Taken from The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Frankenpooh and Spookable Pooh is a double feature of vaguely Halloween-themed Pooh adventures. Frankenpooh includes The Monster Frankenpooh, Things That Go Piglet in the Night, and Pooh Moon. Spookable Pooh includes A Knight to Remember, and Rock-A-Bye Pooh Bear.

The films follow a predictable pattern: Pooh and his friends tell spooky stories or dress in costume for scary games. The characters act according to their age-old natures, to the point of caricature: Brave Tigger tells a scary story and ends up frightening himself; Pooh is forever and maddeningly hungry; Rabbit strives to remain the voice of reason; and stuttering Piglet is scared beyond help.

I sat down to watch these short animated films with my toddler, and she was uninterested after 10 minutes or so, finding more entertainment in her bellybutton. I felt the same way. We ended up showing our bellybuttons to each other and sharing funny bellybutton stories. She has an "outie" and I have an "innie."

Anyhoo.

The tone of many current Winnie the Pooh cartoons—particularly when you compare them with the classic short films and the A.A. Milne stories—is distressingly patronizing, and I got the feeling that even my daughter could sense it. Rather than simply and naturally tell a story, these cartoons almost constantly talk down to their audience. The beloved characters—Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Owl, Rabbit, Eeyore—seem to have been lobotomized in their modern incarnations, speaking in slow drawls and given to exaggerated expressions. I found myself wincing at the obvious plots and the poor voice acting.

Disney presents Frankenpooh and Spookable Pooh in a fullframe transfer of the cartoons' original 1.33:1 TV presentation. Unfortunately, the films suffer from a general murkiness, and the source material shows more age than it should. Detail is unimpressive, lending the image a blurry fuzziness. Colors seem fairly accurate.

The disc offers a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack that reproduces dialog well. I noticed no tinniness or distortion. Music seems somewhat flat.

One special feature that will appeal to adults who like to use their TV as a babysitter (although the thought of doing so makes me shudder) is a child-friendly menu option. This option lets you configure the menus so that only the remote's Enter button is required to navigate to a particular short film. A seemingly dim-witted, slow-talking narrator introduces the film choices.

You also get two interactive features: Piglet's Hallowasn't Game and a sing-along titled I Wanna Scare Myself. The first continues the disc's tradition of simple-minded entertainment by letting the child use the remote to help Pooh find some honey. The second lets your child sing along with Tigger.

Stick with the original cartoons, or—better yet—the original A.A. Milne books. Disney is making the Pooh character and his friends increasingly irritating, moving them toward Barney territory. And that scares me more than anything on this disc.