At Kohl’s, they have a program called Kohl’s Cares for Kids, and you can purchase Winnie the Pooh characters and books, the proceeds of which go to kids’ charities. That’s pretty cool.
However, in classic “me” fashion, I’ve found something to complain about, so here it is:
The books are not A.A. Milne’s classic stories. They are new stories, written by whoever the fuck, and they all have a heavy-handed moral about trees, or nature, and they’re completely NOT the simple little stories about childlike wonder and gentleness that generations have grown up on.
Winnie the Pooh is rarely about “lessons”. It’s about, “Oh, Pooh’s so fat he got stuck in his cave!” or “That crazy Tigger needs to calm the hell down” or “Let’s all go hunting for heffalumps!” (Which, by the way, regardless of what that greedy fucking merchandising whore called Disney would have you believe, do not fucking exist. That’s the whole damn point of the story.)
If there is a lesson in a Pooh story, it’s simple: don’t be so selfish; give people a chance before you judge them; don’t be so pessimistic, life isn’t that bad. Simple lessons, told simply. Milne didn’t beat you over the head with this shit, and just as many of the stories were about the denizens of the 100-Acre Wood just being the absurd little goofballs they were.
Of course, Heaven Forbid if our precious little snowflakes were ever exposed to something that was being silly for the sake of being silly. No, it’s got to have a fucking agenda, now. So now we have a whole generation of kids that will never know Winnie the Pooh and gang as anything else but a bunch of moral-spouting blowhards, and that really upsets me.
This is Pooh:
This is Disneyfied upchuck:
What I’m saying is: if you really care for kids, you’ll seek out a good reprinting of the original stories to read to your children and donate 20 bucks to your local children’s hospital or something. There’s no reason why you should need an enormous corporation to be any part of this process.