Now we are 100. Winnie-the-Pooh, to give AA Milne's amiable bear of very little brain the correct hyphenation, has reached his centenary. Clearly, an optimistic outlook on life, a talent for tiddly-pomming and a health regimen that runs to a game of Poohsticks before eating a little smackerel of something must be good for longevity. Just so long as the heffalumps don't get you.
Christopher Robin's teddy bear appeared in a poem in Punch in 1924, under the name of Edward, but he was rechristened as Winnie after a bear at London Zoo. Milne's first collection of stories about Pooh and his friends of disparate personality types, from the gloomily depressive to the manically bouncy, was published on October 14, 1926.
The honey-addict has since become the world's most popular bear. Yet in some places he is also the most controversial. Here are seven times when Pooh has been banned, cancelled or cruelly mocked and exploited. Paddington doesn't have to put up with this.
In Which Pooh Gets Stuck in Xi's Head
One of the most important rules of being a politician is not to let on when the satirists wound: it only encourages them. China's President Xi was reportedly unamused in 2013 when an image of him walking with the leaner, more upbeat Barack Obama was compared to Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger. It quickly spread on Weibo, the Chinese micro-blogging site, leading to a social media ban by the censors, though the South China Morning Post pointed out that, while chubby, Pooh was very popular and it might have been good PR for XI.
Realising that the president hated to be winnified, dissidents made further images copying his meetings with Japan's Shinzo Abe (Eeyore) and Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong (Piglet). These memes were also taken down, while Pooh's Chinese name was censored from video games. The 2018 film Christopher Robin was not granted a release in China.
This sensitivity has only encouraged Xi's opponents. Pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong took to wearing Pooh face masks at protests, while Taiwanese pilots have worn patches on their uniforms showing a Formosan black bear, a native species, punching Pooh in the face. Or perhaps they were just protesting about his twee poetry?
In Which Piglet is Squashed By Turkey
In 2006, Turkey's public television station TRT banned the Walt Disney cartoon Winnie the Pooh because one of its main characters was a pig – an unclean animal for a Muslim audience. Turkish press reported that the station had considered just cutting out Piglet's scenes but he appeared too often.
They were not the only ones to chop the little porker. In the first Disney animation since it acquired the rights, Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), Piglet does not appear. He was replaced by a Gopher to appeal to American audiences. Disney also gave Christopher Robin a Midwest accent. Ernest Shepard, who had illustrated the books, called the Disney Pooh "a complete travesty". Piglet returned for the next one.
In Which Pooh Disrespects God
Many children's books have come under attack from hyper-sensitive American parents, including Harry Potter and Where's Wally. In 2006, a Christian group in Kansas came for Winnie-the-Pooh and Charlotte's Web, the 1952 book by the American author EB White, because they featured talking animals.
"Humans are the highest level of God's creation and are the only creatures that can communicate vocally," they argued, calling for a ban from school libraries. "Showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God." Only humans should tie themselves to a balloon in order to get honey from a tree.
In Which Pooh is Dressed in Nazi Regalia
Russian audiences were less bothered by talking animals, though Fyodor Khitruk did cut Christopher Robin from the three animated films he made of the books from 1969-72. His version won a state prize and was chosen to appear on Soviet postage stamps. Forty years later, however, the Moscow Times reported on a more sinister rendition. The Justice Ministry had listed the depiction of Winnie-the-Pooh wearing a T-shirt featuring a swastika among 414 items of extremist material that could be punished by a 3,000 rubles fine and 15 days in prison. This came about after such an image was found at the home of a man in the state of Bashkortostan who had been sentenced on extremist charges in 2006. Images of Vladimir Putin in Nazi uniform were also banned.
In Which Pooh's Nudity Becomes a Problem
When the Polish town of Tuszyn sought a role model to be a statue in a children's playground in 2014, Pooh's name was put forward. Some councillors were concerned, however, with his casual attire. "The problem is it doesn't have a complete wardrobe," councillor Ryszard Cichy said. "It is half-naked which is wholly inappropriate for children."
An official explained that Pooh had a bare (and a bear) behind because he was a hermaphrodite. Another said he was sexless. They decided it was safer to go for another mascot – and obviously not Donald Duck, who exposes his parson's nose for all to see. Perhaps they should have considered Rupert Bear, another ursine Brit who sensibly covers his hindquarters in yellow checked trousers?
In Which Pooh's Sentimental Language is Nauseating
While most loved Milne's adventures, the American critic Dorothy Parker loathed its mawkish tone. In a review, she described the scene where Pooh composes an ode about snow and explains to Piglet that he added the word "pom" to "make it more hummy". This adjective was too much for Parker, who wrote her column in The New Yorker under the pen name Constant Reader. "It is that word 'hummy,' my darlings," she wrote, "that marks the first place… at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."
Parker already had a beef with Pooh's creator because her publisher had advertised her poetry collection, Enough Rope, as being by "America's AA Milne". This provoked her into writing a parody called When We Were Very Sore, mocking Milne's poem about John and his waterproof boots, that went: "Dotty had great big visions of quietude./ Dotty saw an ad. and it left her Flat./ Dotty had a Great Big Snifter of Cyanide./ And that (said Dotty) is that."
In Which Pooh Takes His Bloody Revenge
When Milne's US copyright expired in 2022, one of the first to take advantage was Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who made a horror film called Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. It features the animals, abandoned by Christopher Robin, deciding to eat Eeyore and then take their bloody revenge on the human who left them and all his friends. Panned as one of the worst films ever made, it grossed (in so many ways) almost £6m at the box office on a budget of less than £40,000. A sequel in 2024 also did well and a third film is in the works. Not such a silly old bear now, eh?
This article was originally seen on Yahoo News.
