Why Disney Stopped Using the Original Voice of Winnie the Pooh: ‘His Agent Was PO’d’

Oh, bother.

For millions of us, those two words instantly conjure the voice of Winnie the Pooh — that warm, whimsical tone that made a “bear of very little brain” one of Disney’s most beloved characters. But the man behind that magic, Sterling Holloway, didn’t get to voice Pooh forever. And as the iconic character marks 100 years since his 1925 newspaper debut and 1926 book release, the story of why Disney let him go is being revisited with new context.

On Monday, January 5, Joe Sibilia — host of Nostalgia Tonight on AM 970 The Answer — shared new insight from Holloway’s biographer Rod Taylor, who spent five years documenting the actor’s life before his death in 1992.

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The truth? It wasn’t personal. It was physical.

“His agent was PO’d because Sterling created that role,” Taylor revealed on the podcast. “But we all forget entertainment is a business.” When Disney launched The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in the late 1980s, they asked Holloway — then in his early 80s — to audition. He still sounded like Pooh, but cranking out dozens of episodes for a full television season was another story.

“At that age… he just couldn’t knock them out,” Taylor explained. “He still had the ability to inflect and do all those little things, but he just couldn’t crank them out. And that’s when they pivoted to Jim Cummings. There is no way that Sterling would have been physically up for that.”

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That shift marked the end of Holloway’s time as Pooh, but it came late in a career that had already made him one of Disney’s most relied-on performers. Even so, he was never particularly close with Walt Disney himself — a contradiction Taylor calls “one of the great ironies.”

“Here is the voice that during Walt’s lifetime was used more than any other actor in Hollywood,” Taylor said, pointing to roles like the Cheshire Cat, Kaa the snake, and Flower the skunk. And yet, Holloway was never part of the Disney founder’s inner circle. In fact, Taylor says there’s only a single known photo of the two men together.

“That picture that you saw of him is the only picture of him and Walt. The only picture,” Taylor explained. “He wasn’t invited over to the house in Holmby Hills to go swimming in the pool or anything like that. That didn’t happen.”

Still, Walt championed Holloway from the start. When the first Pooh featurette was greenlit in the 1960s, there was never any question who would voice the bear. “In Walt’s mind from the get-go, Sterling was going to be the voice of Winnie the Pooh,” Taylor said. “And I think time has proven that was a really good choice.”

Holloway was named a Disney Legend in 1991. He passed away the following year at 87.