When I was a little tyke, my favorite Saturday morning cartoon was The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
The Disney-fied meanderings of this tubby little cubby always enchanted
me, and my fondness for Pooh is one of the things friends and relatives
most often remember about me, as my large collection of Pooh
memorabilia attests. Several years ago, Disney released a number of
small collections of episodes, one of which I recently rented. Growing Up With Winnie the Pooh: Friends Forever is a nice showcase of episodes typical of the series.
Goodbye Mr. Pooh
begins with a miscommunication. Tigger bursts in on Pooh, who is about
to dispose of some especially raggedy hunny pots. When he tries to
explain this to Tigger, his bouncy friend misinterprets the situation
and dashes off to announce that Pooh is moving away. The shocked
woodlanders plan a going away party for the surprised but grateful Pooh,
who then feels obliged to actually go away in accordance with the
occasion. When he returns a short time later, he finds Eeyore has moved
into his house, so he tries to make a go of it at Piglet's, but the
friends discover that even the best of buddies can find it difficult to
live together.
This episode has a fairly bittersweet feel to
it. After all, how can there be a Hundred-Acre Wood that does not
include Pooh? His confusion and his friends' grief at his departure are
touching. Eeyore is a bit presumptuous moving into Pooh's house
immediately after he leaves, but when your own house is constantly
crumbling, I guess you have to seize those sorts of opportunities. It's
also a little disheartening to see Piglet growing so aggravated with
Pooh; he puts on a polite face, but some of Pooh's living habits clearly
grate on him. It's another misunderstanding that brings Pooh back to
where he belongs, with his friendship with Piglet unscathed.
Misinterpretations play into Where Oh Where Has My Piglet Gone
as well. When Piglet comes over, Pooh, who can never keep track of
anything, is busy searching for the hammer he borrowed from Rabbit. Pooh
is so wrapped up in his search that he doesn't hear Piglet asking him
if he'd like to hear him sing. He goes on berating himself for his
absent-mindedness, which Piglet takes to be disapproval of his singing.
Shamefaced, Piglet makes a break for it, leaving Pooh aghast that he has
now managed to lose his best friend.
Pooh, Rabbit and Tigger
organize a searching party but spend most of the evening losing each
other in a series of simple but comical mishaps. Pooh is sweetly
self-deprecating throughout the ordeal, while his friends grow
increasingly panicky and nonsensical, and their dialogue starts to sound
like an Abbott and Costello routine as they banter about just who has
lost who. Meanwhile, Piglet goes to amusing lengths to avoid subjecting
his friends to his voice while still obeying his own compulsion to sing.
Fish Out of Water is a strange episode in which the
residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood find themselves under attack by a
relentless barrage of migrating trout. They don't stick to the waterways
in their travels; they move in a fluid stream, leaping across cliffs
and tearing through living rooms. Everyone is inconvenienced by their
presence, especially Gopher, whose tunnels they seem to prefer,
prompting him to move in with a most irritated Rabbit, who proposes a
plan to rid the Wood of these fishy intruders once and for all.
The fish are quite cute, and it's funny to watch them travel over the
land as naturally as if it were water. This episode could introduce the
concept of migrating fish to youngsters, though the only explanation as
to why it happens comes in the form of Pooh telling Piglet that the
trout are swimming upstream to do whatever it is that they do upstream.
It's nice to see an episode focus on some of the Wood's natural
residents, or more accurately visitors. The trout are just passing
through, but they are a regular part of the landscape instead of
transplants plunked down by Christopher Robin.
Speaking of Christopher, he gets the ball rolling in Pooh Skies.
After the imaginative boy spends the afternoon describing to Pooh all
the remarkable things he sees in the clouds, Pooh comes to think of that
wispy realm as Christopher Robin's, and he becomes desperate to fix it
after a hunny-finding attempt goes awry and he knocks a blue eggshell
from a nest. Tigger tells Pooh that he's broken the sky, and the storm
that turns the sky black moments later seems to confirm this idea. It's
up to Pooh and Gopher to find a way up to the clouds and figure out how
to stop all of Christopher's dreamscape from disappearing.
The
stylized appearance of the cloud world is highly creative, with great
billowing structures surrounding Gopher and Pooh as they navigate their
way across the unusual surface. Their proactive approach to what they
perceive as a terrible problem is impressive, and Gopher's engineering
expertise is especially handy here. The basic plotline is similar to The Wishing Bear,
which begins and ends with Pooh and Christopher Robin star-gazing
rather than cloud-watching and involves Pooh believing he has broken an
important element of the night sky. It also reminds me of a few other
episodes in which characters' perceptions create a fantastical landscape
for themselves.
Between episodes are short scenes featuring
paper cut-outs of Pooh and his friends. These brief interludes have the
look of a pop-up book and are a fun way to set the episodes apart from
each other. I also like the theme song for the video series, though I
still prefer the television theme, the wordless version of which plays
over the end credits. I'm annoyed with Disney for releasing these
episodes a few at a time, scattered across many videos and DVDs, but
since I doubt they'll release entire seasons on DVD any time soon, Friends Forever is a fine collection for Pooh fans young and old.
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