The Notorious 1987 Sorta Sequel Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night is Pure Nightmare Fuel
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In the 1980s, Filmation, the animation powerhouse behind Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Star Trek: The Animated Series and various DC productions decided to get into the movie business in the laziest, most derivative possible manner.
The cynical opportunists decided that the best way to compete with Disney was by shamelessly ripping them off with a frenzy of exploitative sequels. In 1985 Filmation announced plans to release no less than thirteen feature films based on preexisting intellectual property with titles like The New Adventures of Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfelles, The Challenge of Cinderella, Time Machine II: The Man Who Saved the Future, Bambi: Prince of the Forest. 20 Million Leagues Across the Universe, Frankenstein Lives Again!, The Further Adventures of Gulliver, The Son of Sleeping Beauty, L. Frank Baum's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The Continuing Adventures of the Jungle Book, New Tales of Arabian Nights and Alice Returns to Wonderland.
I actually think this is a very good, not at all unethical idea, as evidenced by my upcoming books Running With Scissors Again, Sex, Drugs and Additional Cocoa Puffs and An Even More Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
People might say I’m crassly ripping off those writers without their permission. Despite the lawsuits those ingrates are filing against me, I think of it more as homage.
Disney responded to Filmation’s scheme predictably. “Hey, you can’t make sequels to all those movies! Those are OUR movies. Get your own! No fair!” The House of Mouse shouted through its lawyers.
Filmation responded that, TECHNICALLY, they were fairy tales in the public domain so anyone could make reboots or sequels or prequels but the damage was done.
Of the thirteen films announced, only two were ever made and released: 1987’s Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night and 1989’s Happily Ever After.
Disney sued Filmation for ripping it off and while it is true that both films are ostensibly based on the same book Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night doesn’t adapt Carlo Collodi’s novel so much as it adapts the Disney masterpiece.
When Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night is following slavishly in the footsteps of the original you can’t help but think, “Christ, this is EXACTLY like the Disney version but terrible. It fucking sucks.” When it deviates from the version everyone knows and loves, in sharp contrast, you think, “Ugh, this is NOTHING like the Disney version. It fucking sucks.”
You can’t win. It’s not worth trying. Later Disney would very lucratively get into the business of cranking out cheap follow ups to some of the greatest films ever made. They learned from Filmation’s mistakes, of which there are many.
Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night opens a year after Pinocchio has been made into a real boy by his Fairy Godmother. He’s got no strings to hold him down! No, wait, that’s the other, real version.
This is the bootleg, baby! To celebrate, kindly Gepetto, voiced by the effortlessly paternal and warm Tom Bosley, throws a birthday party attended by the former puppet’s Fairy Godmother.
Ethereal eighties oddball Rickie Lee Jones voices the Fairy Godmother; listen closely and you can actually hear the monster bong rips Jones clearly took between each take. She is blazing and amazing as the most obviously stoned fairy in the history of children’s entertainment. The fact that she keeps ad-libbing about wanting Dorito’s and telling the audience not to narc on her is a giveaway.
Jones was fascinatingly miscast because she's a singer. God knows she’s not a voiceover artist. Yet the synthesizer-soiled saccharine ditty she croons barely qualifies as music.
Watching Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night put me back in touch with that ominous sensation of watching a cheap kid’s cartoon and thinking, “Oh fuck. Another song” every time one of these crudely animated creatures begins to croon cloyingly.
Of course this wouldn’t be a bootleg knockoff sequel without a major supporting character who is EXACTLY like a character they presumably couldn’t get the rights for, but terrible, slightly different and with a new name.
Love Jiminy Cricket, that iconic sentient Conscience with a tune in his heart and love and fear in his soul? Then you may be able to grudgingly tolerate Gee Willikers, a wooden glow worm blessed and cursed with the unholy gift of sentience voiced by Don Knotts.
Being a dumb fuck who didn’t learn ANYTHING about Pinocchio’s puppet stage, Gepetto unwisely gives him an expensive jewel box to deliver to the mayor after he promises not to get up to any mischief.
This proves a mistake. Pinocchio is human in the sense that he’s a lying, selfish, deceitful, self-absorbed piece of shit who only thinks about himself. I guess he also has a capacity for love and self-sacrifice or whatever but mostly what makes him human is his awful personality.
Pinocchio’s awful personality and extreme gullibility lead to him being separated from the jewel box by raccoon con artist Scalawag (Ed Asner) and his vaguely offensive monkey sidekick Igor (Frank Welker).
That’s nothing, however, compared to the indignity he suffers next. Evil puppeteer Puppetino transforms Pinocchio back into a puppet in one of many scenes in the film that are way more dark and disturbing than they’re supposed to be.
Scenes like this verge on Cronenbergian body horror. To feel your body transforming from flesh and bone and muscle into hollow wood is a horror almost beyond human imagining.
Like so much of the film it’s pure nightmare fuel but not in a good way. The story of Pinocchio is so inherently grim that even when done perfectly, with incredible artistry, care and imagination it’s still legitimately traumatizing. When done badly, Pinocchio’s nightmare descent becomes a bad scene, an animated acid trip, a stone cold bummer.
The Fairy Godmother shows up as a deus ex machina to once again save Pinocchio from himself. Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night is rambling and episodic, which is to say that it’s just one goddamn thing after another.
Pinocchio ends up battling an evil carnival with a sinister connection with The Emperor of the Night, a figure of Satanic evil voiced by James Earl Jones.
This is the only element of the film that impressed me. Where the rest of the animation is alternately bland and viscerally disturbing The Emperor of the Night has been brought to life with audacity and imagination.
He’s a demonic, four-armed force of nature, hell personified, a more than worthy antagonist for our shitty protagonist. Then he’s easily defeated and the film goes right back to sucking.
There’s something inherently fascinating about bootleg sequels and unintentionally unsettling kid’s cartoons from our fuzzily remembered childhoods. The film’s off-brand weirdness is even more pronounced because the original is so well known that we know damn near every beat by heart.
Even with a running time that barely tops eighty minutes this is an endurance test. It’s certainly not the worst or creepiest version of Pinocchio, a story about life’s inexorable horrors and the grim crucible of pain and humiliation that is adolescence, but it’s pretty goddamn bad and creepy all the same.
That’s what makes it grubbily compelling if ultimately extremely tedious.
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