Pinocchio's Christmas

From the beginning, Rankin Bass started their stop-motion and general career with The Adventure of Pinocchio. A TV Show I’ll review later, with the limitations that episodes are rare to find and youtube only showed the first few episodes. There could be a theory that Pinocchio was to be rebooted with the episodes close to Collodi’s books, but stop-motion TV shows are mostly rare in the 80s in America. Best solution would be a short special, and add Christmas to the runtime and you get Pinocchio’s Christmas.

A lumberjack chops down a tree from an enchanted forest, who gave the lumber to Gepetto (voiced by Heat Miser’s George S. Irving). There was something so sacred, something magical that Gepetto can make a puppet out of it. Thus he made Pinocchio as his son.

Within a year later, it just happened to be Christmas. Gepetto had a talk to reflection to think what to get Pinocchio for Christmas without telling him he’s cheeky.

*Gepetto’s reflection turns into Snow Miser.*

“Mind your blood pressure. Mother warns you about that hot temper.”

-Snow Miser from The Year Without Santa Claus.

Pinocchio had a math book as a gift from his father, Gepetto He gets persuade by a Fox and Cat to bury his coins to grow a money tree (as it was from the book.) Pinocchio lost the coins to Fox and Cat, as he works for a puppet master named Fire Eater (voiced by Alan King, who I swear is Kublai losing weight.) as his puppet. Pinocchio steals one of Fire Eater’s female puppets and ran into the middle of the Enchanted Forest. After Pinocchio had a fun musical encounter with Fox and Cat, he got to the place where the Blue Fairy and the Cricket (he kicked out months ago) are at.

This is the first of the pattern I noticed in this era of Rankin Bass Christmas films, namely Christmas became an afterthought. You can argue that Christmas In July and Jack Frost started that phase, but the thing is both of those films have Christmas characters to tie it to Christmas that without them isn’t a Christmas film. Pinocchio isn’t a Christmas characters. If you take Christmas and Santa at the end out, it’s just Pinocchio’s Birthday. Hell, there’s more Cricket Christmas than Puppet Christmas, excluding the Muppets. This is part of the reason I don’t include this film as part of continuity, as more reason why I wouldn’t care for this film aside from good performances that stands out.

This is the last time we hear George S. Irving (for a while) and Allen Swift (who voiced the Fox). In fact, this is at this time of Rankin Bass when most of the actors are either retiring, moving on to other project, or being part of Rankin Bass TV shows, Bob McFadden is one of them who remain.

Much like Wind and the Willow and most of the Festival of Family Classics, I mostly wanted to avoid this film because of a famous Disney everyone praises. For every forgettable versions are made, the Disney version as well as all of their films gets better as others get worst. If you want a better Pinocchio Christmas, then go watch Two Ronnie’s sketch of Pinocchio 2, as part of their Christmas special. There’s even an anime series that had a Christmas episode. It’s a weird world we live in.

Regretfully for me to say to this film there are strings pulling for Pinocchio’s Christmas, but not in a good way. Let’s move from Italy to Ireland and too see if Christmas still means a thing.