“Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore”

This is not actually the Winnie-the-Pooh property from 1983 with which I am more familiar, but even if a large amount of the episodes weren’t, it seems, considered lost, I can’t bring myself to watch The House at Pooh Corner again. I remember hating it as a child, and my sister watched it incessantly. This one was not a made-for-Disney Channel series; this was a theatrical release, appearing with the rerelease of The Sword in the Stone. It’s more of the Disney-in-a-holding-pattern stuff that would go on until the Renaissance. It’s not good, but it’s not infuriating.

In fact the short is chapter six of two different books. We start with “In Which Pooh Invents a New Game and Eeyore Joins In,” from The House at Pooh Corner. Pooh (Hal Smith) drops a fir cone into the stream, and he discovers it goes under the bridge. He makes a game of floating sticks under and seeing whose comes through first. Then they discover Eeyore (Ralph Wright) floating under the bridge, because Tigger (Paul Winchell) has bounced him there. As the narrator confirms. Then we find out that Eeyore is sad because it’s his birthday and no one cares.

I’ve never been a huge fan of these books and I particularly don’t like Tigger. Because it especially doesn’t matter whether he knocked Eeyore into the stream on purpose or not. For one thing, he never, in fact, apologizes. Not in the book and not in the short. Now, apologizing doesn’t make all the difference, inasmuch as you have to make up for what you did wrong, but it’s an important first step, and Tigger doesn’t do that, much less do anything to try to make it right.

Christopher Robin (Kim Christianson) is, in a way, something of an adult figure in these books, because of how they’re written. Oh, only Roo (Dick Billingsley) is explicitly a child, and of course Kanga (Julie McWhirter) is, therefore, explicitly an adult, but while I think Owl (also Hal Smith) and Rabbit (Will Ryan) are theoretical adults as well, Christopher Robin is still the adult there. He’s the one who resolves situations, and he decides it isn’t even important if it was an accident or not.

Eeyore is an extremely sympathetic character to those of us with depression issues. He’s right to be upset that no one remembered his birthday. (Did they know? Possibly, but either way.) He’s right to be upset that Tigger bounced him into the stream. He’s right to be upset that Pooh dropped a very large rock on him. No, the others don’t expect him to be anything other than who he is, but they also don’t treat him the way I’d want to be treated. They respond to his complaints with “well, he’s just Eeyore.” Yeah. He is. But Tigger still bounced him into the stream.