The Original Pinocchio Kills the Cricket and Is Hanged
The popular story, checked against the evidence.
The Real Story
- Popular claim
- The original Pinocchio is darker and more violent than the Disney film.
- Verdict
- True
- The record
- In Collodi's 1880s original Pinocchio kills the cricket and is hanged; the author first intended to end there.
Disney’s Pinocchio is a sweet, wayward boy guided by a kindly cricket. Carlo Collodi’s original puppet is a different creature altogether: callous, violent, and, at one point, a killer — in a story its author first meant to end with the hero’s death.
A cruel little puppet
Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio was serialised in the early 1880s, and its title character begins as anything but lovable. He is selfish, disobedient, and quick to lash out. When a Talking Cricket — the model for Disney’s Jiminy — dares to lecture him about behaving, Pinocchio does not take the advice to heart. He throws a hammer at the insect and kills it. The cricket later reappears as a ghost, but the moment stands: the story’s conscience figure is murdered by its hero in the opening chapters.
The hanging Collodi intended as the end
The darkness deepens. Pursued by the Fox and the Cat — con artists who want the gold coins he is carrying — Pinocchio is caught, and they hang him from the branch of a great oak tree and leave him to die. Collodi wrote this as the conclusion of the story. Pinocchio, gasping, simply dies at the end of the rope. It was the intended finish.
Readers, however, were not willing to let it end there. The outcry at killing off the puppet was such that Collodi was persuaded to revive him and continue the tale, adding the Blue Fairy and the long road toward becoming a real boy. The redemption arc we know exists because the audience rejected the author’s original, bleaker ending.
The verdict
True. The original Pinocchio kills the Talking Cricket and was meant to die by hanging — a far crueller story than the film, rescued into gentleness only by protesting readers. It belongs firmly among the dark origins of fairy tales.
Sources
- Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (serialised 1881–83).
- “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” Wikipedia.
