NEXT TEMPTATION: PLEASURE ISLAND

Now the Blue Fairy makes her second appearance. Pinocchio and Jiminy are commiserating inside the birdcage, the cricket failing dismally at cheering up the puppet and only making himself more miserable. Outside the window the rain has abated and suddenly that distant glimmering star approaches again. The prisoners realize it’s their benefactress approaching and shamefaced both try to hide, Jiminy in the seed of a birdfeeder, Pinocchio by turning away and bending over. So upon her arrival, the Fairy is greeted by both of them mooning her! When she asks for an explanation of their predicament, Pinocchio volunteers lie after lie and with each falsehood his nose grows longer.

Nowadays this famous image has become the cultural icon for prevarication! His tall tales finally beyond any modicum of plausibility, Pinocchio’s nose sprouts branches, including a bird’s nest with two eggs in it, which hatch, the birds mature and fly away, the leaves wilt and shrivel.

“What happened?” asks the bewildered puppet, turning his head face-forward so that his elongated proboscis extends right up to the camera. “A lie keeps growing until it becomes as plain as the nose on your face,” the Fairy warns him. Pinocchio apologizes. Jiminy begs for mercy. The Fairy relents, but advises them that this is the last time she can help; and with a touch of her wand and a big burst of radiance she vanishes, leaving the puppet’s nose reduced to normal size, the padlock undone and the door to the birdcage wide open. Puppet and cricket waste no time in escaping the wagon, though Pinocchio – ever the naïf – almost blows it by shouting “Good-bye, Mr. Stomboli!”

Now a slow multiplane camera zoom through foggy mist toward the entrance and into the seedy bowels of the Red Lobster Inn, where Honest John and Gideon are recounting to the Coachman their grand pecuniary success at selling Pinocchio to Stromboli, plunking down on the tabletop a puny bag of coin. The Coachman trumps that with a substantially larger purse, theirs if they help him corral “stupid little boys” he can lure off to Pleasure Island. Huddling together secretively, they continue to conspire over booze and tobacco, drunken Gideon trying to keep up by pressing his ear against Honest John’s to discern what the Coachman is whispering into the fox’s other ear. Here we get Mel Blanc’s second hiccup.

There’s no danger of legal ramifications, the Coachman assures fox and cat, because the poor deluded youngsters “never come back – as boys!” whereupon his face transforms into that demonic physiognomy I mentioned earlier. We leave the three of them conferring on details of the plot as…

Jiminy and Pinocchio have challenged each other to a race to see which can reach Geppetto’s cottage first. The cricket of course leaves the puppet well behind in the dust and also once more in the clutches of Honest John and Gideon, who happen to encounter him running down the street. “Oh, hello,” says the puppet with curt and unenthused politeness. Consistent with their former encounter, the slapstick comedy resumes as the fox in the guise of a doctor convinces the gullible wooden boy that he is seriously ill, in fact “allergic” – though to what he never even needs to specify. But no matter, the poor puppet’s health appears to deteriorate right before our eyes, his hair disheveled, his pallor pale, his clothing coming untucked, his hat askew. The cure according to doctor fox is a vacation at that fabulous resort, Pleasure Island. Proffering an Ace which he apparently keeps up his sleeve for cheating at cards, Honest John surrenders his own “reservation” so the puppet can go in his place and regain his health. Jiminy returns to find out what is delaying his charge only to witness once again fox and cat carting Pinocchio away dangling between them.

The coach leaves at midnight and onboard is our hero sitting on the driver’s seat right next to the Coachman, who whips the fleet of miserably sad donkeys yoked ahead of the vehicle. On his other side is a new character, Lampwick, an obnoxious delinquent, so self-centered he talks right over Pinocchio’s naïve attempts at friendly conversation.

“Lucignolo” in Collodi’s novel, Lampwick, now animated as self-caricature by Fred Moore, speaks a slang-ridden tough-kid dialogue delivered by Frankie Darro (1917-1976). Clinging to a stirrup below and choking on the dust is Jiminy. The trip to Pleasure Island is dispensed with quickly in a montage of striking images showing first the coach, then a side-wheeler paddleboat traversing the moonlit sea, then the disgorging of its cacophonous young passengers through the wide-open gate into the park.

Collodi called the place “Paese dei Balocchi”, i.e. Toyland. Although Disney renamed it Boobyland as it was called in Yasha Frank’s stage play, its temptations consisted at first mainly of sugar consumption in the forms of candy, ice cream and baked confections, which might have more accurately deserved the designation Candyland, such as had been depicted in Disney’s 1935 short Cookie Carnival. The appelation “Pleasure Island” was a late decision.

By this time Walt had become father of two daughters, Diane (1933-2013) and Sharon (1936-1993), and soon began taking them to a nearby amusement park. His dim opinion of such tawdry places led during the ’50s to the imagineering of Disneyland and a thorough deconstruction of the entire amusement park industry. At first glance, Pleasure Island is bright, colorful, festive, but its midway features such unamusing attractions as The Rough House, where boys can “pick a fight”, a pristine Greco-Roman style Model Home, “open for destruction”, and Tobacco Row, where gigantic automated Native Americans (a.k.a. wooden “drugstore Indians”) dispense cigars tossing them by the handsful to the eager young hoodlums thronging below. Pinocchio, under the tutelage of his new buddy Lampwick, jumps right into the mayhem along with all the other ruffians. Jiminy, searching, gets nearly trampled in the riotous rampage.