Mary Packard

My love of Winnie the Pooh mostly comes from watching the Disney movie adaptations as a kid. I have no memory or record of reading the original Milne books until I was twenty-one, though I did collect a dozen or so issues of the comic book series in the late 1970s. I was inspired to seek out the original books only after the 1988 debut of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh animated show resparked my interest in the tubby little cubby during college. ("I gotta get up / I've gotta get goin' / I'm gonna see a friend of mine!")

I do enjoy regularly revisiting the Pooh movies, so as a sub-set of the Pooh Project my daughter and I are going to rewatch all the films and some of the shows and use that as a prompt to read some of the many adaptations that we have in our collection of Pooh books. We're starting off with first Disney animated short, 1966's "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree," which has been collected as the first third of the movie The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. It's a delightful film that fills me with joy every time I see it.

The book in hand today is a serviceable little adaptation from 1994 by Mary Packard and Russell Hicks that was initially released as a Little Golden Book. It adapts the first half of the short film, as Pooh goes undercover as a little black raincloud in order to infiltrate bee hive security and filch some honey. The plan goes awry in a delightful way, though not quite as delightfully as it does in the film or in the first chapter of Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. But it'll do in a pinch.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... )… (more)