Lunch in the Jungle - "Pranzo nella Jungla"

Content

This film is about an Italian explorer who explains to the head of a cannibal tribe the advantages of cooking on gas.

Film prohibition

Within the development of Dollywood studios, Italy played a remarkable role.
Italy was economically punished after WWII for their role in during this war. This prevented advertising films from being produced abroad. For this reason, Joop Geesink opened its own office in Milan and was suddenly not a ‘foreign’ supplier. This yielded relatively many assignments from Italy. In addition, Italy turned out to have excellent outdoor film locations was for his other studio, STARFILM, which made a lot of liveaction commercials. 

80-20 rule

The Italian government dictated that cinema commercials had to contain around 80% entertainment and thus only 20% advertising. No conclusive info is available on the exact ratio of this percentage. As a result, the films, which were already slow to get to the heart of the story, were even slower. While we are on the subject of ‘perception’, it should be clear that this concept of advertising is obviously from more than half a century ago, when most Europeans had no idea of what was going on outside the country's borders. According to an entry in film trade magazine NBF, the film Agip-Gas “Pranzo nella Jungla” was produced in 1953.

Trivia

This film has several sets and puppets that were likewise to had been used in another film,‘Jungle Prestige’ (1962). Since both films were made for different countries and different clients, it could be assumed that people did not see the similarity. After all, the films ran exclusively in cinemas, and the chances of English customers also coming to Italy were negligible.