Disney axes Winnie the Pooh day in Winnipeg; says annual event too costly
WINNIPEG (CP) — Oh, bother. Disney has pulled the plug on Pooh Friendship Day.
The hugely popular local summer festival ate up the entire marketing budget for Canada, say Disney officials.
Learning that Pooh won’t be returning to the park was heart-wrenching, said Donna Hicks, executive director of Partners in the Park, which helped organize the event.
“We can’t host a Pooh Friendship Day without Disney because of the characters, but our board of directors will be meeting very soon so we can do another fabulous event,” she said.
Last year’s Pooh festival drew thousands of children to the park and cost more than $400,000.
Disney paid half the cost and flew out 12 staff members to help, armed with costumes featuring the popular characters of the A. A. Milne books.
Maria Gladowski, a Disney spokeswoman, said the company wants to spread its reach across Canada and promote more than just one Disney character.
“The Canadian office is very small and we were using 100 per cent of our marketing budget and all of our resources on this event in Winnipeg,” she said.
“It was strictly a business decision. We are absolutely thrilled Winnipeg has supported the event for the past few years and, moving forward, we hope to bring the city of Winnipeg something they will enjoy just as much.”
Gladowski said the company is looking at a wide range of options but couldn’t go into detail.
The first Pooh picnic first began as a celebration of International Friendship Day, with parties in Winnipeg, New York, and Orlando, Fla.
The response was overwhelming. The Winnipeg event, held in August 2000, was expected to have 20,000 visitors but actually drew twice that. The numbers continued to grow.
Celtic pop group Leahy performed at the first festival at Assiniboine Park.
It continued to be one of the most popular summer family happenings in Winnipeg for the next three years. Country star Michelle Wright took the Lyric Theatre outdoor stage in 2000 and R&B diva Deborah Cox appeared in 2002.
Last year, there was autograph sessions with Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger and Pooh to go with family-oriented games and attractions. Everything was free.
The “chubby little cubby” was named during the First World War by a local soldier, Harry Colebourn, who purchased a bear cub from a hunter in northern Ontario and adopted it as a mascot for his brigade.
Colebourn named the bear Winnie after his hometown and took the cub to England. When the brigade went into battle in France, he gave Winnie to the London Zoo, where it became a favourite of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin.
Milne wrote four books about Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Kanga, Roo, Tigger and Rabbit. Disney brought the stories to the big screen. In 1997, Pooh was named a United Nations World Ambassador of Friendship.
(Winnipeg Sun-Winnipeg Free Press)
― The Huckle-Buck (Horace Mann), Friday, 16 April 2004 18:02 (twenty-two years ago)
How the fuck can Disney OWN Pooh? It was a book, not a cartoon.This bit from the Wall Street Journal explains the rights issue and the lawsuit:
The rotund bear, created by author A.A. Milne and illustrator E.H. Shepard in the 1920s, has spawned more than 7,000 products generating an estimated $5.9 billion in world-wide retail sales annually. At Disney, Pooh and related characters bring in about $1 billion in annual revenue through apparel, toys and other merchandise, accounting for an even bigger share of Disney's consumer-products sales than Mickey Mouse and the other original Disney characters.
In its suit, Stephen Slesinger Inc., based in Tampa, Fla., claimed that Disney had dramatically underpaid royalties owed under the 1983 renewal of a licensing agreement originally struck with Disney in the early 1960s. The small company, paid more than $80 million in Pooh royalties since the renewal, is named after the literary agent who paid Mr. Milne $1,000 plus royalties for the rights to sell Pooh merchandise in the U.S.
Pooh wasn't yet a merchandising juggernaut when Mr. Slesinger bought the rights to sell Pooh-inspired products in the U.S. Mr. Slesinger died more than 50 years ago, but his 83-year-old widow, Shirley Lasswell, is the company's president. She struck the first deal with Disney in the 1960s.
At some points in the case, it looked like Disney was on the defensive -- and might even lose. In 2001, the company was hit with a sanctions order stemming from the destruction of 40 boxes of documents seven years earlier. The boxes held papers of a deceased Disney executive, Vincent Jeffereds, who oversaw the company's negotiations with Slesinger. As the case dragged on, the Slesinger family said at times that it wanted to simply end the agreement with Disney because it felt so badly mistreated.
― El Diablo Robotico (Nicole), Friday, 16 April 2004 19:36 (twenty-two years ago)