My Childhood Not-Disney Pinocchio Quest

If it's not a good game or catholic...who do you call?...why Pokematic "hi."

I might be a little late to the "year of Pinocchio" hype since that was late 2022 with the Disney remake, Guillermo del Toro version, and some mockbuster riding the wave of these movies, and it's now early 2023 and may not be relevant, but this is when I looked into it and found everything. Onto the story. So every now and then I try to find vague memories from my childhood, because I have a fair amount of mostly forgotten media from my childhood, and something that's been in-and-out of my search is the not-Disney Pinocchio tapes from my childhood. When I was little the version of Pinocchio I would watch was based on who's house I was at; my paternal grandparents had the Disney version, my maternal grandparents had a not-Disney version, and my parents had yet another not-Disney version. 5-6 years ago I decided to see if I could find them, because how many different versions of Pinocchio could there possibly be? Well, turns out there are a lot of them, and none of them on wikipedia were what I remembered. I did manage to find this video on like the 4th page of results for "not-disney Pinocchio VHS," which is the one my parents had, but I lost the clip shortly after finding it.

Last year I made a post to r/tipofmytongue looking for the marionette pirate movie I watched when I was little, and that worked out (which was Davy Jones' Locker - Bil Baird's Marionettes by the way), so tonight January 12th 2023 I decided to ask r/tipofmytongue to see if they could help me find the Pinocchio tapes.

Here are the memories I was going to post in r/tipofmytongue:

• It opens with a night sky or snow drift with Pinocchio singing "I have a dream of wishes."
• Geppetto is in his shop and hears a voice coming from a piece of wood. He starts to carve a head in the wood and that frees Pinocchio and he starts singing his name "pin-o-cchio, pin-o-cchio."
• Pinocchio is at a carnival and falls into the orchestra, breaking the conductor's baton. When the conductor is angry at him he says "I'm very sorry mister, but now you have two."
• Pinocchio befriends a clown with a pointed hat that plays the guitar.
• Pinocchio is being chased by a dog and runs up a tree to get away from it, and then starts chanting "na-na-na-na-na-nah" (I remember this because I got in trouble for repeating it once).
• Pinocchio tells the clown to start playing Geppetto's song and he scare's off the dog or whatever as he comes up the hill.

The "dream of wishes" was from my grandparent's tape and the "carves a head" bit was from my parent's tape, and I thought the rest were on my grandparent's tape. So I was going to say "I looked through the wikipedia article for Pinocchio and the section of non-Disney adaptations and none of these were it," but that was true 5-6 years ago and the thing about wikipedia is it's constantly changing, so I clicked through them to say "it may sound like this, but it isn't" (which is what I was about to say with this adaptation, The Adventures of Pinocchio 1978 since it seems like the "carve a head" description but it isn't).

Well as I was clicking through to say "this isn't it," I ended up actually finding one, the "I have a dream of wishes" one from my grandparents. It turns out it was the Golden Films/Goodtimes Entertainment version.

OK, so that's that. Here's where things got confusing. I could have sworn everything but the "carves a head" thing was in this one. I vividly remember watching those things on my grandparent's couch on their console TV, not my parent's house, but they were nowhere to be found in this movie. Maybe I was mixing it up with some other version or cartoon my grandparents had (they had some "1 hour of classic cartoons" VHS tapes, so maybe it was a cartoon on there). I also remembered nothing from this version except the opening song, which was weird because I thought I watched this version all the time, but whatever, I found the maternal grandparent's version.

I still was at a loss for the not-Disney Pinocchio tape my parents had though. Sure, I found the first 10 minutes years ago, but I probably wasn't searching logged into youtube (and I remember finding it on the 3rd or 4th page of bing), but hail marry I went to my watch history and typed in "Pinocchio," and there it was. I thought "this is great, I can link the clip to see if anyone knows more about this mysterious 'not-Disney' Pinocchio," but low and behold the uploader had information in the description of the video; "United American Video release of an English-dubbed edition of a Russian Pinocchio adaptation titled Priklyucheniya Buratino." I decided to google "Priklyucheniya Buratino" and the full version was uploaded by the same user.

I skimmed through it and it seemed to be the version that had all the other memories (notably the clown that plays guitar), but something was off. It didn't have the baton clip or the dog chase or the "Geppetto to the rescue over the hill." Like, this is exactly the art style and lip sync I remember (which I remember not being the best, and given it's a dub of a Russian cartoon that was probably done rather cheaply, that makes sense), so it had to be it, but it doesn't have the things that stuck with me for 25 years.

So that thing about dubs, apparently this was an edited version (48 minutes compared to 62), and the very little information I could find on this says there were multiple releases of this dub (or attempts at dubbing), so this might have been a different release. Here's the original Russian version.

At 18:46 is the baton breaking bit and at 49:11 is the dog chase bit. Not sure about the Geppetto thing, that could have just been a false memory (like how I thought a relative was on the ship with the kid in Davey Jones Locker but wasn't). I was still "on the tip of my tongue" though, since there was some alternate/uncut dub out there and it seemed to be hard to find (I'm searching "the adventures of Pinocchio" and there are multiple movies with that title, and while there was a wikipedia and IMDB page for it, they weren't giving much to go off of). One of the commenters of the video said "this is a weird cut version, this is the one I remember" but the link went to a deleted video. I seemed to be stuck.

Well, then I remembered that archive.org is a thing, and they sometimes archive full youtube videos with the youtube page, and I had the link. This was a REALLY low odds shot, because while archive.org does a pretty good job of copying the internet it's not perfect and is going to miss a lot that isn't "high enough profile," so this obscure Pinocchio adaptation is probably not popular enough to get archived, right? 

That was it, I had found the video from my parents. This seems like such an odd thing to archive, but I'm glad I found it. Given that I lived with my parents and not my grandparents I guess it is to be expected that I watched my parent's Pinocchio more often so the memories would be stronger with that one. This was some wild ride, and I'm glad I now have access to the not-Disney Pinocchio movies I had as a kid. Maybe I'll review them, but for now this is just my adventure finding them.