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In the alternate reality presented by these slick illustrations by Coran Stone, Calvin and Hobbes grew up to be super spies, and Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear are hell bent on bringing them both down.
These illustrations, and the story behind them, are just begging to be made into an animated series of some sort, and you can read the whole thing at the Geeks Are Sexy link below.
It’s the ultimate battle of imaginary friends, and I like the fact that, in the Pooh picture, Hobbes is still a stuffed animal!
Link –via GeeksAreSexy
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When you think about it, Winnie the Pooh makes a lot more sense when you consider all of the characters simply live inside of a mental institution. Dan Meth hit the nail on the head with this great medication chart.
Link via Laughing Squid
The marvelous artist James Hance loves to mash up pop culture themes, particularly Star Wars and Winnie the Pooh. Here’s one of his recent projects showing Wookiee the Chew walking into the sunset, followed by Piglet D2. At the link, you can view another piece of burned wood showing Eeyore as an AT-AT.
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Piglet, Tigger, Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore and Kanga. (1925)
These stuffed toy icons all belonged to Christopher Robin when he was a little boy. They have traveled the world but found a permanent home at the Central Children’s Room at the New York City Library in 1987 where they are on display for new generations of children to enjoy. These animals appear to have been very well loved indeed.
Link – Via Libraryland
Webcomic artist Giant Hamburger illustrated this children’s book mashup of Winnie the Pooh and the Alien movie series. Silliness ensues when Pooh mistakes an alien egg for a honey pot! Link -via Buzzfeed
Even if you’re not a particularly athletic person, there’s a sport out there for you. Whether you’re an avid ironer or are known for launching your cell phone 300 feet after dealing with an exceptionally annoying telemarketer, there’s something in the world that will play to your skills. Here are 10 of them.
1. Toe Wrestling. Yup – there’s arm wrestling, thumb wrestling… and now toe wrestling. As you might imagine, it’s a lot like thumb wrestling – competitors just use different digits. It apparently started when a group of men at a pub decided to find or invent a game that “the British could actually win,” and after a few beverages, they came up with just the thing. Ironically, the first-ever World Toe Wrestling Championships ended with a Canadian victor. Competitors have their own phalange-related nicknames: two of the most accomplished athletes are called the Itatoelion Stallion and the Toeminator. The face of the sport would probably be Alan “Nasty” Nash, a five-time champion who has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to show off his technique. “I don’t think the size of your toe has anything to do with it as I have short, stumpy toes,” he has said. Picture from Metro.
2. Cheese Rolling. You’ve likely heard of this one, but it’s too weird to leave out of the article. Every year at Cooper’s Hill in England’s Cotswolds, a large wheel of cheese is sent tumbling from the top of the hill (pictured)… and a bunch of Cheese Rollers come tumbling after. The first person to reach the bottom of the hill wins the cheese. This may not seem like an outstanding prize, but be assured that the race for the Double Gloucester round is a heated one: injuries have included concussions, broken bones and sprained ankles. Injuries are usually incurred by the Cheese Rollers themselves, but on at least one occasion the cheese (which usually weighs seven or eight pounds) took a wicked bounce at the bottom of the hill and careened into a spectator. Picture from Cheese Rolling.
3. Poohsticks. Children’s lit fans (or Disney fans) will be familiar with Poohsticks from The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne’s 1928 book. Milne actually played the game with his son, although we’re not sure if the game was invented for the book and then played by Milne and his son Christopher Robin or vice versa. Fans started actually playing the game, which involves dropping sticks in a stream or river to see which one crosses the designated finish line first, in 1984. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution needed some money and the lock keeper thought a Poohsticks competition – donations accepted – might help their cash flow. His hunch was correct – since its inception, the World Poohsticks Competition has raised more than £30,000. Every winner receives a gold medal and a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear.
4. Extreme Ironing. There are a lot of us out there that probably dread the tedium of pressing wrinkles out of clothes, but there are others who look at it as the opportunity for an adrenaline rush – namely, Extreme Ironers. It started out as just a fun, quirky hobby, but for the past several years an actual competition sponsored by Rowenta has taken place. EIs send in a photo of themselves ironing in strange and extreme places and points are given for place and style (just standing there with an iron will get you minimal points; striking a graceful pose while ironing underwater will get you more). Bonus: the sport has inspired cellists to do the same thing. Photo from OneInchPunch.
5. Buzkashi sounds like something made up for Borat, but it’s a real sport in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, among others. It’s kind of like polo, except the focus of the game revolves around a decapitated goat or calf instead of a ball. If you’re a Rambo fan, you might remember seeing the game depicted in Rambo III. Photo from AfghanNetwork.
6. Cell Phone Throwing. Fed up with your cell phone? Join the club. But now you can do something legal to vent your frustrations (as opposed to going Naomi Campbell on someone). Since 2001, the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships have been held in Finland. Categories include the traditional toss, freestyle (points for creativity!), team, and junior. If you’re not near Finland and don’t care to travel there just to chuck a phone, never fear: the U.S. held its first event in Massachusetts in 2008. And if you love your cell phone but hate outdated technology, you can join in the Rotary Phone Throw at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
7. International Regatta of Bathtubs. La Regate des Baignoires was created to boost tourism in Dinant, Belgium. As you can imagine, bathtubs don’t float very well, so it’s a pretty entertaining “race.” In fact, speed really doesn’t matter at all when it comes to winning this thing. It’s more about the creativity of your tub and whether your tub actually makes it across the finish line or not. Photo from P&O Ferries.
