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 A fourth, shorter featurette was added to bring the film to a close, originally made during production of "Blustery Day" (based on the presence of Jon Walmsley as Christopher Robin).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
Winnie-the-Pooh right in "When We Were Very Young". In the first chapter of "Winnie-the-Pooh", Milne offers this explanation of why Winnie-the-Pooh is often called simply "Pooh": The American writer William Safire surmised that the Milnes' invention of the name "Winnie the Pooh" may have also been influenced by the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado" (1885). The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are set in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, England. The forest is a large area of tranquil open heathland on the highest sandy ridges of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty situated 30 miles (50 km) south of