Okay so everyone always thinks about
Pinocchio's nose because it's quite literally right there in your face but
have you ever considered this ? In order to keep standing Pinocchio would need to
bend backwards significantly to balance out the added weight of that branch and
eventually even the bird's nest at the end. But look!
Pinocchio isn't leaning back at all to compensate which means that he must have
some kind of counterbalance growing in his uh-oh .... Oh my.... I like BIG BUTTS and I cannot lie! Hello Internet!
Welcome to Film Theory! The show that has no corporate strings to hold us down -
which is why we get to talk about things like child slavery and Disney films.
That's right, today we're going all the way back to that Disney classic about
the exploitation of child laborers Pinocchio. Now as a kid this movie just
really provided me with years worth of Nightmare fuel.
I mean Monstros mouth anyone? Children turning into literal work mules! It's
terrifying but looking back on it now Pinocchio actually raises a lot of
questions. Like, did people really just throw money during marionette shows like
some kind of puppet strip club? If people who go to Pleasure Island become
jackasses are the other animals that we see throughout the movie also people?
Or are they're just animals who actually do walk around as living
creatures? What about this Fox is awfully human. What about Jiminy Cricket? We
haven't even gotten into the logistics of literally lighting a fire inside a
whale! Sadly though, all these questions are gonna have to wait for another day
because today we are tackling everyone's favorite subject - business. Specifically
the business of Pleasure Island. The bizarro 1940s bad boys utopia. “Look at yourself. Smoking tobacco! Playing pool!” Today's
episode is all about the incredibly scary reality that Pleasure Island as we
see it in the movie Pinocchio could have actually existed in real life. I like to
call this episode "How to Succeed in Child Slavery Without Really Trying". But
first, a recap because I can't assume that you guys have seen this Pinocchio
is really old at this point. I mean to kids nowadays Tangled is probably like
the furthest back they go and call it a Disney classic. Oh boy! Anyway, this guy
name Geppetto is a clock maker and a vaguely European disney-esque country
around the turn of the century, who makes a marionette named Pinocchio and then
wishes for him to become a real boy boy . the Blue Fairy comes down and grants his
wish but in a pure dick move only grants the wish half way because apparently
fairies can just do that for the lols. I've given you life because
night Geppetto wished for a real boy. So instead of Pinocchio becoming a real boy he instead becomes a
living puppet monster. Geppetto wakes up sees that his marionette has come to
life and like anyone would do in this situation
goes back to sleep. The next morning though he then shoves Pinocchio out the
door saying hey you've existed for 12 hours now surely you can figure out
school right? On the way Pinocchio meets two Foxy swindlers - Honest John Foulfellow and Gideon who proceeded to swindle Pinocchio several times and
doing multiple stupid things like becoming an actor. Until finally leaving
with them to Pleasure Island along with a horde of kidnapped children. Once
Pinocchio and the small army of young boys arrived at Pleasure Island they
drink, smoke, trash a mansion, and destroy all the rides. So basically they become
the 1940s equivalent of team 10. Every day bro! But every good vacation has to
come to an end and the boys start to regret all that indulgence when they
start turning into literal donkeys! It's revealed that the big scheme behind
the entirety of Pleasure Island is to transform boys into donkeys, who are then
sold off to work in salt mines while the owners of Pleasure Island to make
themselves a hefty little profit. Or is there actually a profit to be had here
at all? Yhis whole thing sounds so ridiculous and far-fetched is there any
chance that kidnapping kids transforming them into donkeys and then selling them
off to the highest bidder is actually a profitable business venture? I mean look
at this! The kids destroy the amusement park! So should the owners of Pleasure
Island just scrap their half-assed plans - or I guess in this case fully-assed
plans - and just sell off the park to become yet another Six Flags?
No! No they shouldn't! Child kidnapping and donkey sales are actually
surprisingly profitable and I'm about to show you how! Aren't Disney episodes fun?
So the first question is how much is a donkey actually worth? Going by a equine.com's prices it seems like most jackasses today sell between $500 and
$2,000 each. Unless of course you're an MTV branded jackass in which case you're
worth two and a half million dollars. Since our child jackasses are certainly
more intelligent than most will use the $2,000 per jackass price range. "You are a
great talker. You were like top dog." Since Pinocchio happens sometimes
around the late 1800s or early 1900s as indicated by the ferris wheel first
introduced in 1893 we're gonna adjust for inflation and estimate that each
donkey is selling for about seventy six dollars in Pinocchio's time. And just how
many of these donkeys is the coachman able to sell off in a batch? Well to
answer that we first need to know how many little boys he's gotten himself a
hold of. The best way to estimate the total
donkey load isn't actually to count the boys at Pleasure Island, but rather it's
to look at how they all got there. This Mississippi style steamboat that
transports all the boys to the island also tells us how many victims we're
gonna be looking at. Passenger river boats of this size with three decks have
an absolute max capacity of 2150 five people. So given the Coachman's
unscrupulous morals and lack safety records - I mean just look at the kids
falling between Ferris wheel cars - we can assume that he's stuffing the maximum
number of kids onto this thing as possible. Especially since children are
so much smaller than adults and these boys aren't carrying any luggage. So
we're gonna subtract a standard 50 people to account for the boat crew of a
steamer that large, which leaves us with room for a whopping 2105 young boys. It's
truly a pretty horrifying level of evil that's going on here in Pleasure Island.
