My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a great jazzy arrangement of “I[‘ve] Got No Strings” by Paul Langford. The original song was written for the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio and was also released the same year, with slightly different lyrics, by Decca Records. Most post-1940 performances use the Decca lyrics, I suspect because they fit into a more generalized meaning than the film’s wording, which is closely tied to the scene at the marionette theater where Pinocchio performs along with other, stringed puppets. I’ll include videos and lyrics for the two different versions at the end of this post.
The original story of the wooden puppet who comes to life was written by an Italian, Carlo Collodi, in the late 1800’s. His tale is considerably darker than the Disney version. Pinocchio is downright nasty! He kills Jiminy Cricket! With a hammer! (The cricket reappears as a ghost later on in the story.) There’s a lot of violence in the original that doesn’t appear in the film: Pinocchio goes to sleep with his feet propped up on the stove and wakes up to find that they’ve burned off; Geppetto makes him some new ones. Pinocchio bites off a cat’s front paw when the cat is disguised as a bandit. At one point Pinocchio is being hanged, but apparently he’s taking too long to die and so his would-be murderers, the cat and the fox, wander off. The Turquoise/Azure/Blue Fairy rescues him. And so on.
Yes, it has. But that’s what always happens. If successive generations couldn’t put their own stamp on sources, we’d be pretty limited in what we could read, see and hear. There’s a theory that there are only around seven plots that show up in every piece of fiction ever written. I’m not sure that I quite buy that, but it’s certainly true that the same themes show up over and over again. We never tire of true love’s triumph, for instance. And I am especially fond of fairy tales, having devoured so many of them when I was in grade school. How exciting it always was to go to the bookmobile with my mom and see what new choices were there. If a book had the word “fairy” in the title, I was game.