Pinocchio 32x released

Time to update the wiki.

Pinocchio

 

Don't know where that US date comes from - there's no reference to back it up, but the EU one seems accurate.

Both the US and EU Mega Drive packaging have 1996 copyrights. Winter-ish seems like a normal time to release a game like this - the original plan seems to have been late 1995, but they might have delayed it a year so they could launch with the SNES simultaneously (this sort of thing did happen back then). The 32X was dead in the water by 1996 so if that were the case, you can see why that version would have been scrapped.

We'd need someone to trawl the magazine archives to be sure.



Pinocchio is a really weird entry in the Disney library, because from what I can see... only Walt Disney seemed to really love this film. It made a loss in 1940 and has been dragged along through Disney parks and into the public consciousness, but I'm not sure it was ever as immensely popular as later endeavours. I'm not really sure why they'd make a video game of it in 1994/1995/1996 - who was going to buy it? (as with all console generations, post-Saturn the Mega Drive was considered by some as a console for "kids", but still).

I was going to say it might have been released in conjunction with the VHS (as Disney were big on that in the 1990s), but no - Pinocchio got its shiny VHS release in 1992... right at the start of the run... because it's Pinocchio and Disney love it.


Which leads me to believe there wasn't a huge rush to get this out the door. Blind faith that people like Pinoccio.



(just forget this bit exists)



Anyway this is great to see, well done to all those involved

 

https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AMAN!AC_DE_1995-12.pdf&page=10

There's some German SNES coverage from the December 1995 issue of MAN!AC. It doesn't look like it would take a year to finish - I'm wondering if December 1995 was the original release date, development didn't actually wrap up until Spring 1996, and Disney Interactive sat on it until the more profitable Christmas 1996 season.

 

I was more interested in this early Earthworm Jim 2 proto from the same releaser. It's at an interesting point in development and has tons of leftovers; old stuff from the first game as well as totally scrapped stuff. I didn't hear a breath about it here or anywhere else, kinda surprising.

 

Probably for the same reason why The Jungle Book exists between Aladdin and The Lion King - they were trawling for 'masculine' disney movies to turn into games. Seemingly couldn't do much with Beauty and The Beast or Pocahontas

 

It's pretty well-respected in the animation community, but commercially it has always seemed to be on the bottom rung of popularity for Disney movies.

It was actually the first animated Disney feature ever released on VHS, because Disney at the time felt releasing home versions of their movies would cheapen the brand (at the time they would re-release movies in theatres on seven-year cycles, making it an event to get to see one), and figured Pinocchio was expendable enough that giving it a VHS release wouldn't affect their bottom line too much. It was only when it instantly sold out its first run they realized the gold mine they were sitting on.

 

Well hey, I unironically wouldn't mind a Bambi game.

 

I don't think it's so much masculinity that Pinocchio was chosen, but because it's such an episodic film with plenty of distinct parts that it's sensible to make level set-pieces out of them. Remember it was in 2000 that Disney licensed Alice in Wonderland out to Digital Eclipse as a platormer for the Game Boy Color; definitely a girly property, but defined with distinct set-pieces.

Of course Alice has been the subject of dozens of adaptations since 1984, not many of the Disney. I guess it's one of those things that are acceptable for boys to play, for whatever reason.

 

Makes sense. Not to mention Mickey Mania/Mickey's Wild Adventure, which was literally just loads of different cartoons as set pieces.

 

Dumbo, 101 Dalmatians, Peter Pan, The Sword in the Stone, Aristocats, Robin Hood.

Which I think are all(?) part of the initial run of Disney VHS releases. I know 101 Dalmatians was an early one - about the only thing I remember from that film are the clips they used in the anti-piracy messages (which probably had the reverse effect - I became kinda interested in piracy as a concept when Disney first told me about it when I was 5 or 6).


Some of these were made into Pico games around the same time.


But I'm not that surprised that Pinoccio got top billing. Stick any of those cassettes into a VCR and you'll get that jingle (and Sleeping Beauty's castle but let's ignore that).

 

It's interesting how this prototype mixes graphics from both versions and adds its own stuff, although those extra parallax planes in the first level seem to clash a bit too much with the rest, in my opinion...

The giveaway of this not being a final version is the early background in the Jiminy Cricket level, which looks less polished than even the Mega Drive's (and with duller colors for a change) and features a different design for the poster.


Gotta say that, even as a kid who enjoyed the movie, I also never understood why they spent their time and budget on making this (pretty slow and boring) game. Just imagine what they could have done with Darkwing Duck instead or, heck, even other classic movies such as Alice in Wonderland.