That's not even accounting for all the rampant racism and underage smoking! So
multiplying everything out we have 2100 for donkeys - minus 1 because
Pinocchio escapes - $76 each gives us one hundred and fifty nine thousand nine
hundred and four dollars. Which might not seem like all that much but remember
this is money way back at the turn of the century. Accounting for inflation, the
coachmen is looking to net a whopping four million two hundred eight thousand
dollars! That's four million of twenty eighteen dollars. So things are looking
pretty good for the old coachman here right? But the one thing that every
businessman will tell you is that before you go walking off with your profits you
need to start calculating your overhead. And running Pleasure Island isn't a
simple operation! So we need to factor in the costs of two thousand boys drinking
themselves under the table while destroying an entire amusement park. As I
pointed out earlier, in just one night a boatload of boys managed to level
Pleasure Island into a desolate hellscape. It's like the world of Fallout.
What's worse than a nuclear apocalypse? Aw just two thousand young rambunctious
boys lookin to scrap smoke and drink. So how much is it costing the coachman to
rebuild an entire amusement park every time they bring one of these boatloads over? Well initially I calculated out every little piece of wood and every
glass pane broken in here but what I found out was that most of the repairs
were actually just small items that ultimately didn't make that big of a
difference on the bottom line. At most we were looking at about a thousand dollars
on tobacco which translates to about thirty-eight old-timey dollars, and about
two hundred inflation-adjusted dollars to restock the destroyed mansion with
more old furniture for the boys to tear apart. Both of those numbers not nearly
enough to hit the Coachman's bottom line. The bigger ticket items though is where
they get you - namely the rides. If we're running this business we're basically
gonna need to replace the ferris wheel cars and basically the entirety of the carousel -
which looks like the central axis has actually been bent down the middle. This
all begs a completely separate question, what kind of Hell beasts are these
children? I mean what would enable them to even be able to try bending a
carousel in half? And how many children did it take to accomplish that sort of
thing? Or was it just one super kid? Maybe some solid steel marionette who's also
on his way to becoming a real boy too. Anyway these are the expensive things to
replace but when you actually run the numbers they don't wind up being all
that expensive. Ferris wheels are surprisingly cheap. Which is honestly
kind of scary to think about as you dangle 40 feet in the air on one. Smaller
used Ferris wheels cost as little as fifteen thousand dollars. Back in 2008
the Santa Monica Ferris wheel was put on sale on eBay for a mere $50,000 and it's
worth noting that that Ferris wheel is both large and famous. Which is jacking
up the cost. So we're gonna assume that the coachman isn't feeling too spendy
here and we'll go with that $15,000 estimate or 572 old timey adjusted
dollars. Still nothing that's even close to making a dent into his total profits.
Now the carousel is gonna run you a bit higher. The cheapest option is from the
carousel works for about three hundred and twenty thousand dollars or twelve
thousand dollars in inflation-adjusted costs. Now they wouldn't have to buy a
whole new carousel every time so long as the turntable still worked. But from what
I can tell in carousel terms that thing is totaled! Which means that the coachman
is gonna be forking out twelve thousand dollars for a new merry-go-round every
time he does one of these little trips. So between the
two major rides that need to be replaced with every new batch of kids plus all
the smaller incidentals I mentioned, the coachman is looking at about thirteen
thousand dollars worth of operating costs. Which still leaves him with a
hundred forty six thousand nine hundred four dollars or four million dollars of
twenty eighteen money. But the biggest cost here is actually still coming!
Kidnapping the boys in the first place. The coachman has to pay lowlife scum
like Honest John with a big ol sack of loot that we actually get to see. This
sack of loot is so big that it would be totally devastating to carry and ran
calculations on the amount of gold this thing holds by comparing it to the size
and capacity of a standard german beer stein - which we see it lined up against
in this shot - it comes out to about nineteen hundred cubic inches of gold. Which converts to a whopping 1211 troy ounces or 83 pounds of gold. Don't you be
forgetting about leg day coachman! Now this has got to be the amount of gold
traded to fill the entire boat and this by far is the Coachman's largest expense
per night - coming in at 1 million six hundred thirty one thousand seven
hundred eighty-five dollars and ninety three cents as of writing this script.
