Boo to You Too! Winnie the Pooh–aka Winnie the Pooh: Boo to You Too!–is a 1996 television special which premiered on ABC just in time for Halloween. It was the first animated treat starring everyone’s favorite silly old bear (well, unless you count Paddington?) since 1991’s Winnie the Pooh and Christmas, Too! Why the five year gap? Well, there’s a surprising answer to that question: Sears.

Or, rather, the lack of Sears. Gather round, whippersnappers, as Grandpa Scrat weaves you a yarn as old as those large catalogs which could also serve as a convenient substitute for toilet paper if you had no other option. You see, in the mid-60s, Sears sealed a contract with Disney which gave them the exclusive rights to all Winnie the Pooh products for the next three decades. And I do mean all products. This included home videos, which included ten separate volumes for The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh Saturday morning cartoon series. And they didn’t sell well, because people weren’t going to Sears to buy videos, they were going there for large catalogs which could also serve as a convenient substitute for toilet paper if they had no other option.

Flash forward to the mid-90s, and Disney was all too happy to let the Sears contract expire. And then…Pooh Mania happened. Now able to sell Pooh merchandise everywhere, Disney did indeed choose to sell Pooh merchandise everywhere. And it sold like honey cakes! A new collection of home videos for The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh proved extremely successful (remember the “Playtime” and “Learning” series?). Disney was finally able to release the Christmas special on VHS three years after it had first aired. And naturally, the demand for Pooh–or “content” as the studios say these days–emerged.

And so, we got Boo to You Too! Winnie the Pooh, which was a big enough hit for Disney to approve two more holiday specials for Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day in the years that followed. Narrated by John-Rhys Davies (sweet!), it’s focused on Piglet trying to find the courage to not spoil Halloween for his friends by spending the holiday hiding from them. Granted, the obvious solution here is Piglet just stays home with a bottle of a wine and a Colleen Hoover novel while his friends celebrate the spooky season without him, but I digress. Boo to You Too! is very charming and funny, exactly as anything involving Pooh and the gang should be. And yet…it’s never been released on DVD in the United States. Sort of.

Yes, around a decade later, Boo to You Too! was “repackaged” into the straight-to-video “movie” Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween Movie, which has Roo and his heffalump buddy Lumpy wandering off alone to try to capture a goblin (or something) supposedly capable of granting wishes. When they inevitably become lost, Lumpy gets scared, so Roo tells him the story of how “Piglet learned to be brave for Halloween,” and boom, you just shaved half of the runtime off of your film’s animation budget! Never mind that Roo isn’t even in Boo to You Too!, but the most “interesting” (and by “interesting” I mean “really fucking stupid”) thing about its inclusion is how they “censor” Pooh’s politically incorrect Heffalump racism by dubbing over dialogue in which he expresses genuine fear over the possibility of meeting a polka-dotted pachyderm. Unfortunately for Pooh, the original audio from the special eventually made its way online, resulting in him being forced to star in shitty low budget horror flicks to make a living.

Have a Tigger-rific night, y’all!