the film, based of the reviews it's apparently a good movie, but the summer just isn't the time for a movie like this. Typically, family movies like these are best saved for Thanksgiving or Christmas time. Not to mention, it opened on the 'same weekend as the last Harry Potter movie. It's like Disney just didn't care if the movie bombed at the box office.

• Some hypthetical WMGs could be:
  • Disney had the highest hopes and thought it would perform so well that it would be a real game-changer amongst the blockbusters.
  • It was just seen as a lower-deck television movie by the marketing, who wanted it to be steamrolled by the final Harry Potter film into obscurity!
  • It was already released in other countries months before the summer, and the US release date was the least important.
  • Disney thought it would be targeted toward a different audience than anything else this summer and thus, competition wouldn't be an issue.
  • It wasn't made for the box office performance, but as a marketing obligation to go along with the merchandise.

Why is there only one chapter mentioned in the film?

Press released told us they would be adapting several of the original stories, yet the narrator opens the film with Chapter One... which takes up the whole film! Which, I may add, is only an hour long. They do know that the audience will expect more than one chapter to be present, right?

• Potential sequel?
• They did adapt three stories, but merged them into a single story with elements from all three. As to why the narrator even bothers with chapter one, I do not know... I'll take the above answer, 'cause that'd be awesome.
• It's to make the film flow better and seem less like a sketch film.

Somewhat unrelated

Secret Identity?

• I don't know about the rest of you, but have you ever seen Christopher Robin and Gopher in the same scene at the same time, or even interact with one another?
  • They don't interact (and it doesn't seem like Christopher Robin even notices Gopher is there), but they do briefly appear in the same scene at the same time twice in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. First at the end of the Honey Tree segment, where everyone's trying to pull Pooh out of Rabbit's door, then the second time during the Hip Hip Pooh-Ray song in the Blustery Day segment.
  • Fridge Brilliance! Christopher Robin was a real person who came up with many aspects of the Pooh stories himself. Walt Disney came up with Gopher ("I'm not in the book!") So while Disney, taking A.A. Milne's characters for a whirl, can introduce them to his own character, Christopher Robin can't meet Gopher, since he never thought of Gopher himself.
  • The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh establishes that Gopher respects Christopher Robin, and we do see Gopher and Christopher Robin in the same place in some of the holiday specials such as "A Winnie The Pooh Thanksgiving" and "A Very Merry Pooh Year". But the clearest interaction is in "Winnie the Pooh: A Valentine for You", where Christopher Robin gives valentines to his friends, including Gopher.
    • Gophers, IRL, are crepuscular or nocturnal and a lot of the scenes with Christopher Robin are during the day.

"Tata for now!"

• I know that in some movie or tv show from the more recent adaptations of Pooh, Tigger leaves people with "TTFN! Tata For Now!" Since this was or is one of many abbreviations for texting, did Tigger popularize the acronym, or was the acronym become used by Tigger?
  • It does not completely originate from Tigger (it's older than the Pooh movie), however chances are most people that use it txting got it from hearing Tigger say it before txting was a thing. The current oldest known use is British WWII Soldiers, so dating as far back at the end of the 1930s.

Is Rabbit Real or naw?

• Is Rabbit even a real rabbit or a stuffed toy like Tigger and Pooh are? "The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" implies it's the latter but what is it? He doesn't even resemble a stuffed toy!
  • The Disney version seems to flip-flop a bit on the subject, but all in all? He's a real rabbit. When the original books were written, the only two characters who were not based on Christopher Robin Milne's stuffed toys were Owl and Rabbit; they were instead based on real forest animals. (In The House of Pooh Corner Rabbit even briefly provides a Shout-Out to this fact when he claims that he and Owl are the only ones capable of real thought because they have real brains, and the others just have fluff or sawdust.)

Heffalumps and much ado about them

• So since the events of Pooh's Heffalump Movie, we know that heffalumps exist. We also learn from one of the movies that backsons exist (but they're not evil and Christopher Robin wasn't writing about one). However, do woozles, wizzles, and jagulars exist?
  • Well, while the Heffalumps get by far the most attention, the New Adventures cartoon does establish that Woozles are real as well — a devious and thieving Woozle named Stan appears in a couple of episodes together with his friend Heff the Heffalump. A "Wizzle" has been theorized, but not actually confirmed, to simply be a young Woozle. No word on Jagulars, though.

Bonhomie

• Maybe there's some reference or whatever I just don't get, but what does Eeyore mean when he says, "Bonhommy. French word meaning bonhommy. Joke, haha."?
  • I don't remember that exact line, but "bonhomie" is an English word borrowed from French, so the joke is that he's using the word to define itself. (Something like, to use more common words, "Rendezvous: a French word meaning rendezvous." or "Cul-de-sac: a French word meaning cul-de-sac")