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Winnie the Pooh’s Rabbit
Rabbit is featured in chapters III, and chapters V - X. So you can see what an important part Rabbit plays in the success of these timeless stories. Rabbit is the best speller in 100 Acre Wood where he and the other characters live, and he enjoys writing notes and organizing game plans. He usually includes Pooh and Piglet in these schemes, but when he needs to do some serious thinking he visits Owl because as Rabbit comments to him “You and I have brains. The others have fluff”. Rabbit loves his vegetables. In fact he has his own garden and is very protective of it. Once he even built a fortress and moat around it to keep others out, only to realize he  had forgotten to make a doorway. Rabbit’s first encounter with Pooh happens when Pooh squeezes through the hole leading to Rabbit’s underground house to eat a lunch of honey. But when Pooh attempts to squeeze back out of the hole he gets stuck because now he is too fat. Rabbits gets all his relations to pull Pooh out beu to no avail. Finally, Christopher Robin is sought out who concludes Pooh is not to eat for a week as the way to slim down, then he can be pulled out of the hole successfully. In the meantime, Rabbit uses Pooh’s back legs as a towel hanger. Rabbit is gregarious and good-hearted. He has a good rapport with all the forest animals. It is said his family relations would take 17 pockets for him to carry them  around in; 18 if he used a handkerchief. Rabbit thinks quickly on his feet but sometimes gets disoriented in new surroundings. Many of his plans become too complicated but he always seems to make everything turn out all right. Rabbit can be pushy because things are important to him. It is said of Rabbit by others, “Rabbit’s clever, and he has a brain. I suppose that’s why he never understands anything”. As you can tell, the episodes about Pooh, Rabbit and the other characters in the Winnie the Pooh stories are very comical. A. A. Milne had been writing for the leading British humorous magazine “Punch” (later becoming an assistant editor), so writing about  laughable situations came natural to him. But as Christopher Robin grew up the Pooh stories were left in the past. In 1930 Stephen Slesinger bought the rights to the Pooh characters from Milne and produced gifts, games and puzzles featuring these beloved personalities. By 1938 this became a $50 million business. Then in 1961 Disney purchased the rights and made Winnie the Pooh features for the movie screen and television. Currently the merchandising of Winnie the Pooh’s cast of characters is bringing in about $1 billion a year! |
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novelist and playwright who enjoyed composing nursery rhymes. When his only child, Christopher Robin, acquired stuffed animals for his play room, Milne was inspired to write a story about them. When he needed to add more characters to the story not among Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals, he made the wise choice of adding a rabbit and an owl.