Nick’s Post:
If depression were a place I could visit in my mind, it would have to be a little isolated workshop in a little isolated town. The town is surrounded by a deep, dark, evil forest. This forest would be so deep, dark and impenetrable that it wouldn’t even provide the solace of weekend recreation or inspire fairy tale wonder.
The town that surrounds the workshop would be filled with citizens who could not speak.
Citizens who could not see. Citizens with big furry paw gloves and horrid painted smiles AND NO SOULS AND…I’m getting ahead of myself.
This workshop is no ordinary workshop: It’s a TOY workshop! There is no other place on earth that a child would rather be than a workshop (Note: this is before I was old enough to learn what forced labor was). But oh, these toys are not the ones we grew up with, my friends. These are the lamest wooden pieces of crap you could ever share a room with. I’m talking windmills, that dog on wheels that you pull with a string, and giant soldiers that don’t move (unless you summon dark powers, that is).
Where the hell are my Swamp Thing and Beetlejuice action figures?!
Yes, this is a place of broken dreams and soul-stealing isolation. Naturally, I’m talking about Pat Morita’s toy workshop in the 1986 TV movie “Babes in Toyland”.
“Babes in Toyland”, based on a 1903 operetta which also spawned two other films (most notably a 1934 version starring Laurel and Hardy), was first broadcast on NBC on December 19, 1986. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that it actually premiered on a SLP VHS video cassette that also included “Cloak and Dagger” and “Mask”. This movie was probably played in my house over 100 times, nearly as many as “The Goonies”, “Three Amigos”, and that one Ninja Turtles episode where Krang and Shredder steal gravity (or something like that).
My sister Katie loved “Babes in Toyland” and to me that was good enough to make this film worth existing. But to tell you the truth, it was never my thing. Still, I watched it every time it was on. I gazed in wonder at the nicotine stained teeth of Richard Mulligan. I recoiled in horror at Googy Gress’s moose knuckle (the real star of the movie, mind you), and I sat in catatonic boredom for the rest of the time.
Here’s the gist: In a too-close-to-home bit of plotting, Drew Barrymore plays a girl who is growing up too fast. That’s where the similarities with real life end. Instead of Drew being in the grip of addiction (which was actually going on in real life at the time, which led to her reaching the lowest point of her life a few years later: dating Corey Feldman), she is forced to basically be the mother to her sibilings since their mom is off living the 80’s dream: being a cold, heartless businesswoman (or maybe I just have “Baby Boom” on the brain).
Drew is transported from the fairyland of 80’s Cincinnati to the grim, Raymond Chandler-esque social jungle known as Toyland. The way she gets there is ingenious: She flies out of a jeep, recklessly driven by Keanu Reeves, smashes her head against a tree, and she’s off!
Yes, you saw that name right. Keanu “Johnny Mnemonic” Reeves is in this thing. He plays the dual roles of Drew’s sister’s boyfriend and the equally dunderpated Jack Be Nimble in Toyland.
Essentially it’s a whole “Wizard of Oz”/”The Talisman” deal. Everyone has a duplicate in the other realm.
The sister, a forgettable character played by Jill Schoelen, is Mary Contrary, Keanu’s portly chum becomes the tight pantsed Georgie Porgie, and his lecherous boss is the feathered villain Barnaby Barnacle played by Richard Mulligan two years away from his successful run on “Empty Nest”. Side Note: (Who am I kidding, everything I write is a side note), I love it that there was once an era that allowed people like Richard Mulligan to be a star. I also find it amazing that Mulligan was 67 years old when he died in 2000. Are you kidding me?! He was only in his 50’s when he did “Babes in Toyland” and “Empty Nest”? I would have guessed he was at least 137. No matter.
The plot of the movie from here on out is so unimportant it’s not worth mentioning. So here it is: Barnaby wants to marry Mary who is in love with Jack. Drew tries to help Jack who is also being framed by Barnaby and his henchman (one of them looking a bit too much like Brad Dourif for my comfort) for a crime he didn’t commit. We learn that Barnaby is creating an undead army, or something to rule Toyland, but needs a bottle filled with all of the world’s evil that for some reason is being kept in the Toymaster’s closet.
The Toymaster. The goddamn, mutha-loving Toymaster. If you want to talk about pure evil, how about making poor Pat Morita get into some crazy get-up that makes him look like the pawn shop guy in “Gremlins”. And in the same year as “The Karate Kid Part II”! The character of the Toymaster is mentioned many times before he is seen as some kind of benevolent force. And then you meet him and you find out all he does is paint wooden toys. And then he turns out to be Santa Claus at the end of the whole deal. What the shit?!
Anyway, Toymiyagi has a trick up his sleeve for Barnaby. Hey kids, how do you confront violence? More violence! To battle the Barnacle army (Barmy?) is a bunch of life-sized toy soldiers with real working guns. They massacre the forces of evil, only killing one civilian in the process (a giant goose who happened to be named Crispus Attucks). Barnaby is banished from Toyland and forced to live in the evil forest, where he is most likely devoured by a Wendigo, a brood of Wolpertingers, or possibly Joe Isuzu.
