ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 13, 1996 TAG: 9611130025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KAREN HELLER KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
``Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders.''
- A.A. Milne, ``Winnie-the-Pooh''
Winnie-the-Pooh still lives in the forest. He also lives on video, at the supermarket and in department stores everywhere, while being heavily traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Pooh is no longer all by himself. He is everywhere. He is even two Poohs.
There is the original Pooh based on the A.A. Milne books with ``decorations'' by Ernest H. Shepard. And there is the Disney Pooh.
The original Pooh is 70 this year, and the Disney Pooh is officially thirtysomething. They look distinctly different, but it hardly matters. Disney owns both of them. Though Milne deemed Pooh a ``silly old bear,'' he is making Disney honey pots of lucre.
If you are seeing more Pooh these days, this is not by accident. Disney does not have accidents. The explosion of Pooh has been as carefully planned as the assault on Normandy's beaches.
Since the 1960s, Sears had an exclusive marketing deal for all Disney Pooh products. Two years ago, the contract ended. For two years prior to that, Disney planned and planned and planned for the day when Pooh would be free to be in all sorts of stores and there would be highly profitable Pooh corners everywhere.
``Of all our characters, Pooh is second in awareness to Mickey Mouse,'' says Charles Champlin, spokesman for Disney's licensing and consumer products. ``He deserved first-class treatment.''
Pooh is getting that, and then some. There are now about 75 licenses for Disney Pooh, and 35 for the Milne/Shepard Pooh, which is known as ``classic Pooh'' at Disney's magic headquarters in Burbank. There is stationery for $5, Bilston & Battersea classic Pooh porcelain boxes for $250, and 12 different sizes of plush Disney Pooh bears.
The bear Disney calls classic Pooh first appeared in 1924 as Edward the Bear in ``When We Were Very Young.'' ``Winnie-the-Pooh'' was published two years later, on Oct. 14 in this country to be exact. Pooh was first drawn in black ink, but 50 years later, when Shepard was 93 years old, he colored the 240 drawings for anniversary editions.
Disney Pooh is very orange, sporting a midriff-baring red polo shirt (the shirt appears in only a few of the Shepard drawings). Disney Pooh was first introduced in the 1966 animated short, ``Winnie-the-Pooh and The Honey Tree.'' (Actually, all the Disney characters look strikingly different from Shepard's decorations. Disney Tigger looks more like Kellogg's Tony the Tiger than Shepard's drawing.)
The first Disney Pooh - collected in three short features released last year as ``The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh'' - is a hybrid between the Milne/Shepard Pooh and the modern Disney Pooh.
So, to be honest about it, and to confuse matters even more, there are really three Poohs: classic, classic Disney and Disney.
``We have diversified Pooh,'' says Laurel Whitcomb, a spokeswoman for Buena Vista, a division of Disney. (Disney appears to be the world's leading employer of spokesmen and spokeswomen. )
Adds Whitcomb: ``Pooh is one of the favorite properties of all Disney people.''
Ahhh, property. ``We see a lot of potential for Pooh,'' says Nicole Kristensen, vice president for Winnie-the-Pooh licensing. ``The Walt Disney company looks at Winnie-the-Pooh as second only in scope to Mickey Mouse in terms of popularity of character, breadth of product line.''
A heavily marketed character, like Batman, can have 300 licenses. Pooh has this potential, Kristensen says. Next up are Disney Pooh products for adults, everything from denim to watches to pajamas. The classic Pooh products, which have been available for eight years, are more popular with adults who were raised with the books.
Pooh is crucial to Disney in another way. The core market for Disney Pooh, Kristensen says, is ``mothers of children from zero to 6.'' In this regard, Disney Pooh has a considerably younger target audience than the Milne/Shepard books, which are more geared toward children in elementary school.
Through videos and other products, Pooh is often the first Disney character in many young children's lives, delivering built-in nostalgia for parents reared on the Milne/Shepard books, while offering stories free of violence, potential political incorrectness and aerodynamically confounding heroines. Pooh is safe - with a literary pedigree.
The television show is now off ABC, another Disney company, but the stores are flooded with 29 different Pooh videos. ``The reach of the video market is far greater than the reach of the television market,'' says Tania Moloney, director of marketing and publicity for Buena Vista Home Video, who estimates that between 15 million and 20 million Pooh videos have been sold since the late 1980s, 8 million alone for ``The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.''
For a single holiday, Halloween, there was a Pooh special on CBS, and two different Pooh videos in the stores, last year's ``Frankenpooh'' and this season's ``Unspookable Pooh.'' There is a Pooh Valentine video and a Pooh Christmas video, ``and we'll be doing more seasonal videos,'' Moloney promises. Disney is also working on its first 90-minute, direct-to-video Pooh movie, scheduled for release next year.
This rise of Disney Pooh has upset Pooh purists. ``Of course, I hate it,'' says Ann Durell, retired children's book editor at Dutton, the American publisher of the four Milne/Shepard classics. ``I would have liked it if it had been more like Beatrix Potter, where the English publisher Frederick Warne kept the rights. The products all look like the original books.''
Not that the authors were opposed to making money. Durell once visited Shepard in the English countryside. The illustrator, who also did the classic images for Kenneth Grahame's ``Wind in the Willows,'' joked that ``this was the house that Pooh built.'' More than 20 million copies of Pooh titles have been sold.
All rights, except publishing, were sold to Disney ``for a relatively small amount, which was a big mistake,'' Durell recalls. It was Milne's widow, Daphne, who sold them in 1961, according to Disney, though other people recall that Milne and Shepard sold the rights themselves. In any event, once the rights were sold, the world eventually became populated with two Poohs.
``There was some fear that two Poohs being out there would create confusion,'' says Christopher M. Franceschelli, president and publisher of Dutton Children's Books. ``But both versions of Pooh have their great fans and the explosion, if you will, of Disney products has been complementary to our books.''
Dutton has not been shy about capitalizing on Pooh, either. ``In the past 10 years, we've probably been a bit more aggressive in our publishing,'' Franceschelli says. ``We published far more books that appeal to the adult fans of Pooh.'' The publisher, a division of Penguin, has more than 60 additional titles featuring Shepard-like drawings, including the best-seller ``The Tao of Pooh,'' ``The Te of Piglet,'' ``Winnie-the-Pooh's Cookie Book Baking Set,'' ``Winnie-the-Pooh on Problem Solving'' and ``Eeyore's Gloomy Little Instruction Book.''
LENGTH: Long : 124 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Disney's Pooh, circa 1987. color.by CNB