Oh, bother.

Disney, on a never ending quest to remake! retell! sell!, seems to have decided that Christopher Robin isn't trendy enough for today's young audience. Yep, Disney, in it's misguided marketing zeal, is giving Christopher Robin the boot. So who will be accompanying Pooh on future adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood in his stead? A red-headed, six-year-old tomboy of a girl, who will make her debut in a new Winnie-the-Pooh televison series that will air on the Disney Channel in 2007.

An article from The Age summed it up this way:

It is hardly the first time Disney has outraged Pooh purists, of course. They bought the rights to the Pooh stories and images in 1961. Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and the rest were duly Americanised and their characters changed; the wistful bear of little brain, who was regularly described as "growling", acquired an effete little voice and West Coast perma-cheer.

[and]

"The charm and flavour is not there in Disney," says illustrator Anne James, whose South Melbourne shop, Books Illustrated, does not stock the Disney versions of Pooh. "The fact that they took it and changed it so drastically means they haven't got a sense of the thing they wanted in the first place." Sadly, she says, many children now know Pooh and his friends only as Disney characters.

As I was reading over this and other articles about the newest development in this version of Winnie-the-Pooh, an image of Disney and it's overhandling sprang to mind in the memory of the following poem (one I enjoyed repeating as a girl):

Funny how Felicia Ropps,
Always handles things in shops!
Always pinching, always poking,
Always feeling, always stroking
Things she has no right to touch!
Goops like that annoy me much!

- "Felicia Ropps", Gelett Burgess