I knew Pooh Bear made Disney a lot of money, but The Curse of Pooh explains just how much:
Billions of dollars are at stake in the lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial in March. Pooh videos, teddy bears, and other merchandise generate $1 billion in annual revenues for Disney — the same amount as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto combined.
I find “The Curse of Pooh” fascinating:
Milne, on the other hand, was a world-weary intellectual. The writer, who died in 1956, was known wherever he went as the man who breathed life into Winnie the Pooh. But success as a children’s writer had made him bitter. As a young man Milne was an up-and-coming playwright in London. On a whim he wrote a poem about his 2-year-old son, Christopher Robin, entitled “Vespers” with the now-famous closing lines: “Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.” He told his wife she could keep the money if she sold the poem to a magazine.Daphne promptly sold “Vespers” to Vanity Fair, where it was published in 1923. Other magazines clamored for Milne to write more children’s poems. The most popular were his whimsical verses about Christopher Robin and his teddy bear, who appeared early on as Edward Bear and was soon dubbed Winnie the Pooh. In 1924 the poems were collected in a book called When We Were Very Young. It sold so well that Milne bought a farmhouse on the edge of Ashdown Forest. The forest became the setting for Winnie the Pooh, a book of stories about the unforgettable bear who lived for honey and lazy afternoons doing “Nothing” in the Hundred Acre Wood with Christopher Robin and Piglet. Winnie the Pooh was published in October 1926. In the U.S. alone, it sold 150,000 copies before the end of the year.
Milne could see where Pooh was going — and wanted to stop him. He published a second collection of tales in 1928 entitled The House at Pooh Corner, but tried to kill off Pooh at the end of the book. In the haunting final scene, Christopher Robin tries to explain to an uncomprehending Pooh that he’s growing up and will soon have to bid farewell to his playmate from his nursery days.
‘Pooh?’
‘Yes, Christopher Robin?’
‘I’m not going to do Nothing any more.’
‘Never again?’
‘Well, not so much. They don’t let you.’Pooh wasn’t so easily done away with. Milne wrote novels, antiwar essays, and more plays. But the public only cared about Pooh.
It’s all pretty sad, really.