comments in others' LJs

[scarfman]

billroper answered the A.A. Milne writer's block question last month ("Which Winnie-the-Pooh character are you?") saying that people tell him he's Rabbit. The thesis of the following has been knocking around in my head ever since, so finally I went to look whether anyone else has ever commented with the same point, and no one had. But daisy_knotwise had noted that Rabbit is a planner, so I replied to her comment:

Remember that there's a big difference between Milne Rabbit and Disney Rabbit. Disney Rabbit is a flibbertigibbet. Milne's Rabbit is Clever, nowithstanding that the bear with only fluff and an instinctive grasp of the Tao is better at solving their problems.

(When I was a kid I only realized that Rabbit and Owl were the two with Brain. It wasn't till I rediscovered Pooh as an adolescent that I realized the difference between them: Rabbit's clever and Owl knows things. One critic I read noted that they were the only characters Milne invented, as opposed to adapting from Christopher's toys; then quoted passages from Milne's autobiography to suggest that Milne's mother had a neverending string of relatives and Milne's father sounded like he knew everything but didn't really.)

In theatrical releases Disney Rabbit is a babbling worrier, and only comes off as at all a thinker in bits adapted from Milne in which Rabbit was a thinker. I'm not familiar with the current body of tv that Disney Rabbit appears in, so I don't know which way that trends, but when someone calls Bill Rabbit they're probably thinking of Milne Rabbit.