This week’s Morlock assignment: writing about tragedy, horror, death, or disaster in a Disney film. No problem. I remember hearing about how theaters would wait seven years to refurbish their chairs because that was how often Snow White would hit the screens and after each show loads of kids would soak the chairs from the frights they got from that film. One of my film history teachers (the late Stan Brakhage) even claimed that Walt Disney collected medieval torture devices that were specific for children. (Research? Fetish? Quirky collectibles? No idea.) Regardless, I don’t begrudge Disney for scaring the pants off of kids. In fact, I admire it. He knew how to make an impression. Every Halloween season I aspire to do the same by trying to spook every trick-or-treater that comes to my house. Why? Because I follow the golden rule and still treasure my memories of the horrifying hosts who went that extra mile to make me earn my candy. So let’s talk about the creepy stuff in Pinocchio, shall we?

First let’s go to the source material which first appeared in 1883 and was written by Carlos Collodi.

Pinocchio starts out as a pine log that screams in pain when the first guy tries to carve him into a table leg (ouch!) – so the guy (understandably) freaks out and gives the log to Geppetto, a carpenter known for making wooden dolls. The resulting puppet, Pinocchio, comes into an animated state of being and gets Gepetto into trouble, kills a talking cricket that had been around for over a century (with either a thrown hammer or squashed under the puppet’s foot, depending on your source), cries himself to sleep when facing starvation, burns off his feet by sleeping too close to the stove, gets fixed up by Geppetto but later runs out and almost turns into firewood again (to cook Mangiafuoco’s lamb dinner), he squanders his food, money, and is caught by bandits who hang him from a tree and who “get tired of waiting for the marionette to suffocate and leave” (Wikipedia), and so on… But let’s stop here to use Pinocchio’s hanging for an appropriate segue as to author’s original idea for how he would end his story:

Carlos Collodi was really Carlo Lorenzini, a journalist and rabble-rouser who settled down to write children’s stories. He took his pen name from the town of his mother’s birth, Collodi. When he originally published Pinocchio in the form of a magazine serial, Lorenzini’s intention was to kill Pinocchio by having him hang himself. At the suggestion of his editor, Lorenzini added chapters sixteen to thirty-two, giving the story a happy ending and creating the character of the Blue Fairy. (IMDB)

Collodi’s story was further altered by Disney. “Indeed, Disney made so many changes to the original fable the author’s surviving nephew, Paolo Lorenzini, tried and failed to sue the studio for libel.” (Walt Disney, Hollywood’s Dark Prince by Marc Eliot) But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Disney sugar-coated everything. After all, stats compiled by none other than Hugh Hefner’s publication make it clear it was still pretty edgy stuff:

The August 1993 issue of Playboy cited 43 instances of violence and other unfavorable behavior in this film, including 23 instances of battery, nine acts of property damage, three slang uses of the term “jackass”, three acts of violence involving animals, two shots of male nudity, and one instance of implied death. (IMDB)

Eliot’s book makes clear that Disney also contributed some of that old-Testamenty sensibility to Pinocchio: “Indeed, when projected through the lens of Disney’s psyche, Pinocchio reveals a powerful Fundamentalist underpinning: the quest for self-redemption and the hellish fate that awaits those who lack the inner strength to resist the inherent evils of pleasure.” Speaking of pleasure-seeking behavior, I can’t help but share another fascinating excerpt from Walt Disney, Hollywood’s Dark Prince:

For the film’s New York Premiere, Walt hired eleven midgets dressed in Pinocchio outfits and ordered them to frisk about on the roof of the theater marquee. At lunchtime, food and refreshments were passed up to them, including without Disney’s knowledge, a couple of quarts of liqour. By three o’clock that afternoon things got so out of hand an amused crowd was regaled by the spectacle of eleven stark-naked midgets belching noisily and enjoying a crap game atop the Broadway marquee. Police with ladders were called to remove them in pillowcases. Walt decided not to duplicate these festivities in other cities. (p. 116)

This amusing story is followed by more bracing stuff regarding Disney’s treatment of his staff. Synchronicity allows me to touch on this subject via an article on Naomi Klein (author of The Shock Doctrine) that just appeared in The New Yorker. The article mentions how Klein’s paternal grandfather, Philip, worked on Pinocchio, and the following excerpt gives a bit of historical context to the work conditions surrounding the film:

Philip wanted to be a painter, and in 1936 he got a job as an animator for Disney. He worked on Fantasia and Snow White and Pinocchio. Disney animators had been trying to organize themselves in secret since the early thirties, but they didn’t pull it off until after the bonuses they were promised for Snow White failed to materialize. In the late spring of 1941, they went on strike. Philip and Anne, ardent believers in the union, lived in a tent across the street from the studio, cooking over open fires and manning the picket line. Their first son, Michael, Naomi’s father, was then three, and lived with them in the tent part of the time. The strike was settled in September, but a few months after that Philip was fired for being an agitator… Philip sought to revive his early ambition of becoming a painter, but all his figures looked like Disney cartoons. (Outside Agitator, Naomi Klein and the new new left. By Larissa MacFarquhar. The New Yorker, Dec. 8, 2008)

To finish on a more personal note, I have to here admit to identifying with the pleasure-seeking Pinocchio. Just last night I had another poker game here at my house (which I’m tempted to call Pleasure Island), and between the gambling, smoking, drinking, and general jack-assery, my mother’s recently voiced concern over whether I would ever grow up is probably justified. The only thing missing was a crap game with a bunch of naked and belching dwarfs.