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.....