Disney has a habit of taking dark, twisted children’s fairy tales and turning them into sickeningly sweet happily-ever-afters.  The 1940 version of Pinocchio is no exception. Jiminy Cricket appears in the book, and does not play as prominent of a role. He first appears in chapter 4 in which the Talking Cricket lectures and tells Pinocchio to go back home: Well that pissed off Pinocchio and he jumped up, took a hammer from the bench, and threw it at the Talking Cricket. It hits him in the head and with a last weak “cri-cri-cri” the poor Cricket fell from the wall, dead! You might be happy to know that Pinocchio did learn his lesson quite soon after that—or seemed to. While he didn’t seem to feel bad about killing the cricket (in fact, he later tells Gepetto, “It was his own fault, for I didn’t want to kill him.”), he did seem to regret not taking the cricket’s advice as he runs into more and more trouble. At last, karma catches up to Pinocchio and he gets his feet burned off. As he no longer had any strength left with which to stand, he sat down on a little stool and put his two feet on the stove to dry them. There he fell asleep, and while he slept, his wooden feet began to burn. Slowly, very slowly, they blackened and turned to ashes. Gepetto forgives him and makes new feet, which is really more than Pinocchio deserves, when Pinocchio first became “alive” and learned to walk first thing he did was run off. What’s worse is that Pinocchio leads people to believe that Gepetto has abused him, which lands Gepetto in prison. You would think by this time that Pinocchio would learn to be a good, obedient little boy, but nope and the Talking Cricket returns as a ghost to tell Pinocchio not to get involved with some people who claim planting gold coins will result in a tree of gold. Rather than apologizing for throwing a hammer at the poor bug, Pinocchio scoffs at the advice once again. Pinocchio’s decision to continue to ignore the Cricket resulted in him finding more grief in the way of being hanged by the very people who had told him about planting gold coins: And they ran after me and I ran and ran, till at last they caught me and tied my neck with a rope and hanged me to a tree, saying, &#096;Tomorrow we’ll come back for you and you’ll be dead and your mouth will be open, and then we’ll take the gold pieces that you have hidden under your tongue.’ The hanging scene was actually where the story was meant to end. Basically, he wanted to convey the message that children could face consequences for being disobedient. However, the editor of the paper requested that Collodi continue writing—perhaps wishing for a bit more of a happily ever after himself—and that’s where the blue fairy came in to save the puppet. In the additional chapters, Collodi made it so that Pinocchio learned his lesson and decided to take care of his father rather than spend his time getting in trouble.