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 A fourth, shorter featurette was added to bring the film to a close, originally made during production of "Blustery Day" (based on the presence of Jon Walmsley as Christopher Robin).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
A. A. Milne a poem, "Teddy Bear," published in "Punch" magazine in February 1924 and republished in "When We Were Very Young". Pooh first appeared in the "London Evening News" on Christmas Eve, 1925, in a story called "The Wrong Sort Of Bees." "Winnie-the-Pooh" was published in 1926, followed by "The House at Pooh Corner" in 1928. A second collection of nursery rhymes, "Now We Are Six", was published in 1927. All four books were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. Milne also published four plays in this period. He also "gallantly stepped forward" to contribute a quarter of the costs of dramatising P.