After much hurrah-ing and wedding-ing, Drew is transported back to Cincinnati. Instead of being depressed that the Reds ended up 10 games behind the Astros that year, missing the playoffs for the seventh straight year, she is relieved to find her family, friends, and underpaid farmhands who have all reverted back to their non-Toyland drudgery. Googy still was having pants-issues.
And I got through this whole thing without besmirching Eileen Brennan’s name by mentioning she was in this turd (Oops!)!
It was definitely a nostalgic trip watching this movie again, but it definitely does not hold up in terms of being a holiday classic, or any other classic for that matter. I’d still watch A Christmas Story, Ernest Saves Christmas, or a Very Brady Walpurgisnacht if I want to feel festive all year round. If I saw Babes in Toyland for $1.99 I might scoop it up. I’ve heard the special features are subtitle selections and audio commentary by one of the people in the toy soldier costumes which is mostly just him ranting about how this movie ended his marriage and led him to a 10 year addiction to Vick’s VapoRub.
Kate’s Post
I think my feelings about ‘Babes in Toyland’ (1986) are best illustrated by the fact that I was relieved when I thought I had lost my notes and thus would not have to relive my watching it. However, Nick found them in his car, and now I’m here, having to stare into the abyss that is my memory of seeing Googy Gress’s fupa being in close proximity to cookies for an hour.
The thing that struck me most about the movie was that it is unrelentingly bizarre, but not in the way that (I assume) the makers had intended. The camera angles, expressions, and dialogue especially seem to have been imagined by aliens who took a summer-long crash course in Earth Studies – probably on a planet like Venus, which, according to NASA, has the shortest seasons. Everything about the movie seems to lack a basic awareness of human relationships and human nature, and the particularly nightmarish element of people in broke-down animal costumes reminded me of how older generations think that really creepy shit is adorable and appropriate for existing in one’s home. (The most disturbing moment comes when the ghoulishly-animaloid menagerie sings a song thanking Lisa for stopping the wedding, as a haunted Humpty Dumpty looks on.)
There were several themes that were interesting to me, though also disturbing:
First, the sexual harassment of the clearly-underaged Mary by her elderly boss is pretty realistic. At first, I thought, ‘seriously, she has to put up with this shit for a seasonal job in a toy store?’ But then thinking back to all of my jobs and the jobs of my friends and family, I realized that it is at those shittiest jobs that people have to put up with the most harassment – the easiest targets are those with the most to lose and without the proper resources to fight back. So there’s one point where they get it right. (This is unfortunately the Cincinnati-counterpart to the aspect of child marriage in Toyland.)
Next, the political structure of Toyland is jumbled but weirdly sort of fascinating – though the fact that I find something mildly fascinating about this pile of crap confirms that I’m definitely reading too much into it. First, the police officers are all teddy bears, demonstrating that there is some sort of caste system which determines profession. (Side note: they’re mavericks, but dammit they get the job done. Just kidding, they’re ultimately ineffective against Barnaby’s army of Nosferatu gimps.)
The Toymaster, on the other hand, is basically a Japanese Fidel Castro, who either works for or is Santa (Stalin?) – it’s unclear which. Though his utopian-socialist leanings are made clear with his remark “you’re a taker in the land of giving”, he also seems to be a doomsday prepper who has been developing an army of life-sized toy soldiers who chillingly follow orders without question and are armed with real weapons. Apparently, the toy shop is a front for a munitions factory. (Though Wikipedia says it was filmed in West Germany, I’m not entirely convinced.)
Finally, I was trying to figure out exactly what Toyland is. At first, I assumed it was some sort of child’s afterlife and not just an Oz-type concussion-fest. I mean, Lisa straight-up falls out of a moving Jeep during a snowstorm (seriously Googy, you couldn’t have caught her??), slides down a heavily-wooded mountain, and hits a tree. Then there’s an explosion and she ends up in Toyland.
She’s clearly dead, right? WRONG. She wakes up at the end, and Dorothies out at her unconcerned family – her asshole mom even interrupts the story to make a joke about needing to call the exterminators. Lisa lisps her way through a contrived point about Chrithmath, and then a dead-eyed toy soldier under the tree salutes her. I don’t know what the hell kind of ‘Inception’ ending that was, but that bitch definitely died after she FELL OUT OF A FRIGGIN’ JEEP IN A SNOWSTORM.
Watch ‘Babes in Toyland’ (1986) if you:
–want to hear a villain sing to his adopted one-eyed raven-monster
–want to see giant teddy bears fail to enforce the law
–believe that there is no god and that people don’t have souls.
Retroactive nights Nick has to stay on the couch for making me watch that:
5/5 (and I’ll probably turn my back to him for awhile after that, too)
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