A Shooting Game Tied to a 1940 Premiere
The Walt Disney’s Pinocchio Target Game was a cardboard shooting game produced around 1940 by American Toy Works of New York, with game design credited to Arthur Dritz. Like the dart and target amusements popular in the era, it asked players to aim at printed figures on a lithographed board. Its lasting appeal lies in the artwork: bright classic-era renderings of Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket set against the carnival world of Pleasure Island, complete with roller coaster and a splashing water scene drawn straight from the film’s most memorable sequence.
The Film Behind the Game
Pinocchio premiered on February 7, 1940, as Walt Disney’s second animated feature, following Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was adapted from Carlo Collodi’s 1883 Italian children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le avventure di Pinocchio), the story of a wooden marionette who longs to become a real boy. The picture was a leap forward in animation craft, and although its initial box office fell short of Snow White‘s record-setting run, it earned lasting acclaim. At the 13th Academy Awards the film won two Oscars, for Best Original Score and for Best Original Song for “When You Wish Upon a Star” the first Disney feature to win in either category.
The game leans on one of the film’s darkest and most visually striking passages. In the Pleasure Island sequence, a sinister Coachman lures wayward boys to an island of unchecked indulgence, where the children who run wild are transformed into donkeys. That blend of amusement-park spectacle and underlying menace gave illustrators a rich palette of imagery, and the target game borrows its carnival rides and fairground color to frame a simple childhood pastime. For comparison with the studio’s earlier hand-painted output, see our overview of Disney golden-age animation cels, 1937 to 1950.
American Toy Works and Arthur Dritz
American Toy Works was a New York manufacturer that became a Disney licensee during the merchandising surge of the late 1930s and early 1940s. The company had already issued a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Target Game, also designed by Arthur Dritz and copyrighted by Walt Disney Enterprises, making the Pinocchio version a clear follow-up built on a proven format. Dritz’s name appears on a run of these inexpensive boxed and board games of the period, including the firm’s Ski-Jump Target Game, and he turns up earlier still on Disney’s Game Parade.
This wave of licensed play sat inside the larger machine built by Kay Kamen, the licensing agent who made Disney merchandise a global business. As each new feature reached theaters, manufacturers raced to translate its characters into toys, games, and household goods. Pinocchio’s release in 1940 brought a fresh cast of figures into that pipeline, and the target game was joined by other tie-ins such as the marble game Pitfalls: A Pinocchio Marble Game. Together they capture how quickly Disney’s animated stories moved from the screen into the playrooms of the era.
