Why Did Winnie The Pooh, And Friends, Meet Queen Elizabeth In 2016?

National Winnie the Pooh Day is observed annually on January 18th.  Author A.A. Milne brought the adorable, honey-loving bear to life in his stories which also featured his son, Christopher Robin.  National Winnie the Pooh Day commemorates Milne’s January 18, 1882, birthday.

• 1914 – During World War I, a Canadian soldier named Harry Colebourn made a pet of a black bear cub he bought from a hunter for $20. Named Winnipeg—or “Winnie” for short—the bear became his troop’s mascot and later a resident of the London Zoological Gardens.
• 1921 – Pooh was purchased at Harrods department store in London and given by A.A. Milne to his son Christopher Robin on his first birthday, August 21, 1921. He was called Edward (proper form of Teddy) Bear at the time.
• 1924 – The first-ever Pooh stories appeared in a Christmas special edition of the Evening Standard newspaper in December 1924.
• 1926 – A.A. Milne began writing collections of stories and poems that became the books When We Were Very Young, The House at Pooh Corner, Now We Are Six, and Winnie-The-Pooh.
  • It was these stories where Christopher Robin’s adored toy animals Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, and Roo made their literary debuts.
  • Milne’s lovable Pooh Bear, as he was fondly called, is a fictional bear inspired by a black bear named Winnie. Winnie lived at the London Zoo during World War I. The author’s son, Christopher Robin, would visit the bear often and named his teddy bear after her and a swan named Pooh.
• 1928 – Believe it or not, Tigger didn’t appear until the second Winnie the Pooh story, “The House at Pooh Corner.”
• 1960 – The story of Winnie the Pooh hit the prestigious New York Times Best Seller List.
• 1961 – Disney bought the rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh characters dropping the hyphen from Pooh’s name. The illustrations were a bit different, too.
• 1972 – Singers Loggins & Messina release “House at Pooh Corner” song & Video
• 1977 – Disney released the animated film, “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” featuring a new character, Gopher, who makes clear that he is “not in the book.”
• 1980s – Thanks to a questionable Disney show from the 1980s, Pooh and the gang warn of stranger danger.
• 2003 – Winnie-the-Pooh was briefly banned from some U.K. public schools in 2003, for fear that Muslim children would be offended by a talking pig. This edict was overturned by the Muslim Council of Britain, which voted to end the “well-intentioned but misguided policy.”
• 2016 –  In a new collection of stories to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh in 2016, Pooh makes a new friend: Penguin.
• 2016 – Pooh visits the Queen of England. Winnie the Pooh bear shares the same birthday with Queen Elizabeth II. 1926. To celebrate their joint 90^th birthday, a special story was created where Pooh Bear goes to visit the Queen to celebrate. The story tells a tale of Pooh and his friends visiting the Queen at Buckingham Palace so they can both celebrate their birthdays together and deliver a special gift to the Queen.
  • The special present is his iconic “hum.”
• The characters of Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, and Roo all came from stuffed animals that the real-life Christopher Robin owned. ​
  • Most of the original toys can be seen on display at the New York Public Library—except for Roo, who went missing in an apple orchard in the 1930s. The likes of Owl and Rabbit were included to loop in some of the fauna that frolicked outside the Milne family home.
• The character of Christopher Robin was inspired by A.A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne. ​​
• Illustrator E.H. Shepard ambushed Milne for the job of drawing Pooh. But Milne was reluctant to hire a political cartoonist, so Shepard took the initiative. As recounted by Milne’s old neighbor, Laurence Irving, Shepard wandered Ashdown Forest, the inspiration for Milne’s mythical woods, and created a portfolio of sketches. Then he turned up unannounced at Milne’s home, where he handed over his portfolio to Milne and won his approval.
• The real Christopher Robin resented his father and Pooh. Being forever the tender little boy in Hundred Acre Wood didn’t suit Christopher Robin Milne. Like his father before him, he became a writer but wrote memoirs of his own life, like The Enchanted Places, Beyond the World of Pooh, and The Hollow On The Hill. In these, he asserted, “It seemed to me almost that my father had got where he was by climbing on my infant’s shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and left me nothing but empty fame.”
• Scholars and philosophers have been pulling from Pooh for inspiration.
  • American author Benjamin Hoff wrote both The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet to explain the principles of the Chinese philosophical school of Taoism.
  • Scholar John Tyerman Williams responded with the long but self-explanatorily titled Pooh and the Philosophies: In Which It Is Shown That All of Western Philosophy Is Merely a Preamble to Winnie-The-Pooh and Pooh and the Psychologists.
  • English professor and author Frederick Crews penned The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, which satirized academic trends in case studies.
• You can send birthday cards to Winnie-the-Pooh courtesy of the New York Public Library, where Christopher Robin’s original stuffed bear lives.
• Pooh’s red t-shirt was added when the rights to the character were bought by Disney. The original sketches and drawings of the character were just of a bear that didn’t wear any clothes, and as drawings developed, he was pictured with a t-shirt on.
• A.A. Milne served in both the First and Second World War, despite being a pacifist.
•  In the 1930s and 1940s, Milne returned to writing for adults, as he had before Winnie-the-Pooh. This included an anti-war book, Peace with Honour.
• Forbes magazine has ranked Winnie-the-Pooh as the second most valuable children’s character in the world, after Mickey Mouse.
• Winnie The Pooh is the patron saint of teddy bears.
• The Guinness World Record for the largest “Pooh and Friends memorabilia collection” is held by Deb Hoffmann, from Wisconsin. Hoffmann received her first Winnie-the-Pooh when she was two years old, and as of the record-setting date in 2015, she had amassed 13,213 Pooh items.
• Disney animator and Orthodox Jew Saul Blinkoff has hidden various Jewish “Easter eggs” in his Winnie-the-Pooh films, including a mezuzah (a tiny Hebrew scroll in a case) on Winnie’s door.
• Tigger’s iconic line in the Disney adaptations, “T.T.F.N, Ta-ta for now,” was ad-libbed by Tigger’s voice actor, Paul Winchell, and it stuck.
• From the 1960s to the 1980s, Sears had an exclusive North American license to sell Pooh merchandise. This included a line of “Pooh-rated” clothing. And yes, that’s Gary Coleman in this 1977 ad. 

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Mental Floss

National Today

Fact Site

New York Public Library

CBC