The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh ("Find Her Keep Her" and "The Piglet Who Would Be King")

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire


"The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" is a Disney series that ran throughout the late eighties and early nineties. They'd already produced a number of Winnie the Pooh movies, shorts, and series adapting the original stories that they held the exclusive rights to in a skeletal death grip for seventy years, but "New Adventures" was a new direction for the property. Rather than adapting or playing off of the original Winnie the Pooh stories by AA Milne, this series used the characters and setting to tell new, more American-cartoon-oriented stories. Explicit messages and morals for young children to learn from. Nonetheless, it still mostly stayed true to most of the spirit of the originals. Mostly.

The two episodes I'm watching today, both from the show's first season, are examples of New Adventures deviating much further from the mean than most. In two very different ways.


"Find Her Keep Her," whose title I'm trying very hard not to read in Zeus' voice, leans a little darker than I'd expect from Winnie the Pooh. It deals with topics of adult fear, emotional abuse, narcissistic parenting, and the nature of familial love. It feels ahead of its time, like it's an episode of a more modern children's series that was (slightly) rewritten for the Winnie the Pooh characters.

It begins in an early blizzard, with Rabbit - accompanied by Pooh, Piglet, and Tigger - trying to rescue his last carrot crop of the year from the premature snowstorm. A pitiable, very unsettlingly child-like cry for help brings them to a baby bluebird seemingly abandoned in its nest, which is now being thrown out of its tree by the freezing winds. With great effort, Rabbit is able to save it from the buffeting gale and bring it indoors. He berates the others for "not knowing the first thing about baby birds" when they offer to help, seemingly resenting them having not put as much effort into rescuing the bird in the first place, and insists that he'll take care of it.

The bird tries to call Rabbit "daddy." When told to call him Rabbit, the bird settles on "rabby" as a compromise, and sticks with it.

The bird, named Kessie, is...sort of written as simultaneously a toddler and an infant in terms of how much it can communicate and what sort of care it needs. It's not terribly consistent, at least at first. As time goes on though, Kessie passes into what is very recognizably an age 4-5 equivalent phase by early spring, an age 8-9 or so one by midsummer, and then clearly a preteen one when we skip ahead again to autumn.

Yes, Rabbit spends a year of his life raising an adoptive child.

He's a possessive, overprotective parent to begin with. He only grudgingly lets Pooh and Piglet help him take care of baby-toddler aged Kessie once he's too physically and emotionally exhausted to do so at all anymore, and when a hapless mistake sees the laughing baby bird almost being blown away in a too-large soap bubble, Rabbit has to rescue him again and then doubles down on the protectiveness and possessiveness. In particular, he starts drilling it into Kessie that she should never go too far. Never try to rise too high, where she could potentially fall and be hurt.

Rabbit fills her life with gardening, housekeeping, and the other things that Rabbit spends most of his existence preoccupied with. The bird learns faithfully, and does what she can to show her love and appreciation for "Rabby." Rabbit is very rigid and restrictive about what shows of love are acceptable, but it's obvious that it really means a lot to him that she's giving it.

But, things get worse again when Rabbit makes the (very foolish, even if it's hard to say no to Kessie when she's begging for it) decision to let Tigger take her outside to play. There's a couple of very unsettlingly real moments that happen almost back-to-back, as a consequence of this. First, Tigger - already foolhardy and bumbling by nature - is spurred to greater athletic heights in order to see more of the smiles and hear more of the laughter of the little bird-child he's carrying around on his back. So he ends up getting himself AND the kid in more danger than he ever normally would.

The next of those moments is when Rabbit hears the terrified screams, in an older version of the same voice that got his attention last winter, and comes running...but isn't able to make it in time before Kessie loses her grip and falls off the cliff. Rabbit is in denial, babbling manically about how they need to hurry down to the floor of the canyon to get her, and Tigger - his voice frozen in horror and self-recrimination - has to cut in and tell Rabbit that she's just gone. Rabbit nearly jumps off the cliff after her.

Kessie isn't actually gone, as it turns out. On her way down, she happens into a midair conversation with Owl, who gives her some helpful tips on avian flight as he helps her into a gentle landing.

Rabbit's way of dealing with this is to basically ban Kessie from ever having anything to do with heights, falling, flying, the sky, or being outside of his field of vision ever again. And also lashing out at Owl for daring to offer to give Kessie some proper flight lessons of the kind that all bird children typically receive from their elders.

