Todd Graham grew up in the small town of Peterborough, Ontario in the 1970s, where he spent his formative years warping his mind with MAD, National Lampoon, and Heavy Metal magazines. In 1987, while a film student at Ontario College of Art and Design, Graham faced a fast-approaching deadline for a class project. He had to produce a short film, and quick, so ran with a goofy whim. Inspired by an off-the-cuff joke involving a stuffed Tigger doll, he laid some clips from the Apocalypse Now soundtrack over scenes from Disney’s Winnie the Pooh and vice-versa.
The resulting short, Apocalypse Pooh, was akin to watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon, but funnier. A number of people in the latter half of the 20th century—the Situationists, bands like The Residents and Negativland, and filmmaker Craig Baldwin among others—had manipulated existing images and soundtracks as a means of cultural critique long before Graham, but his film was somehow different. Apocalypse Pooh was strangely and accidentally profound. By blending two seemingly incongruous preexisting sources, Graham made something completely new, if only because the two sources worked together so frighteningly and unexpectedly well. After the film was shown to his class, friends began requesting it at underground Ontario screenings. Bootleg copies started to make the rounds internationally among collectors of strange films. Apocalypse Pooh was included in a number of traveling animation festivals, began popping up on VHS anthologies of weird shorts, and was analyzed in serious film journals.
As Apocalypse Pooh quietly wormed its way through underground culture, Graham, unaware that all this was happening, continued making similar experimental films in which he combined Peanuts cartoons and Blue Velvet, and Babar and The Elephant Man. The unfortunate thing is, justifiably fearing a letter from Disney’s legal department concerning certain copyright issues, Graham left his name off Apocalypse Pooh, and so was never recognized as the film’s director until much later. At least that’s how the legend goes.
“This is a popular misconception,” says Graham, now 50 and living in Toronto. “I did have a title card with my name—T. Graham—on the original tape, as well as the original title of the piece which was Homeformat as I was mimicking the structure of a commercial VHS release of the day. It’s correct that Disney’s legal team was at its most tenacious during this time. They were suing nursery schools for painting unlicensed murals until someone pointed out that it was, more importantly, brainwashing future consume-eteers. I heard third-hand that somebody who worked...
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