This time, we’re over in World War I. This one soldier is friends with a bear and, since it wasn’t until World War II that people realized it would be awesome to have bears on your team, so the soldier had to give the bear, named Winnie after Winnipeg, to a zoo.
And so, ten years later, after all the bears friends have been horribly killed in trench warfare, we come across a man (Double-A Milne) who has brought his son and his illustrator to that same zoo. Young Christopher Robin likes the bear so much that Milne says he’ll write some books about it (though the fact he already had Mr. Shepard drawing the thing suggests that he was going to do that anyway, so Christopher Robin’s opinion means jack). The young lad suggests that they call the bear “Winnie-the-Pooh” but when pressed for answers, even he doesn’t know why. Literally nobody in this commercial can explain the bear’s name, but it remains the bear’s name. It is a fact embedded into the fabric of reality since time immemorial. This can only be the mysterious will of the Unknowable Beings Who Maintain Reality, they being the only ones who could be fomenting this fanciful idea, this sacred name, to grow in this young boy’s soul, hatching it into the world according to their plan. Why would they do this? I don’t know. Just Winnie-the-Pooh.
Anyway, this is another attempt to tie Canada into the creation of an enduring pop culture icon. I suspect that there is more validity here than in the Superman one, because the only claim Canada is making is that the bear is named after Winnipeg, instead of having Mr. Shepard in Canada showing his sketches to his cousin Piglet five years before the character was really created (again, that’s a reference to the Superman one). Still, as Heritage Moments go, I have to give the Superman one the higher esteem, with its fast-talking Joe Shuster easily trumping strange little Christopher Robin. Apart from that, we’ve got a decent musical score, we’ve got a little bit of quotable material. I feel I can confidently give this Heritage Moment Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.
I remember when this came on before and whenever they got to the point where it was asked “Why Pooh, Son?” I’d do my best Christopher Robin imitation and say “I don’t know because he smells like shit.” I like to think that Christopher was thinking the same as me and just did not want a spanking for cussing.
Apparently Pooh was the name of a swan they saw that day or something and the kid was just combining the names, but that swan probably didn’t have anything to do with Canada, so screw him.
Swans are jerks anyway.
You`ll get no argument from me.