The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh derived from three previously released animated featurettes Disney produced based upon the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne: "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" (1966), "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day" (1968), and "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too" (1974). Extra material was used to link the three featurettes together to allow the stories to merge into each other. A fourth, shorter featurette was added to bring the film to a close, originally made during production of "Blustery Day" (based on the presence of Jon Walmsley as Christopher Robin). The sequence was based on the final chapter of
Gopher (Winnie-the-Pooh) original character and not based on a character from the A.A. Milne books, a fact he notes in his first appearance when he says "I'm not in the book, you know!" Instead, he was initially developed by Disney as a replacement for Piglet. Apparently, the proposed character of Gopher was thought to have a more "folksy, all-American, grass-roots image" than Piglet. While American audiences loved the character, British audiences were less than pleased. Like most Winnie the Pooh characters, Gopher is named after his own species. Gopher is also known for his unique voice characterization. He tends to whistle his