The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) Movie Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? Did you all have a good long weekend? I did. I went out with Brad yesterday and went to small convention in a town that's west of where I live, and we went to a thrift store there too. At the convention I picked up one comic and two VHS tapes, and at the thrift store I picked up two VHS tapes and two DVDs. One of those VHS tapes that I got at the thrift store was the 1996 Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection release of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which was one of the first animated Disney movies to be released on home video in the early '80s, but wasn't re-released on home video as part of the Walt Disney Classics line in the mid-'80s to mid-'90s. Naturally, after rewinding the two tapes that I got at the convention, I watched The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh on VHS. So I'll be reviewing the movie today. So let's get into it!

The 1970s was a weird time for Disney, particularly for the animation department. Walt had died in 1966, during production of The Jungle Book, and Roy, Walt's brother and business partner, died in 1971 while Robin Hood was in production. As such the animation department started to become less and less of a priority for the heads of the studio as they focused more and more on live action comedies such as Herbie Rides Again (1974) and Freaky Friday (1976). This resulted in Disney not releasing any animated feature films in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Even though production on both this movie and The Rescuers, which was also released in 1977, had begun by 1975. Unlike other Disney animated movies that had come out since Cinderella was originally released in 1950, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is a package film similar to what the studio had produced in the mid to late '40s, both during and after World War II.

The first featurette is Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), which Walt was heavily involved in the production of.

The second was Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968), which Walt greenlit, but ultimately never saw to completion as he passed away in 1966.

The final featurette to be edited into the movie is Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974), which Wolfgang Reitherman, who directed all of the animated feature films and animated featurettes from 101 Dalmatians (1961) to The Rescuers (1977) and produced all of the animated feature films from The Aristocats (1970) to The Fox and the Hound (1981), greenlit and produced in the early '70s. All three featurettes were individually released on VHS multiple times from 1986 to 2000, as well as being released as part of this movie. 

Many documentaries including the introduction at the beginning of the 1996 VHS release, and the behind the scenes featurette on the 2002 VHS and DVD releases for the movie, have said that Walt had always intended to make Winnie the Pooh into a movie, but decided to go with short featurettes to start with as Americans weren't as familiar with the original Winnie the Pooh books by A.A. Milne as the British people were. However I don't think Walt intended on editing the featurettes together into a feature film. Mainly because he'd only gotten Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree and Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day made, and both featurettes are only 25 minutes long, so combining those two together, only makes 50 minutes of content, which, by the 1960s there hadn't been an animated feature shorter than 75 to 80 minutes since the first package film, Saludos Amigos was released in 1943. So I think that Walt intended to simply make a Winnie the Pooh animated feature film without editing the featurettes together, because as we saw with Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin (1997) and Winnie the Pooh (2011), the Disney Winnie the Pooh movies can be original productions but still use story elements from the source material. Not to mention there were, and are, plenty of unadapted stories in the two Winnie the Pooh books, plus a third book, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (2009), that contains stories not adapted by Disney.

I love The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. It's one of my favourite Disney movies of all time, but I technically didn't grow up with it. I say technically because I had the three individual featurettes on VHS when I was a kid, and still have two of them on that format now, but I didn't own a copy of the feature film version until I got the 2002 DVD release sometime in the 2010s. I do remember seeing the feature film version on TV around the time that the movie was re-released on VHS as part of the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection but I don't remember when exactly it was on TV.

I grew up with these characters, both the Disney versions, and the original versions from Milne's stories. There was never a time where they didn't appear on TV or in movies when I was growing up, and with the featurettes on constant repeat these characters are as much a part of my life as any other TV show and movie characters. My favourites have always been Pooh, Piglet, and Tigger. Pooh because he's silly, Piglet because he's small and fearful, and Tigger because he's funny, and full of energy.

The way the shorts themselves are set up it's almost like watching six stories in one movie. Each segment is split up into two stories that are connected to each other through a theme. For example, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day is about wind and rain storms in the Hundred Acre Wood. And because the original Winnie the Pooh stories were written with children in mind, the stories adapted into this movie are easy to follow. Of course, being that I watched all three of the segments in this movie individually constantly, I have all the lines memorized, including the narrator's dialogue. I am a geek afterall.

Of course the voice cast of this movie consists of all the Disney staples from the '40s, '50s, and '60s, Sebastian Cabot as the Narrator, Paul Winchell as Tigger, Sterling Holloway as Pooh, Junius Matthews as Rabbit, Hal Smith as Owl, John Fiedler as Piglet, Barbara Luddy as Kanga, and Ralph Wright as Eeyore. Clint Howard voiced Roo in the first two segments, but was replaced by Dori Whitaker in Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. Christopher Robin had three voice actors. Bruce Reitherman, the son of the director, voiced him in the first segment, Jon Walmsley, who played Jason on The Waltons (1972-1981), voiced him in the second segment, as well as in the final scene that was shot specifically for this movie, and Timothy Turner voiced him in the final segment. Christopher Robin is the only character to have a different voice actor for all four of the original Winnie the Pooh featurettes, as he would have another one voice him in Winnie the Pooh and A Day for Eeyore (1983), which I reviewed on this blog about a year or two ago. Actually, come to think of it, I think he's the only character in Disney's Winnie the Pooh franchise to have a different voice actor for every movie and TV show the character is in. 

Overall The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is a great movie. It's one of Disney's animated movies that used to get released on home video every six to ten years, but hasn't been released on DVD or Blu-ray since 2013. And individually they haven't been released since 2000, though Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day was released by itself as a bonus feature on the 2006 DVD for Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin, but was not included on the 2018 Disney Movie Club exclusive 20th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray release. This movie is on Disney+ and I think the 2013 Blu-ray is still in print. So if you've never seen it before, for whatever reason, you can still check it out.

That's it for me for today. I will be back tomorrow for a review of the comic book that I got yesterday at the con I went to. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.