Why 'Playdate With Winnie The Pooh' Is A Truly Unnecessary Reboot

After premiering last year in countries that still have a Disney Junior cable channel, the first season of pre-school age Winnie The Pooh reboot/spin-off Playdate with Winnie The Pooh has arrived on Disney Plus, with it's companion series, Me & Winnie The Pooh likely to follow sometime soon. This has brought the series, which both redesigns the characters and recasts their voices, to the attention of some traditional Pooh Bear fans who were previously unaware of it, and many are not happy.

While reboots are often maligned for being unwanted or unnecessary, Playdate with Winnie The Pooh seems especially so. Here are some of the reasons why.

The concept is nonsensical and disrespectful considering the established world of 'Winnie The Pooh'

The Producers of Playdate with Winnie The Pooh have tried to appease some upset fans with the explanation that the show is not a full franchise reboot, but more a prequel to the stories that already exist. The core concept is that it is set when the characters are young children, and each episode features one of Pooh's friends visiting him for a Playdate. This makes it the first Disney Winnie The Pooh project not to feature the character of Roo, a more prominent character than his Mother in most Disney Pooh content, as Playdate portrays Kanga as just a child, meaning Roo has not yet been born.

Those who know anything about the world of Winnie The Pooh will understand why none of the above makes sense.

Pooh Bear and his friends have always been portrayed as stuffed animals. Toys, belonging to Christopher Robin, who have been left to reside in his own special world of the Hundred-Acre Wood. This is clear in the classic Disney designs, which depict many of the characters with visible stitching in some areas.

The characters' status as toys has previously meant that they have always been as they are, and will always be. They are timeless. While they are innocent and child-like, they are not, apart from Roo, children themselves. Aside from ruining the timeless aspect of the characters, portraying Pooh, Piglet, and co as not being toys feels rather disrespectful to the original source material, as the characters and stories are inspired by real-life toys that belonged to Winnie-The-Pooh author A.A Milne's son, the real Christopher Robin Milne.

The real toys, (minus Roo, lost during Christopher's youth) were restored in 2016, and can be seen on display in the New York Public Library. Ashdown Forest, aka the Hundred-Acre Wood, is a real place that can be visited in England. Playdate with Winnie The Pooh's 'reimagining' of the franchise takes none of this into account.

On top of all this, the prequel argument doesn't fly for continuity reasons, mostly regarding Playdate's younger versions of Kanga and Tigger. While the order of their arrival varies, particularly in the Disney version, in both the Disney films and A.A Milne's novels, neither Kanga and Roo nor Tigger have always lived in the Hundred-Acre Wood. They move in sometime after the beginning of the story.

Even if Kanga had once been younger and not always a Mother, she wouldn't have been having playdates in the Hundred-Acre Wood with Pooh Bear, because she did not live there yet.

'Winnie The Pooh' was already suitable for young children.

In the latter half of 2023, the new series Young Jedi Adventures arrived on Disney Plus. It is aimed towards preschoolers, and has been marketed as an age-appropriate way to introduce younger children to the Star Wars franchise. While some fans balked at the idea, no-one can deny that there was a place in the franchise for such a show, as most previous Star Wars content was unsuitable for very young children. The same cannot be said for Winnie The Pooh. While Disney's Winnie The Pooh projects, mostly the films, do feature some scenes that may be scary to the littlest children, these are few and far between. For the most part, Pooh lives up to his reputation as being a character for all ages.

There was a time when The New Adventures of Winnie The Pooh, which originally ran for four seasons between 1988 and 1991, often aired in reruns on Disney's original Preschool block, Playhouse Disney, and it's current successor, Disney Junior, without any of the content warnings or edits older Disney content has been subjected to in recent years. Clips from the show and films were regularly shown between programs, under the title 'Mini Adventures of Winnie The Pooh'.

Young Jedi Adventures justifies it's existence via the fact that no Star Wars content suitable for Preschool age children previously existed. Playdate with Winnie The Pooh does not, because existing Pooh content was already suitable for Preschoolers.

And even if the producers believed there was need for a Pooh Bear series aimed more directly at young children, or that there hadn't been one before, well, they needed to do a little more research.

There have already been TWO Winnie The Pooh series aimed at Preschool aged children

Yes, two. The first, The Book of Pooh, was made using puppets and cut-out backgrounds replicating a pop-up book, hence The Book of Pooh title. Each episode featured two segments, which each featured a musical number that helped move the plot. The series aired from 2001 to 2003 as part of the Playhouse Disney programming block, earning positive reviews and three Daaytime Emmy nominations over the course of it's run.

The second, My Friends Tigger & Pooh made it's debut on Playhouse Disney in 2007, and was carried over when the block/channel rebranded as Disney Junior, ultimately running for three seasons. The first Pooh project utilising CGI animation, the series stars a new character, six-year old Darby, who along with her dog, Buster, befriends Pooh Bear and Tigger forming a group they call the Super Sleuths, who roam the Hundred-Acre Wood and solve problems for the other residents, who all appear on a recurring basis.

During it's run, My Friends Tigger & Pooh was rated the number one show for children aged 2-5, and even received praise from early childhood educators for encouraging critical thinking and problem solving skills. The series also spawned two direct-to-video films, Super Sleuth Christmas Movie, and Tigger & Pooh and a Musical Too.

While produced with different styles than the traditional 2D animation of most of the franchise, neither The Book of Pooh or My Friends Tigger & Pooh drastically redesign the characters the way Playdate does, because there was simply no need to. If Disney really wanted more preschool Pooh content, they should simply have revived My Friends Tigger & Pooh, and thus avoid alienating fans with their own children who want to introduce them to the Pooh designs they have always known.

Jim Cummings simply IS 'Winnie The Pooh'.. and Tigger, too.

As a consequence of reimagining the residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood as children, Playdate with Winnie The Pooh replaces the franchise's entire existing voice cast with child actors. For many long term Pooh Bear fans, the replacement of the voice actors is the new series' biggest sin.. one even more so than the others.

While Jim Cummings is the third voice actor to provide the voice of Winnie The Pooh, he is by far the most well-known and iconic. Cummings took up the role of Pooh beginning with The New Adventures of Winnie The Pooh in 1988, and continued to voice the character in all the films and series' that followed, most recently voicing Pooh in a cameo for the short Once Upon a Studio late last year. More than one generation of children has grown up with Jim Cummings as the only voice of Pooh they have ever known. Cummings also voices Tigger, at first serving as understudy for the aging Paul Winchell before taking over full time when Winchell retired in 1999.

To replace the actor when he is still willing and able to voice the role, and such a vital part of the character's ongoing legacy, simply feels wrong.

Hopefully, the unnecessary changes in Playdate will be just a footnote in Pooh's history, and we will see a return to the original voice actors and designs sooner rather than later.