Roo's messy room

Disney's My Very First Winnie the Pooh

by Betty G. Birney

This is a childrens book

Genres: Picture Books, Childrens

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1999

About the author

From kindergarten through graduation, I attended school in Affton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Then I graduated from Webster College (now Webster University) in Webster Groves, Missouri. Of course, I majored in English and kept on writing.

After working in advertising in St. Louis, Missouri and in Chicago, Illinois, I eventually moved to Southern California. First, I worked for Disneyland (fun job!) in the advertising department. The monorail whizzed past my window all day long. Then I worked at the Disney Studio in Burbank, where I had another fun job, writing and producing television and radio commercials and theatrical trailers (previews of coming attractions) for everything from re-releases of "Cinderella" and "Fantasia" to "Tex."

When the Disney Channel was started, I became a writer and story editor for WELCOME TO POOH CORNER. Since then, I've written more than 200 episodes of animated and live-action television programs including MADELINE, DOUG, BOBBY'S WORLD, DUMBO'S CIRCUS, THE PUZZLE PLACE, CAMP CANDY, LITTLE MOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, WHERE'S WALDO, FRAGGLE ROCK and ZOOBILEE ZOO. That's right, I write cartoons! I also wrote a number of award-winning afterschool specials and many interactive CD-ROM programs, including the award-winning "Berenstain Bears on their Own," "Richard Scarry's Busiest Neighborhood Ever," and "The Crayon Factory."

A made-for-television family movie I wrote, MARY CHRISTMAS, starring John Schneider, Cynthia Gibb and Tom Bosley, aired on the PAX network in 2002. It was the highest rated movie in PAX history and has aired each Christmas season since then.

I have been fortunate enough to win a Writer's Guild of America Award and three Humanitas Prizes (as well as two other nominations). In 2002, I won a Daytime Emmy Award for MADELINE, after two previous Emmy nominations. More recently, I received the Christopher Award for FRIENDSHIP ACCORDING TO HUMPHREY, many children's choice awards for THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HUMPHREY and was inducted into the Affton (MO) School District Hall of Fame.

Reviews

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book felt familiar as I read it, and a quick search of my LibraryThing tags for "kangaroos" and "messiness" immediately brought up Oh, Bother! Someone's Messy! by the same author and illustrator. I pulled that off the shelf and a comparison shows that Roo's Messy Room is an abridged version of the same work produced a couple years later. Sentences have been dropped, chopped in half and rearranged. Some pictures have been discarded, and large pictures have been cropped into two or three smaller pictures. And poor Eeyore was completely removed.

Since Disney recycled, I'm just going to recycle my rating and review too:

Roo's room is messy, so Kanga does the old let-him-soak-in-his-filth-till-he's-sick-of-it trick. Since this is a fantasy, Roo learns the error of his ways, and since this is a Pooh story, all the Hundred-Acre friends come over for a book-ending cleaning-up party.

I tried this with my daughter's playroom for a while, and we ended up with two-foot drifts of papers and toys against the walls and a three foot diameter circle in the middle where she could actually play.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list... )

[Set · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? I love Winnie the Pooh. It's a short version of the story for younger children.