Django 1.1.1 -> 1.2.0 regression

>>> from django import VERSION
>>> VERSION
(1, 1, 1, 'final', 0)
>>> import memcache
>>> memcache.__version__
'1.31'
>>>
>>> from django.core.cache import cache
>>> cache.set('test_key', u'\u2026')
>>> cache.get('test_key')
u'\u2026'
>>>




>>> from django import VERSION
>>> VERSION
(1, 2, 0, 'final', 0)
>>> import memcache
>>> memcache.__version__
'1.31'
>>>
>>> from django.core.cache import cache
>>> cache.set('test_key', u'\u2026')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in ?
  File "/export/www/wwwroot/staging/django/staging6/code/valiant/core/cache/backends/prefix_wrapper.py", line 39, in set
    return self.backend.set(key, value, timeout)
  File "/export/www/wwwroot/staging/django/staging6/code/django/core/cache/backends/memcached.py", line 54, in set
    self._cache.set(smart_str(key), value, self._get_memcache_timeout(timeout))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/memcache.py", line 293, in set
    return self._set("set", key, val, time)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/memcache.py", line 317, in _set
    server.send_cmd(fullcmd)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/memcache.py", line 507, in send_cmd
    self.socket.sendall(cmd + '\r\n')
  File "<string>", line 1, in sendall
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2026' in position 40: ordinal not in range(128)
>>>