Peter Rabbit vs. Peter Cottontail

[Mara the Wolf]

Hey guys! I've been wanting to post an updated list in "What Redwall-like books are there?" and compiled every suggestion in the thread and arranged them by publication date (of the first book if in a series and/or has spin-offs) and author(s)' last name(s). (It's in the 70s!) Well, the first thing in the list is The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter, the 23 Original Peter Rabbit Books & 4 Unpublished Works. Most people think Peter Rabbit and Peter Cottontail are one & the same, right? Well, yes and no.

Here Comes Peter Cottontail is a 1971 Easter stop motion animated television special produced by Rankin/Bass Productions, currently distributed by Universal Television and based on the 1957 novel The Easter Bunny That Overslept by Priscilla and Otto Friedrich. The special also features Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins' Easter song "Here Comes Peter Cottontail".

"Here Comes Peter Cottontail" is a popular secular Easter song composed in 1949, by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins. They also wrote "Frosty the Snowman" in 1950. Mervin Shiner was the first person to record the song, on Decca Records in 1950. It reached #8 on Billboard Hot 100. The name 'Peter Cottontail' was used by a character in a 1914 Thornton Burgess book, but may not have been previously used to refer to the Easter Bunny.

Peter Cottontail is a name temporarily assumed by a fictional rabbit named Peter Rabbit in the works of Thornton Burgess, an author from Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1910, when Burgess began his Old Mother West Wind series, the cast of animals included Peter Rabbit. Four years later, in The Adventures of Peter Cottontail, Peter Rabbit, unhappy at his plain-sounding name, briefly changed his name to Peter Cottontail because he felt it made him sound more important. He began putting on airs to live up to his important-sounding name, but after much teasing from his friends, soon returned to his original name, because, as he put it, "There's nothing like the old name after all." In the 26-chapter book, he takes on the new name partway through chapter 2, and returns to his "real" name, Peter Rabbit, at the end of chapter 3. Burgess continued to write about Peter Rabbit until his retirement in 1960, in over 15,000 daily syndicated newspaper stories, many of them featuring Peter Rabbit, and some of them later published as books, but "Peter Cottontail" is never mentioned again.

When Thornton Burgess began making up bedtime stories with named animals for his 4-year-old son, the boy was already familiar with Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit character, and would not allow his father to give his stories' rabbit character any other name. Later when the boy stayed with grandparents for a month while widower Burgess (his wife had died in childbirth) worked, he wrote stories down and mailed them to be read to the boy. Later still, the magazine where Burgess worked published a few of those stories. Then a representative of publisher Little, Brown came by asking the magazine editor about children's stories, and the editor pointed him to Burgess. Little, Brown then published some of Burgess' stories as the book Old Mother West Wind. The name of Burgess' rabbit character was never changed along the way.

The laws governing usage of published character names were less strict back then than they are today. Burgess was not the only author to reuse the name Peter Rabbit, though with the huge popularity of Old Mother West Wind, he became the most known. A fuller treatment on this topic can be found in Nature's Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess by Christie Palmer Lowrance.

To quote Unshaved Mouse (on Disney's Dinosaur being really similar to The Land Before Time, which he claims shares a few similarities to the "The Rite of Spring" segment from Fantasia):

"And so, we all are connected in the Great Circle of Ripping Off"