No Good Very Bad Movies 12: The one that was supposed to be the worst kids' movie ever

 

Title: Pinocchio In Outer Space

What Year?: 1965

Classification: Weird Sequel/ Knockoff/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

In the last few months, the big change on this blog has been that I’m finally doing animation in quantity. As a further consequence, I’ve had to make quite a few judgment calls about what belongs in this feature. At first, I was content with the Gobots movie as representative of the animation category. Then I added The Wild to represent Disney. As a follow-up, I took a look at one more movie as an option for either this or my animation feature. I decided it belonged here, not because it was “bad” but because of its notoriety and sheer strangeness. Without further ado, I present Pinocchio In Outer Space, and the strangest part off the bat is that they get the space stuff mostly right.

Our story begins with a reintroduction to Pinocchio, the most famous character from a book nobody has read. We learn that our protagonist has been a real boy, but got turned back into a puppet for bad behavior. Meanwhile, Geppetto is still running his toy shop even as the rest of the world is in the space race, which technically means at least 25 years passed in real time since the Disney movie. In a new wrinkle, Monstro the whale has returned as Astro, a rocket-propelled space cetacean that is smashing Earth’s spacecraft. On his way to school, Pinocchio meets Honest John, who gives a motivational song and a book on hypnosis, and Nertle, an alien of a species called Twurtles sent to investigate the disturbances in the solar system.  Pinocchio is ADD enough to join the quest, which will take him through space, a lost Martian civilization and an actual nuclear explosion. It all comes down to a showdown with Astro, with the book on hypnosis as the only weapon, and the all-important moral is… don’t skip school???

Pinocchio In Outer Space is a 1965 animated film, nominally based on the 1883 novel by Carlo Collodi. In fact, the movie drew at a number of points on the 1940 treatment by Disney. The film was a collaboration between producers Norm Prescott and Fred Ladd and the Belgian animation studio Belvision, possibly with the original intent of creating a TV pilot. The voice cast was led by Peter Lazer as Pinocchio and stalwart Arnold Stang as Nurtle. Martin Caidin, a novelist and historical writer previously given indirect notice in my Marx Soviet soldier blog for The Tigers Are Burning, was credited as technical advisor. Some have speculated that the animation was done by just two individuals, though IMDB lists a crew of 29, comparable to that of 49 on Disney’s The Jungle Book. The film was released with a reported length of 71 minutes, somewhat longer than the length of available recordings. The film received further notoriety from Michael and Harry Medved’s book Son of the Golden Turkey Awards, where it “won” as “Most Insufferable Kiddie Movie Ever Made”. Prescott continued as cofounder and executive of Filmation, while Ladd became prominent as an importer (and arguable butcher) of anime. Belvision remained best known for their TV and film adaptations of the Tintin comics. The movie was released on VHS and at least once on DVD.

For my experiences, the first thing I will say is that I read the faithful and complete story of Pinocchio as a kid, and I can confidently and absolutely say it is awful. By comparison, I really didn’t know much about the Disney movie until I ran it down as an adult. But then what really weighed on my mind going into this is just how broad and confounding even my early experiences of animation were. By the time I was 12, I had seen Fantasia and the Battletoads pilot (which I kind of owe an apology for comparing to Ingagi). I think that right there is why I may be exactly the worst kind of person to handle a film like this. If you’ve really seen the hellscape of bottom-tier animation, even an amusingly bad entry like the Gobots movie can be a pleasant surprise. When a film exceeds expectations far enough to be impressive, it can be as disconcerting as the “uncanny valley”. I was brought to the point of remembering a line from Heavy Metal; to bowdlerize, you know your perspective is shot, but you’ve got to work the controls like you’re straight.

Moving on to the movie itself, it can be said at the start that even in the 1960s, the absolute kaka of the animation field didn’t get anywhere near theaters, and this presents a case and point. On further consideration, it is at a minimum more tolerable than plenty of live-action kiddie fair, as evidenced by fellow Golden Turkey nominee Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.  Even its notorious musical numbers are in my view far preferable to the alleged rock and roll of many a willfully hip offering. What certainly is jarring is the strangeness factor, which as often happens is magnified by its evident seriousness. The science offered is incongruously good, all the more so when compared to the gaffs and improbabilities of many science fiction shows and movies then and since. (It’s one of several movies I’ve seen recently to make me think of the iconic Galaxy Quest line, “Is there air???”) The monsters are clearly able to do real damage. The characters show understandable emotional reactions. Then there are the jarringly matter-of-fact Cold War references, up to and including a quite realistic mushroom cloud. (I suppose we should be grateful Astro’s rocket is on his fin…) Even more warped to my eye is the final moment of the movie, when a rocket roars past the celestial home of the fairies with no comment from them. Sure, it could be a harmless civilian craft, but I’d definitely be trying to find out…

What really made this movie interesting enough to write about, however, is the rather warped moral. My take on it is that the story, whatever its intentions, almost always puts Pinocchio in the right. Of course, the right answer to his moral dilemmas is to get Nurtle in touch with competent adults, but if the stupid kids in E.T. are supposed to get a pass, Pinocchio certainly deserves a break. He knows of a threat to property and human life; he meets someone who might solve it; and he risks his own neck to help him. Even more importantly, he clearly has empathy and concern for others, plus enough rational foresight to figure out that leaving a space whale to crater itself and a chunk of Earth isn’t going to help anyone. Yet, the dramatic emphasis is still on his breakdown at being scolded by the moralizing fairy who previously gave him humanity and apparently took it back for acting too human. Though I’m usually on Team Authority Figure, I’m definitely siding with the puppet over an entity with small-g god powers who literally knits while a possible ICBM goes through her yard.

That leaves the “one scene”, and for a change, I’m going with a musical number.  10 minutes in, Pinocchio meets the fox Honest John Sharp and his partner the cat, refashioned as Groovy. The pair are friendly to Pinocchio, who reciprocates for no obvious reason given the events of either the original story (which I definitely remember them from) or the Disney movie. When Pinocchio talks about his hope to stop Astro, the pair initially laugh, but then the fox bursts into a song, “Doing The Impossible”, illustrated with the usual examples of bees that can’t fly and spiders with webs stronger than steel. It’s standard platitudes, put to a catchy tune and some of the movie’s best animation. (I especially like the spider snaring the cat’s brief case.) And you know what? It’s a good message for young viewers, which gives a sympathetic  twist on the character to boot. It’s this moment and a fair number like it that redeem the movie, at least enough to be a curiosity worth attention rather than a self-dated relic.

In closing, this is one time I don’t feel a need to explain the rating. It should go without saying that I’m not calling this a great movie. If you go into this movie with the criticisms of its detractors in mind, it will be very clear very quickly that they were not wrong. What the mockery doesn’t capture is what the movie did right, and still more just how much audacity was behind it. The 1960s were in their own way as poor a decade for Disney animation as the 1970s and 1980s, as the already expansive media empire coasted along on old favorites and a few good new ones while the suits snuffled toward live-action films (including some very strong candidates for the “worst” Disney movie!). With that fully in mind, a brazen and reasonably clever knockoff like this was nothing less than a commendable antiauthoritarian gesture. It lost, and it deserved to, but it offered something worth remembering, even if you don’t want to. And with that, I’m done for another day.