Pinocchio: The Tale of a Foolish Puppet

The story is a playful radio retelling of Pinocchio, presented as a "classic concoction" with a narrator who explains that the author, Carlo Collodi, wove big lessons about love, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and especially wisdom into his tale of a foolish puppet.

It begins with an extraordinary piece of wood in the shop of an old carpenter, Master Antonio. When he raises his axe to carve it into a statue, a small voice cries out from inside the wood, and when he strikes it, the wood yelps in pain. The rattled carpenter is only too glad to hand the strange piece over, free of charge, when his friend Geppetto, a poor toy maker, comes asking for wood to make a puppet that can dance and do somersaults.

In his tiny house, Geppetto carves the puppet and names him Pinocchio. The puppet starts talking the moment he has a mouth, and his nose immediately begins to grow. No matter how much Geppetto trims it, it only gets longer, and Geppetto muses that lying and mischief can do strange things to a body. Pinocchio proves the point right away: as soon as he has legs, he kicks his new father on the nose, and as soon as he can walk, he runs out the door. When a police officer catches the runaway by his broomstick of a nose, Pinocchio accuses Geppetto of attacking him with a knife. Since Geppetto admits he was carving the puppet, the muddled officer arrests the kind old man and sets the puppet free.

Pinocchio runs straight back home, where a talking cricket appears, announcing that he has come to speak wisdom into the puppet's life. The cricket warns that boys who rebel against their parents and run away will never be happy, and that "a life lived for others is the happiest life of all." Pinocchio wants none of it. He throws a heavy book at the cricket, silencing the story's only voice of wisdom, though the flattened cricket later revives, insisting true wisdom cannot be killed, and pops up throughout the tale to quote Proverbs about fools. Finding no food in the house, Pinocchio discovers six gold coins, the savings of Geppetto's entire life, and takes them, running off to see the world. He spends one coin on a delicious creamy food called mud.

He soon meets a smooth-talking fox and his purring associate, Miss Cat-rina, who prick up their ears at the mention of five gold coins. They tell him of the legendary Field of Miracles in the land of the owls, where a buried coin grows overnight into a tree loaded with gold. Pinocchio grumbles about the digging, so the fox distracts him with a shiny object and snaps his long nose right off so it won't get in the way. The puppet buries his coins, takes the required nap, and wakes to find nothing but an empty hole. A laughing owl informs him that the fox and cat dug up the money and fled, adding that the only honest way to get money is to earn it. As Pinocchio dashes off, the owl mutters, "What a blockhead."

Rain washes away the thieves' tracks, and Pinocchio flops down in the road, moaning, "My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes." There a friendly, Elvis-loving pigeon recognizes him: he met Geppetto at the seashore three days earlier, building a little rowboat and vowing to search the seven seas for his son. Amazed that his father still wants him after all the trouble he has caused, Pinocchio climbs aboard, and the pigeon flies him more than a hundred miles over mountains, forests, and waterfalls to the coast. There a man reports that the old fellow's tiny boat was last seen sinking beneath the stormy sea. Deciding that the somebody who saves his father should be "somebody me," Pinocchio leaps into the waves.

He swims all through the cold, stormy night, surprised to discover both that he can swim and that he cares about someone besides himself. In the morning he washes up on an island, where a squeaky-voiced dolphin delivers terrible news: it saw the little boat with the kindly man underwater, just before it was swallowed by a terrible sea monster. As Pinocchio despairs, a blue sprite, a wise, wish-granting fairy, appears beside him. Pinocchio wishes to grow and become a real person, but she explains that puppets never grow, and that she can only grant his wish if he deserves it: he must first learn to be a good boy, which means becoming obedient, hardworking, and kind, everything he has not been. Pinocchio eagerly promises that she is about to see a reformed puppet, leaving his change of heart, and his father's fate, still to be proven.