“Danny Kaye Returns to TV In Dramatized ‘Pinocchio’”
The Robesonian – Mar. 21, 1976
HOLLYWOOD – Danny Kaye and children go together.
It’s not just that he devotes so much of his time and apparently inexhaustible energy to the cause of the world’s children through UNICEF; it’s not just that his portrayal of Hans Christian Andersen has left an indelible impression in the minds of millions of young people in the years […unintelligible…] storyteller’s life was filmed. It’s not even the fact that (as his television variety series so conclusively demonstrated) he simply relates to children better than almost any other performer around. It’s more than all that, it’s an attitude.
“They’re the world’s most challenging people,” he says. “You can’t get away with anything. They’ll be completely truthful with you, and you have to be completely truthful with them. For a performer, that’s a real challenge.”
Kaye will be facing his favorite “challenge” again when he portrays “Gepetto,” the
lonely woodcarver who creates a puppet as a friend in an all-
“It’s a wonderful part,” Kaye enthuses. “It requires almost the whole emotional spectrum, from the elation when Pinocchio becomes a real boy to the utter devastation when Gepetto finds himself abandoned. It’s a genuine character role, in the best sense of the term.
“You know, the story has been kicking around for centuries. It was an Italian Hans Christian Andersen named Carlo Collodi, around 1883. It’s been translated into practically every language on earth in the years since.”
Knowing what he knows about children, how does Kaye explain the story’s enduring popularity with the young?
“It’s all completely true,” he says. “Obviously, it’s not factual . . . there was never a puppet who became a boy . . . but that’s not the kind of truth children are most interested in. Gepetto is true; like all parents all over the world, he literally builds a person. Pinocchio is true . . . children know that they’re going to do things they shouldn’t, and they know they’re going to pay for it in the end—and so will their parents.”