Oh, Pooh!
Perhaps the greatest gift of non-illustrated fiction is that it forces readers and listeners to use their imaginations. Like many of us, I grew up having “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” read to me by my mother. The green hardcover book had no illustrations, but I created vivid scenes from the stories in my mind.
My favorite tale from Grimm was “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” I was well into adulthood before I realized that the story has a quite melancholy ending. Here’s a brief synopsis. A poor cobbler discovers that two merry elves are making shoes using pieces of cut leather he leaves on his workbench overnight. Grateful but troubled that the elves are naked, the cobbler and his wife fashion two sets of tiny clothes and shoes, then leave them for their benefactors. That night, the couple watches from hiding as the elves find the clothing, don it and dance gleefully.
Then the elves run away, never to return.
That’s a pretty depressing plot twist, one I don’t recall my mom ever having read to me. Maybe my memory has lapsed; or maybe Mom censored it to keep me from developing an irrational hatred of elves. Whatever the case, I can easily imagine how Donald Trump, having heard this fable as a child from the lips of a babysitter, eventually conflated the story of two ungrateful elves into a xenophobic tale involving millions of job-stealing immigrants.
But I’m not here today to warn you about undocumented elves. Instead, I want to raise a specter far more fearsome: your favorite childhood characters, turned into homicidal maniacs. That’s exactly what happens in a 2023 film called “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.”
The film is based on characters from A.A. Milne’s books about a boy named Christopher Robin, his teddy bear, Winnie the Pooh, and other animals in Robin’s stuffed menagerie. But Milne’s signature titles passed into the public domain in 2019, after their copyrights expired. Works in the public domain can be used by anyone for any purpose. It took just four short years for someone to turn Pooh and his porcine pal Piglet into ax-wielding maniacs. Oh, bother!
Here’s the film’s plot. Angry that Christopher Robin abandoned them in Ashdown Woods after he grew up, Pooh and Piglet become feral and take their revenge on their former owner, who has regretted his decision and returned to the forest to find his former companions. Oh … Robin just happens to be accompanied by several comely young women, at least one of whom winds up wearing a bikini in a hot tub. Of course! In the film’s sequel, which premiered in March, Eeyore the donkey and Owl join the mayhem to hunt down Robin, who escaped the massacre in part one.
I won’t lie: my sense of humor is just twisted enough to appreciate this as comedy. Yet I have no desire to see either film. I’ve never been a fan of blood-spurting modern horror movies in which characters are sliced and diced as if they’ve been pushed through a giant Ronco Vegematic. In my imagination, bright red blood drips from Bela Lugosi’s incisors in the 1931 film “The Story of Dracula” even though the film was shot in black and white.
But steel yourselves: “Raiders of the Public Domain” is coming to a theater near you! Mickey Mouse’s earliest incarnation, Steamboat Willie, entered the public domain on Jan. 1. Are you prepared to see Willie on the big screen, laughing psychotically while throwing passengers into a churning paddlewheel? The earliest versions of Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny will become public domain within the next 15 years. After this happens, will a machete-wielding Porky stalk a group of barnyard animals that made fun of his stutter? Will Elmer Fudd finally snap and drop a small tactical nuclear device down Bugs’ rabbit hole?
Be afwaid! Be vewy afwaid.