Disney Facts!

Facts 2491-2520: Pinocchio Themed Page

This weekend marks the 75th anniversary of Pinocchio!

So to celebrate, here are some facts about our favourite puppet turned into a real boy!

Fact #2491

Pinocchio creator Carlo Collodi's real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He was a heavy drinking, gambling Florentine journalist in the 19th century who was virtually forced to write the Pinocchio stories in payment of a debt he owed the paper.

Fact #2492

Mel Blanc was called in to record a voice for Figaro, Geppetto's cat, but Disney decided that the character should be mute, so the only sound of Blanc left in the film is a single sneeze. It may not be coincidence that Blanc only ever worked for Disney again once, voicing Warners characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Fact #2493

When Collodi tried to kill Pinocchio off in the newspaper series by hanging him, it prompted a flood of reader complaints from children desperate to see a happy ending. Finally Collodi's editor managed to convince him that a wooden puppet couldn't possibly suffocate, so Pinocchio escaped.

Fact #2494

Pinocchio was only the second film that Disney made, and work started on it even before Snow White and the Seven Dwarves hit cinemas. Although critics loved it on release, it took years for it to make a profit for the studio.

Fact #2495

Collodi based many of the places in the novel on real places. The Red Lobster Inn, or Osteria Gambero Roso, still exists, as does the house that served as the model for Geppetto's carpentry shop.

Fact #2496

The Blue Fairy was based on a real neighbourhood girl, who lived until the 1970s. Funnily enough, while Collodi's Blue Fairy had blue hair, his model was blonde and blue-eyed, like the Disney fairy.

Fact #2497

The Pinocchio puppet built for the film was lost for over 50 years, except for a publicity photo of Walt Disney playing with it. Eventually it was rediscovered in the Disney basement, stuffed in a cabinet, when the phone company removed a bunch of wires.

Fact #2498

When Jiminy Cricket opens a book to tell the story of Pinocchio at the beginning of the film, two other books on the shelf - Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan - perhaps gave a clue about other Disney adaptations already being talked about.

Fact #2499

It took 750 artists to make Pinocchio, and the film used an innovative "multi-plane" camera to get the underwater sequences to look watery. Disney won a special achievement Oscar for that technology.

Fact #2500

Disney used to offer his artists a $5 bonus if they came up with a joke that got used in the film. In Pinocchio, most of the jokes are in the collection of Geppetto's cuckoo clocks, which see such untraditional scenes as ducks in a pond and a mother spanking a naughty child. Geppetto's pocket watch, incidentally, signals when it's beer o'clock.

Fact #2501

In the 1883 novel Pinocchio killed Jiminy Cricket, who was known only as Talking Cricket, by throwing a mallet at him.

Fact #2502

Despite the iconic nature of the scene in which Pinocchio's nose grows, it only happens once in the film.

Fact #2503

Figaro was Walt Disney's favorite character. Disney pushed for the kitten to appear in the film as much as possible.

Fact #2504

According to sequence director Jack Kinney, despite casting Christian Rub's role as the voice of Geppetto, he was actually an irascible fellow who drove the animation crew crazy with his ramblings about the glories of Adolf Hitler. They eventually got even with him when they did the live-action shooting for the scene with Geppetto fishing from inside Monstro the whale. Here, they had Rub on a makeshift stage where he pretended to fish while the stage was jostled by some grips who "rocked the boat" to give the desired effect and effectively giving Rub a ride he never forgot.

Fact #2505

Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors.

Fact #2506

Before his death in 2014, Dickie Jones was the very last person alive who was involved in Pinocchio.

Fact #2507

The character of Jiminy Cricket wasn't introduced into the story until 9 months into production.

Fact #2508

When J. Worthington Foulfellow attempts to coax Pinocchio to go to Pleasure Island, he gives the little puppet a card with an Ace of Spades on it, calling it his "ticket". In popular myth and folklore, the Ace of Spades is referred to as "The Death Card".

Fact #2509

When Walt Disney picked up his honorary Oscar statuettes for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), he told the Academy Award audience about Pinocchio which was still in production, holding their attention for a full 25 minutes.

Fact #2510

This was the first Disney feature available on DVD.

Fact #2511

Due to the war, the movie was not released in either Germany or Japan before the 1950s. In 1951, when the movie was released in Germany, it was dubbed with rather unknown actors. Only Horst Buchholz, as the voice of Lampwick, was to become famous in later years. In 1971, the movie was re-dubbed along with other Disney classics such as Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942). The original dub is now unknown in Germany.

Fact #2512

The name "Pinocchio" literally means "little wooden head."

Fact #2513

According to a 1938 New York Times article, Walt Disney tossed 2,300 feet of footage, representing five months work, "because it missed the feeling he had in mind."

Fact #2514

Future Broadway dance legend Marge Champion, then married to Disney animation director Art Babbitt, was the physical model for the Blue Fairy, acting out the character's movements on film for the animators to study. She had performed a similar task for Disney's Snow White.

Fact #2515

Voicing the roars of Monstro the whale was Thurl Ravenscroft, later best known as the voice of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger.

Fact #2516

Some 2,000,000 drawings were used in the creation of the film, 300,000 of which appear in the final print.

Fact #2517

Some theorized that the movie did poorly initially because it's so grim. Pinocchio is terrorized throughout the movie, and four of the five villains who torment him get off unpunished.

Fact #2518

Paolo Lorenzini, Collodi's nephew, asked the Italian ministry of popular culture to sue Disney for overly Americanizing his uncle's creation. "Pinocchio's adventures are an Italian work of art and must not be distorted to make it American," he stated. There's no evidence that any action was ever taken toward his complaint.

Fact #2519

Edwards went on to voice the role of Jim Crow in Disney's "Dumbo" (1941), where he sang "When I See an Elephant Fly." He reprised the role of Jiminy Cricket in numerous Disney cartoons over the next two decades.

Fact #2520

The film eventually made a profit during its re-release in 1945. Disney would put the film back into theaters a total of seven times between 1945 and 1992.

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I hope you all enjoyed these facts as much as I did!