by Jerry Roberts

There is a reason that I made the title brown.

I submit to you now dear reader the review for the first film that I ever watched specifically for inclusion on this website. Never say that I don’t suffer for you guys.

The worst thing that ever happened to animation was the invention of the studio assembly line. Closing the door on a decade that brought us such delightful films like The Jungle Book and 101 Dalmations, studios in the 1970s wanted cartoons fast, cheap and finished yesterday. The king of this kind of quick marketing was Filmation, a studio that monopolized most of the animated television market and set about two decades worth of 30-minute toy commericals.

With “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast” Disney effectively kicked off the animation horse race that brought animated features out of the kiddie show doldrums. With that, lazy unimaginative studios like Filmation could no longer exist. There is justice in this world.

Filmation, managed to carry their Tarzan series for three seasons without creating a single new animated cell. This was nothing new for Filmation. Their usual technique was to loop the same shots over and over and over and just change the dialogue. Their only memorable product was Fat Albert but that was because it had Bill Cosby behind it. Filmation was as welcome as flypaper, spinning television shows into worthless cartoon shows like M*U*S*H (M*A*S*H with dogs. don't ask) and Gilligan’s Planet (with the castaways traveling through space). Yeah . . . I know

Their last gasp for some kind of relief was “Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night”, an unbelievable animated toiletbrush which again sponges off someone else’s success. In this case it’s a sequel to Disney’s Pinocchio, trying to continue the story even though there is no story to continue.

It has been a year since Pinocchio has gotten his RB status and as the “story” opens he is sent on a simple errand to deliver a jewel box and becomes fodder for a scheming raccoon. It’s not that difficult for the raccoon to filch the box since Pinocchio insists on walking down the street holding it out for all to see but never mind. Shamed that he could have been such a moron, he runs away to the carnival and runs into a puppet master named Puppetino (don’t ask) and we find out that the carnival is really a front for his schemes and scams and, believe me, you see all this coming from the moment Pinocchio steps out the Geppetto’s front door.

Along the way we meet other characters one just as innocuous as the last with names like Grumblebee and Gee Willikers and we meet the Emperor who is cross between Cherborg from Fantasia and that floating wizard head from “The Wizard of Oz”. There are songs in the movie stitched together, I think, from cereal commercials, Christian rock albums and those tapes they make with music to put babies to sleep (it worked on me anyway). The prime top 40 wannabe here is “Love Is the Light Inside Your Heart”, a title so unmemorable that I had to look that title up for this review and check it twice as I was writing it down.

I don’t mean to beat a dead horse but I would have thought that Filmation would have learned it’s lesson after it’s execrable Snow White sequel “Happily Ever After”. “Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night”, I swear could be chopped into three minute bits and injected into toy and cereal commercials and I guarantee that you would never know the difference.