8. Chess Boxing. The old stereotype of chess being for skinny, geeky guys with no athletic ability to speak of is totally out the window with this extreme sport. The game started out as kind of a joke in a graphic novel, but people eventually picked up on it and thought it had merit in reality. The first world championship was held in 2003 and regulated by the World Chess Boxing Organization. I like to think that when you call a checkmate, you get to punch your opponent in the face… but it doesn’t work like that. Boxing rounds are alternated with chess-playing rounds; the winner can be determined by knockout, checkmate, or a decision made by the referee. Photo from Time magazine.
9. Unicycle Hockey. It would seem to me that unicycling and hockey each have enough opportunity for injury all on their own, but combine them and you’re almost guaranteed to get a cool scar at some point. There are a few extra fouls, such as “sibbing,” which is poking your hockey stick in an opponent’s spokes to trip him or her up, but for the most part, the unusual mode of transportation is the biggest difference from regular hockey. Oh, yeah, and the lack of ice. Really, ice + unicycle = asking for a shattered femur. Here’s a group playing unicycle hockey in Telluride:
10. Rock Paper Scissors League. Yes, there’s a Rock Paper Scissors League (to be known as RPSL from now on), and yes, it’s serious. The world competitions take place every year in Las Vegas with Bud Light sponsoring. There’s skill to the game, for sure, but it’s more mental than anything else. For example, statistics have shown that women tend to start off a game with scissors and men tend to start with rock. Know your opponent and you could be a $50,000 winner like Sean Sears, who beat more than 300 contestants at Mandalay Bay last year. If that’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other tournaments to participate in: there’s the National Xtreme RPS Competition, the UK RPS Championship and the World Series of RPS.
That’s the opinion of the Trustees of Pooh Properties, which manages the estates of author A. A. Milne and illustrator E.H. Shepard. They have authorized a new sequel in the Pooh series. Return to the Hundred Acre Wood has generated some controversy among Pooh purists, who argue that the original books were about growing up and moving on, and that if the creators had wanted sequels they would have generated them…
“The whole point is that the boy has to go away from his childhood, from this very idyllic pastoral world of his childhood,” she said. “This is an absolutely perfect ending, and doing anything beyond this is pointless.”
The trustees of the estate believe the sequel will be true to the original…
“The good professor and other great lovers of Pooh will have to form their own conclusions,” Brown said. “And they may say, ‘oh, it’s not quite as good, it’s not quite the same.’ I can’t help that. All I can say is we tried very hard to do something that’s not offensive, shall we say.”
Jennifer Quinn of the AP has more details at the StarTribune. The BBC has a writeup on a new character – Lottie the Otter – created for the sequel. And The Guardian makes note in passing of the possibility that Pooh may have had OCD.
Image credit: Wikipedia.
Poor songwriters – they spend a ton of time writing and composing music for movies, only for a good chunk of their work to be cut at a later date. OK, that probably goes for most people in the movie industry, and songwriters actually have it better than most – with a key change and a tweak to the lyrics, their songs can be repurposed to fit the next big movie… or sit in a vault for 19 years to be pulled out for a television show, as the case may be. Read on!
But not all of them got included – more than 30 songs were written, including one about the Jabberwock (he ultimately got cut from the movie altogether), a song for the Caterpillar called “Dream Caravan,” a song for the Cheshire Cat called “I’m Odd,” and a song that Alice sang to open the movie called “Beyond the Laughing Sky.” Although “Dream Caravan” and “I’m Odd” never saw the light of day, you might know “Laughing Sky” by a different name – “The Second Star to the Right” from Peter Pan.
The song was cut from Alice because the song was a ballad and was a bit difficult for young Kathryn Beaumont, the voice of Alice, to sing. It was also determined that the slow song might start the movie off a little too slow, so the opening song was replaced with “In a World of My Own” instead – it’s a bit more upbeat and matched Beaumont’s range and style better.
The movie is really two shorts all rolled into one experience; “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow” appears in the very first one called “Bongo.” It’s about a bear cub who works for the circus but runs away and ends up having all kinds of adventures in the wild. What does this have to do with Jiminy Cricket, you’re probably wondering? Well, he sets up the story of Bongo by strolling through a house, singing this tune. When he gets to the record player conveniently set up in the house, he puts “Bongo” on and the first short officially starts. You’re probably familiar with the second short – “Mickey and the Beanstalk.” Fun and Fancy Free actually takes its name from a line in Jiminy’s song:
“I’m a happy-go-lucky fellow
Full of fun and fancy-free
You can make the whole world seem mellow
If you take it in your stride like me.”
Don’t feel sorry for Jiminy, by the way – although he may have had to wait seven years for this particular song, his ballad from Pinocchio, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” has been one of Disney’s signature songs ever since and was ranked #7 on the American Film Institute’s “Top Movie Songs of All Time” in 2004.
Here’s Jiminy singing “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow,” if you’re interested. The song plays throughout the opening credits, but if you want to hear him, he starts chirping around 1:47.
There was also a song for the magical compass sequence called “Bobbing Along on the Bottom of the Beautiful Briny Sea” that was later shortened to “The Beautiful Briny” for Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
If it seems like a lot of Mary Poppins songs were repurposed, that’s because they were – the Sherman Brothers once laughingly refused to say what else they had reworked from the movie, saying that people would think all they had done for the past 10 years was shuffle songs around.
