My daughter is really into My Friends Tigger and Pooh. The show was #1 for children 2007-9.
I got out my old books that are a relic of my childhood and she was looking at them. She liked the map of the 100 Acre Woods.
Here are some sentences I found interesting in Milne's Wikipedia entry:
"One of his teachers was
H. G. Wells"
"On 7 July 1916, he was injured in the
Battle of the Somme and invalided back to England."
"During World War II, Milne was one of the most prominent critics of fellow English writer (and Authors XI cricket teammate) P. G. Wodehouse, who was captured at his country home in France by the
Nazis and imprisoned for a year. Wodehouse made radio broadcasts about his internment, which were broadcast from Berlin. Although the light-hearted broadcasts made fun of the Germans, Milne accused Wodehouse of committing an act of near treason by cooperating with his country's enemy. Wodehouse got some revenge on his former friend (e.g. in
The Mating Season) by creating fatuous parodies of the Christopher Robin poems in some of his later stories, and claiming that Milne "was probably jealous of all other writers.... But I loved his stuff.""
He wrote humor for
Punch, films, plays, novels, poems and propaganda during WW1 after his injury.
"The success of his children's books was to become a source of considerable annoyance to Milne, whose self-avowed aim was to write whatever he pleased and who had, until then, found a ready audience for each change of direction: he had freed pre-war Punch from its ponderous facetiousness; he had made a considerable reputation as a playwright (like his idol
J. M. Barrie) on both sides of the Atlantic; he had produced a witty piece of detective writing in
The Red House Mystery (although this was severely criticised by
Raymond Chandler for the implausibility of its plot in his essay
The Simple Art of Murder in the eponymous collection that appeared in 1950)."
"Milne and his wife became estranged from their son, who came to resent what he saw as his father's exploitation of his childhood and came to hate the books that had thrust him into the public eye. Christopher's marriage to his first cousin, Lesley de Sélincourt, distanced him still further from his parents – Lesley's father and Christopher's mother had not spoken to each other for 30 years."
Pooh is one of the most lucrative
franchises for Disney. "Analysts believe Pooh is worth $3bn-$6bn of Disney's total annual sales of $25bn" That was in 2003.
"The UK copyright on the text of the original Winnie the Pooh books expires on 1 January 2027" It's not off copyright in the USA until 2073.
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