Whence?

[Unfortunatley, for enjoyment's sake, after thinking about the following story long enough, I came to the conclusion that it might actually be true, because Gurunet says that the term was first used in the mid-1900s. But, without further ado, here is today's Capricious "Piffle":]

This term clearly originated in one of Walt Disney's most enduring films: Pinocchio. Pinocchio, the creative masterpiece of Geppetto, is a wooden marionette, and as is true with all such puppets, he has strings attached to his body. Pinocchio is forced to hop around in front of a rowdy audience. He has no control over his movements because he is controlled by the person pulling on the strings. Eventually, Pinocchio sheds his strings and becomes a real boy. He has "no strings attached" and thus, there are no limitations to what he can do.

And now you know. . .the rest of the story.

There's an Irving Berlin song from 1935 called "No strings" which has the chorus:

No strings and no connections,
No ties to my affections,
I'm fancy free and free for anything fancy.

But the original story of Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi, 1883) is the most likely source.

Thanks, guys

Though I already posted one opinion, I have reason to doubt the validity of it. I seem to recall a political cartoon of a Native American and a settler in America. The settler was offering a piece of paper that said "treaty" on it to the native american. The piece of paper had a string attached to it and the settler was holding the other end in his hand behind his back. The caption of the cartoon, I believe, was "No strings attached".

I don't know when the cartoon was made, but it looked dated. Has anyone else seen this political cartoon? It was in one of my history books, so it's probably fairly well circulated.

This version also looks more plausible to me, since there is a notion of a bait in the expression, more than the notion of controlling a person.