Disney & The Mellomen (1968)

From the movie Winnie the Pooh and the Blistery Day

Heffalumps and Woozles are the overall main antagonists of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh franchise. They are creatures who first appeared in the 1968 featurette Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.

Pooh encounters them in his dream during the song Heffalumps and Woozles. According to Tigger, Heffalumps and Woozles love honey and always want it, to the point of being willing to steal it. In fact, they turn out to be Tigger slang for Elephants and Weasels. Heffalumps look cute and cuddly like elephants, while Woozles look sly and cunning like weasels. A few of them turn out to be friendly in later installments.

The song was performed by The Mellomen.

The Mellomen were a popular singing quartet active from the late 1940s through the mid-1970s. They were founded by Thurl Ravenscroft and Max Smith in 1948. They recorded under a variety of names, including Big John and the Buzzards, The Crackerjacks, The Lee Brothers, and The Ravenscroft Quartet. They were sometimes credited as The Mellowmen, The Mello Men, or The Mellow Men. They sang backup to some of the best-known artists of the day, including Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Arlo Guthrie, Frankie Laine, Peggy Lee, Elvis Presley, and Jo Stafford.

A. A. Milne (1926)

Dedicated to Winnie-the-Pooh creator A. A. Milne who died on this day in 1956.
I wanted to post this in tribute to his memory and contributions to storytelling and the world of animation.

A. A. Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. Milne served in both World Wars, joining the British Army in World War I, and as a captain of the British Home Guard in World War II.

He was the father of bookseller Christopher Robin Milne, upon whom the character Christopher Robin is based.

Winnie-the-Pooh is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne and English illustrator E. H. Shepard.

The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), and this was followed by The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Milne also included a poem about the bear in the children’s verse book When We Were Very Young (1924) and many more in Now We Are Six (1927). All four volumes were illustrated by E. H. Shepard.

In 1961, Walt Disney Productions licensed certain film and other rights of Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories from the estate of A. A. Milne and the licensing agent Stephen Slesinger, Inc., and adapted the Pooh stories, using the unhyphenated name “Winnie the Pooh”, into a series of features that would eventually become one of its most successful franchises.

In popular film adaptations, Pooh has been voiced by actors Sterling Holloway, Hal Smith, and Jim Cummings in English, and Yevgeny Leonov in Russian.

Heffalumps and Woozles! Beware!