The Disney version was about Gepetto, who wants a son but not a wife so the Blue Fairy brings his wooden puppet to life. Pinocchio (Dick Jones, who would later become a tv star on Range Rider and Buffalo Bill Jr.) longs to be a real boy, which means obeying your parents, going to school, and conforming to 1940s society. Of course, he fails. He is lured to "Pleasure Island," an all-boy paradise where boys can smoke, gamble, get into fights, and stay up late, ultimately turning into donkeys. His salvation comes when he sacrifices his life to save his father. He is resurrected as a real boy (insert Christ metaphor here).
1. A son created without a wife, a single-father family.
2. An oddball outsider longs to fit in, to become a "real boy."
Later versions have often noticed -- and tried to "fix" -- the gay content, often with disastrous results.
1. The 1968 musical version starred rocker Peter Noone (right) as Pinocchio and Burl Ives as Gepetto. It minimized the woodenness to emphasize the alternate family.
3. In a heterosexist 2000 version, comedian Drew Carey became a middle-aged Gepetto, with Seth Adkins as the wooden boy and Julia-Louis Dreyfuss as the Blue Fairy/girlfriend/surrogate mother.
4. In 2002, Roberto Begnini became a rather old version of the wooden boy. This time he's the one who gets the Blue Fairy girlfriend.
The Begnini version is horrifying because he is just too old to play Pinochio. The classic Disney version is very very gay- bear daddy Gepetto praying to the Blue Fairy. The Fox and the Cat sing about how "an actors life is gay" before selling Pinocchio to Stromboli a leathery Italian who puts Pinochio in a cage. In the films most terrifying scene Lampwick is turned into a donkey after having fun with the other boys in Pleasure Island- which sounds like the name of a gay bar.
ReplyDeleteThere's a new vrsion on Amazon Prime that is apparently closer to the original novel. I haven't watched because the trailer shows Pinocchio getting chummy with a girl.
DeleteIn the version by Disney fandom (and in other fandoms) quite a few people ship Pinocchio and Lampwick. Lampwick was a bad boy but he genuinely liked Pinocchio. He was the only person in the film besides his father and their pets, who was his friend, who didn’t use him in anyway, he just wanted to hang out with Pinocchio. As for Pinocchio he obviously had a crush on Lampwick and wanted to do what his crush was doing.
ReplyDeleteAnd in every AU from G to M Lampwick is eventually turned back into a boy so he can be with Pinocchio. Pinocchio’s father would approve once he saw that Lampwick was trying to live a better life and allow them to date.