Preface To Crickets: I'm No Fool

(image from here.)

Long before I saw Pinocchio, probably, as a kid in elementary school, I was regularly admonished & cautioned by a cricket named Jiminy who appeared in a series of filmstrips called "I'm No Fool."  According to this Disney wiki, the shorts were made for the Mickey Mouse Club, but they must have be deemed helpful enough to distribute to schools because on those seemingly random Fridays when we were herded into the cafeteria to watch educational films, there always seemed to be one of Mr. Cricket's safety films.

The Wikipedia tells us, however, there were only six in the "I'm No Fool" series, so they doubtless showed us some (or all) of them over & over.  Because as soon as I thought about Jiminy Cricket in relation to a radio show about crickets, I didn't immediately think of "When You Wish Upon A Star," I thought of "I'm no fool, nosirree! I'm gonna live to be 93! I play safe for you & me because I'm no fool."

Perhaps I saw them on television, but the truth is, I wasn't a big fan of Disney as a kid.  I think I was more likely to watch 60 Minutes than The Wonderful World Of Disney on a Sunday night.  (Later on, PBS programmed Cosmos at the same time - I had to go upstairs to watch that, no one else in my family wanted to.)  The ditty is short & catchy, but the fact that I could recall it so readily after decades makes me think I associated it with something really fun, like getting out of class to watch "movies" in the afternoon.

You can watch these on YouTube - here's the first one.  Wikipedia says they updated them in the 1970s with live action - I would've seen them in school probably between 1974-1976, so we almost certainly didn't have the new versions.  It was public school, after all.