Day 17: Winnie-the-Boo!
October 17, 2022
Dear Disney,
For the 17th Day of Disney Halloween, Darling and I wanted to walk down a path of nostalgia. When I was younger, I loved Winnie-the-Pooh. The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh was my daily naptime movie. To this day, I cannot make it through “Winnie-the-Pooh and the Very Blustery Day” without falling asleep. As the rain, rain, rain, comes down, down, down; so do my eyelids. As I was going through the lists of potential Disney Halloween shorts, specials, and feature length movies, I came across the 1996 Halloween Special, “Boo to You Too! Winnie-the-Pooh.” I remembered watching it after Trick-or-Treating and I asked Darling if we could watch it tonight. She said, “Yes.”
“Boo to You Too! Winnie-the-Pooh” was a Halloween special set in the New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh series world. The New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh aired 1988-1991 on the Disney Channel and ABC. After that, specials would be created using mostly the same voice talent and art style. This lasted most of the rest of the decade of the 90’s. Darling and I remember the shows to be cute, and silly, but relatively tame compared to modern cartoon aimed at the same target audience. One of the things that I remembered was that the colors and visuals were stunning, sharp, and differed enough from the older work to look, to my childish eyes, to be new and cool. When we watched this short tonight, I had hoped that some of my childhood nostalgia would come back as it has for many other works, but, alas, it did not.
The story is simple. It is Halloween. The creatures of the Hundred Acre Wood are getting ready for Halloween, except Piglet. Piglet is too scared to partake in Halloween. Piglet tries to build up his tolerance for fear, but it does not work. Eeyore, Tigger, and Pooh try to support Piglet by leaving Piglet alone. Pooh then decides to come back to Piglet and spend Halloween, or as they are calling it “Hallowon’t” with Piglet. This frightens Piglet, who runs away. All the creatures get lost and scared. Finally finding themselves at Rabbit’s, Piglet accidentally saves the day and everyone is happy.
The story is cute enough. The characters are cute enough. Everything is cute enough, but it was missing something. Or maybe I am missing something. I guess with somethings you can never re-live. Darling says that as she gets older, she stop relating to most of the creatures and start mostly relating to Rabbit. I must agree with this as well. Maybe as we age, we all become Rabbits?
Sincerely,
Jim Dear and Darlin