That converts to sixty three thousand one hundred seventy nine dollars in
Pinocchios terms. Oh poor coachman, look at all those human
trafficking profits just melting away! Now our total earnings per boatload of
boys has been sliced in half! Coming to about eighty three thousand
seven hundred and twenty five dollars every time or a bit over two million. Now
honestly that wouldn't be too bad of a profit for kidnapping two thousand
children and selling them off as donkeys - but we're still neglecting one huge
consideration here! This whole time we've just been assuming that Pleasure Island
was just there but the park had to be built in the first place! And building
the park is gonna be a huge investment for any child kidnappers to be. So let's
look at the big-ticket items here: first there's the cost of that swell
rollercoaster. Even small steel cookie cutter roller coasters cost about five
million dollars up front to build or about $190,000 in Pinocchios time. That
cost alone is more than one night could possibly earn at Pleasure Island. So we
know that this isn't the Coachman's first time at the rodeo.
He is truly talking from experience when he says, "They never come back… AS BOYS!" In order to make this business
anywhere close to profitable, he's gonna need more than one boatload of boys. Now
add to that the cost of actually building the structures that we see on
the park grounds including walls, giant gate, mansion, a tower, a pool hall, slides,
and suddenly the costs start growing really fast!
Luckily Pleasure Island is much smaller than most amusement parks, having only a
few rides and only intending to host about 2,000 guests at a time. So we'll
have to do some scaled estimates based on costs of other similarly sized parks.
Luckily we can use the recent expansion of Universal's Diagon Alley for Harry
Potter land. A project that cost a reported four hundred million dollars to
make. Now that four hundred million does include a hundred million for the escape
from Gringotts ride so we'll have to knock that one off, but that still leaves
us with three hundred million dollars for one small section of a theme park.
Even in Pinocchio's time that is a whopping eleven point four million
dollars. If Pleasure Island were even only the size of just that one small
section of a park there would still be a huge amount of upfront costs in creating
this business. One that would take the coachmen years to recoup. So this whole
thing seems busted then right? With an upfront cost of 11.5 million dollars
between the roller-coaster, the park, the other rides, the employees, 76210 dollars
in costs every time the coachman brings in another batch and they completely
trashed the place - he would need to bring in a hundred and thirty nine boatloads
of small boys to Pleasure Island before he would even start to turn a profit.
That translates to a whopping 292 thousand children. "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!" It's gonna be
impossible right? No. No it's not. The Coachman's main source of children
during this time would have been orphans. France kept remarkable records of child
abandonment in the 19th century but they were basically the only country who did
so we'll have to work off of their numbers. France recorded about a hundred
and sixty four thousand abandoned children annually in the mid-1800s and
that's just one of many European nations the coachman and his goons could have
been traveling. If Italy and Spain had even half of those numbers the coachman
could have shockingly made his money back in less
and a year! From only the abandoned children of three European countries!
Going into year two it's actually conceivable that he could have been
running the most profitable enterprise in all of Europe. While most other
countries would have had no idea because they weren't even keeping records of
orphans. And why how was he able to do this? Why are there so many parentless
children walking around? Because of all the wars happening in Europe during this
era most of these orphans were children whose parents had died in the war. Those
are the children that we see the coachmen snatching up and reselling. In
an unbelievable twist, the supply of abandoned children during this time
period in this part of the world was so incredibly high that the coachman could
have actually pulled off kidnapping and reselling 292,000 children! Making it one
of the most heinous and cold-blooded acts in history! This is the truly
horrifying levels of evil that we see at play in Pinocchio and worst of all the
coachman totally gets away with it in the movie. Old-school Disney is pretty
hardcore but Pinocchio is especially brutal
because in this case we never see any kind of justice served to any of the
villains in this film. In our quote unquote good ending the only one we see
getting rescued is Pinocchio. He's the only one. All of the other 2,000 children
that we see enter Pleasure Island, that we actually watch get transformed into
donkeys, all of them don't escape! All of them don't have a Blue Fairy protecting
them! All of them get sold off into the salt mines to the highest bidder and the
coachman and Honest John and Gideon are all left to run their business for
another day. Just think about that next time you hear Jiminy Cricket talking
about wishing upon a star. I know about three hundred thousand kids who'd like
another crack at their wish but HEY! That's just a theory!
A Film Theory! Aaaand apropos to nothing, I think everyone deserves a chance to
watch the first five seconds of "Pinocchio in Outer Space"! The adventure
your about to see is based on a true portrayal of outer
space.....
A few questions:
I enjoyed this episode.
TV Tropes suggests the Coachman is actually the Devil, which how he's able to continue the operation and do some magic despite the costs
https://awol.junkee.com/there-is-an-underground-amusement-park-in-transylvania/4784 🤔
Supply and demand. Yeah, people at that time would need donkeys, but I feel like you'd pretty quickly start running out of paying customers. A population only needs so many donkeys.