“See the words on the sign in that window?” he sings of the neighboring tailor shop, Mancuso and Son’s. He wants a child because he’s jealous of all the other father-son establishments on his block. You see, this Geppetto doesn’t want a child because he’s lonely and feeling paternal cravings. Of the people who shouldn’t have childrenĪs he stalks the upper levels of his toy shop, stroking his cat Figaro like a judgmental Cleveland-based Blofeld, it’s easy to think, “Sure, this is all a bit creepy, but he just wants to be a daaaaaad!” But boy oh boy do Stern, Moore, and Schwartz have a curveball planned. “There must be a slip-up in heaven’s workshop It’s followed by this misanthropic lyric: Drew Carey himself, who doesn’t come off as a charming Italian paternal figure so much as an exact imitation of me walking around my apartment after taking a Benadryl, singing half-remembered Disney songs.Ĭarey’s Geppetto is also - and I cannot state this often enough - a bespectacled and bewigged toymaker who spends an opening number not interacting with the various excited patrons who have rushed into his shop to examine his latest playthings, but instead moping about why he can’t get laid.įorget “When You Wish Upon a Star.” This Geppetto lurks in the corner singing things like, “Why is it the people who shouldn’t have children who have children?” That is both a sentence that’s missing at least one conjunction, and the toymaker’s “We live in a society” battle cry, a perma-virgin “I want” moment. There is no Jiminy Cricket in 2000’s Geppetto, but there is Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Blue Fairy who brings Pinocchio to life, Brent Spiner as the duplicitous puppetmaster Stromboli, and Usher in the pivotal role of Carnival Barker Who Fucks. But it yielded one of Disney’s best animated features, a high watermark for the studio in terms of craft and storytelling. To be fair, Collodi’s novel has its fair share of demented flourishes, like Pinocchio murdering his talking-cricket conscience with a hammer, burning his own feet off, or being hanged by bandits and left for dead. When the puppet comes to life and runs off on a picaresque series of adventures, Geppetto spends the rest of the story scouring the countryside to find him. The traditional version of the character is a poor, lonely man who so desperately wants a child that he carves one out of wood. That’s quite the departure from the kindly Italian woodcarver from the book and the 1940 animated Disney classic Pinocchio. So imagine my surprise when a rewatch revealed that the film isn’t the charming twist on a familiar story I remembered - it’s a nightmare tale about an incel toymaker gaslighting his wooden son into a life of anarchy. To be fair, Childhood Me loved this bizarre cultural artifact, which attempted to capitalize both on Carey’s early-millennium celebrity, and on the resurgence in made-for-TV musicals inspired by the hit 1997 Brandy / Whitney Houston version of Cinderella. The resulting film purports to tell the story of Pinocchio from his creator’s point of view, introducing the toymaker in an opening narration as an “overlooked character” as if he’s Third Guy From the Right instead of the protagonist’s father. The composer allegedly developed the project as a reunion for Mary Poppins stars Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke, but when Andrews dropped out due to throat surgery, the casting possibility of van Dyke went off the table and the creators had to settle for the next best thing: Drew Carey. Stern and directed by Tom Moore, featuring songs penned by Broadway veteran and Hunchback of Notre Dame lyricist Stephen Schwartz. The 2000 Disney TV musical Geppetto was written by David I. But only one adaptation sends Pinocchio on a hellish descent into madness parallel to the one Todd Phillips tracks in Joker. Eventually, he learns to behave, and becomes a flesh-and-blood boy. Most adaptations of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio follow the same threads: a fairy brings a puppet to life, and he runs around having ill-advised adventures. Over the past 110 years, the living puppet Pinocchio has been played by everyone from 1950s Western hero Dick Jones to 1990s tween heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas to 2000s adult man Roberto Benigni.
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