For the following months of late summer and early autumn, Rabbit gets increasingly manipulative in how he pulls Kessie away from the idea of flight. Framing any interest of hers in learning to fly, wanting to be in high places, or even just being away from him as "not loving him anymore" and guilt tripping her about it. I'm now imagining Rabbit singing a cover of "Mother Knows Best," and simultaneously chuckling at the absurdity and being genuinely unnerved.

By late autumn, Kessie - now clearly teenaged - is watching the other bluebirds of the Hundred Acre Wood flying southward with sorrow and bitterness on her beaked little face. She knows she needs to go with them. Rabbit isn't interested in her doing anything besides growing carrots with him. As if he loves the carrot garden more than he loves her, for all that he guilt trips her about not loving him enough. So, with a heavy heart and a stinging conscience, Kessie goes behind Rabbit's back and gets the flying lessons.

...

I know, I know, I have a queer reading of everything. But...you see what I'm saying here, right?

...

It's early winter by the time Kessie is ready to fly away after the rest of her kind and try to catch up with them. She bids goodbye to Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, and Owl, who all supported or actively taught her or covered for her. Rabbit realizes what's happening too late, and arrives after Kessie has taken off. No goodbyes. No I love yous.

Rabbit is left staring at the horizon, realizing that he really has lost her, now. She really is gone for him. And it's not Tigger's fault, it's his own.

Except, as Rabbit morosely drags himself home, Kessie swoops back down and embraces him. Telling him goodbye, and that she loves him, despite his mistakes. She just needed to be confident she could really fly longdistance now before she risked making her goodbyes to her Rabby.

Rabbit is teary-eyed when she does leave for real. But he's also proud of her.

Watching from afar, Pooh and Piglet muse on what Rabbit must be feeling. Piglet comments on how much Rabbit seems to care about these things. Pooh's response is "Sometimes people care too much about things. I think they call that love."

The episode ends with spring returning, and Rabbit and the others waiting to see if Kessie will return. If she does, however, then it happens in a different episode. This one ends on a question. Does she still love Rabby? Has she survived without him protecting her in his stifling embrace? Hopefully. Hopefully. But those are both out of his hands now, and all he can do it wait, and hope.


So yeah. Pretty intense for Winnie the Pooh. I'm especially surprised that they kind of made Rabbit the villain, for at least the later-middle part of this episode. The part about him conflating "keep you safe" and "only let you have the exact same interests and hobbies that I do" is where he really strays passed well-meaning overprotectiveness and into narcissistic parenting. Rabbit's whole schtick in the Winnie the Pooh stories was always "neurotic and high-strung," but I don't recall it ever being played as this much of a serious character flaw.

That said, the episode does have him learning his lesson and changing his mind, painful though that is for him. The ambiguous ending makes it a lot stronger. Rabbit never gets "rewarded" for his change except for getting that last loving goodbye from Kessie. We never see her coming back to him safe and happy the following year. We don't know if she does. And like...that's true to life. "Find Her Keep Her" doesn't feel very Winnie the Pooh, but it honestly feels like something better than that.


"The Piglet Who Would Be King," meanwhile, was simply written on crack.

This episode starts normally enough. Winnie accidentally pries a spring loose from an old jack-in-the-box he had laying around, and - realizing that it looks kind of like a pig's tail - decides to give it to Piglet as a present. Piglet wants to give Pooh a pot of honey as a present of his own in return, but Tigger and Rabbit convince him that just that small honey pot isn't enough to express his appreciation, and that he needs to give something a little more heartfelt. Cue Piglet putting himself through unreasonable amounts of effort, stress, and frustration trying to gather a huge tribute of honey and deliver it to Pooh's door without literally breaking his back, while Tigger and Rabbit prance around telling him how necessary this is without actually doing anything to help.

The previous episode had Rabbit and Tigger make serious errors in judgement that reflected very poorly on them, and which they regretted. In this one though, they just seem outright malevolent.

When the giant stack of honey pots all get dropped and ruined, they double down on their bad advice and tell Piglet that they'll just need to get more now. There's no honey left in the Hundred Acre Woods though, so rather than waiting for more to be produced they embark on a quest through the jungle (which apparently starts just beyond their home forest's edges) in search of the legendary Land of Milk and Honey. Their words, not mine. After navigating some random encounters with a hyena, a marching band of chimpanzees, and multiple herds of crazed mini-hephalumps who appear out of nowhere to trample the party whenever the words "milk and honey" are spoken aloud for some reason, they find their way to the walls of the Land of Milk and Honey. Just as the legends say, it is a great stone city built around a smoking volcano.

Remember how this started as an episode about not overthinking things and feeling over-indebted to your friends over small tokens? Me neither, and nothing from this point on out is going to remind us.

There's an initial scare when the spring a booby-trap before the gates, and it looks like they're going to get eaten by the giant, animate faux-vodun masks that guard this place.

But then it turns out that the masks merely hide piglets. Small piglets. "Pigmies" as the episode very insensitively names them. The Land of Milk and Honey is home to an advanced dwarf-piglet civilization that's been thriving in this walled volcanic city-state.

As per their country's name, this place normally has quite an abundance of both milk AND honey. They just flow right up out of wells in the ground. The larger-than-life statue that houses the honey-pumping mechanism is broken right now, but it turns out that the coiled spring that Pooh gave to Piglet is perfectly sized to fit in there and get it working again. This string of events matches those foretold in prophecy, causing them to identify Piglet as "the Great One" and hastily put him on the throne.

You know, I think we're very lucky that the pigmies just sound like Piglet, instead of having fake African accents or something. I feel like this was a near miss.

Anyway.

Tigger and Rabbit are quickly appointed Prime Minister and Chamberlain. And almost immediately go full conquistador on the pigmies and start using Piglet's name to cultivate rival cults of personality, trying to outdo each other in statue-building and street violence. Piglet is horrified when he sees what they're doing, but once again they browbeat him into compliance while still pretending to each be acting in his name.

Remember when I said that Tigger and Rabbit were just straight up evil in this episode? Yeah.

Remember when I said that this episode was written on crack? Yeah.

Anyway, Piglet finally gets fed up with their behavior and removes the spring from the statue-honey-fountain again, renouncing his claim to the status of Great One and...also causing the volcano to erupt, for some reason? They end up smashing the giant statues of Tigger and Rabbit and using the rubble to make a flood wall that keeps the lava out of the city, which um...proves that Piglet actually IS the Great One, according to the final clauses of the prophecy?

And then meanwhile we find out that Pooh has been going insane with fear and paranoia after all the honey and most of his friends vanished without a word, and has been staying up around the clock with his door locked, windows barred, and popgun in hand to defend his home from mysterious honey-stealing bandits. There are apologies and reconciliations when they get back, fortunately, and um...I guess we all learned a lesson about friendship or humility or something? I have literally no idea. My sense of reality has been bleeding out my nostrils nonstop for the last twenty minutes, and I no longer comprehend the images that are in front of me or the sounds that emerge from the speakers.


This felt even less like Winnie the Pooh. It's like some lolrandom Adult Swim thing from the aughts. Or like, a much more tasteless version of something you might see in Centaurworld's second season. Or something. I don't fucking know.

Seeing the Winnie the Pooh characters acting this story out feels almost like...okay, did any of you guys grow up watching the early seasons of Spongebob on Nickelodeon? Alright, those of you who answered yes: have any of you gone back within the last decade or so to see what Spongebob has been doing since then? Okay. Yeah. Those of you who still have their hands raised know exactly the feeling I'm trying to describe here.

I very much doubt that most "New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" episodes were like this. I suspect that that's a big part of the reason @ArlequineLunaire chose the episodes that she did.

But, on the other hand, this episode comes from the FIRST SEASON of the series. Normally you don't get this kind of brain damage until much later on when they're running out of ideas. So who fucking knows.


Something that jumps out at me is that half of the characters were missing from both these episodes. No Eeyore. No Kanga and Roo. No Christopher Robin. I didn't think much of their absence in "Find Her Keep Her," but it's weird that none of them showed up early on in "Would Be King" when Piglet was going door to door collecting honey donations from everyone he knows. Not sure what's up with that.

Anyway, one episode was pretty darned good. The other episode was the other episode. For good and/or ill, whatever merits this show as a whole has, it really doesn't feel like it has any reason to be a Winnie the Pooh series. The vibe is just not the same at all.