Finally --- A Good Babes In Toyland DVD


Sometimes a new DVD will come down the pipeline and surprise you. I hadn’t expected much when I pre-ordered Babes In Toyland. It’s always been a problematic show, having passed through innumerable hands over decades of tangled ownership. Worse, there were title changes and edits --- lots of them. They called it March Of The Wooden Soldiers from the fifties on. Some renegade prints circulated about in the guise of Revenge Is Sweet, as bizarre a moniker as was ever hung on a family (musical) comedy adapted from Victor Herbert. And what about that colorized version? Indeed, Babes In Toyland was the great unknown among Laurel and Hardy features. Seeing it truly intact seemed as unlikely as rediscovering The Rogue Song, or finding decent prints of The Flying Deuces and Utopia. Well, there’s (finally) good news in DVD land. Babes In Toyland is now available in a restored transfer worthy of a holiday favorite too long out of quality circulation. The box art says March Of The Wooden Soldiers, but the print carries all the original MGM credits, including the Babes In Toyland main title. I couldn’t see anything missing. All the footage from any 16mm print I ever had appears to be here. There is a colorized version on the disc, but that’s in addition to the black-and-white, and the extras here are plentiful, but more about that later …





Are there any over-aged kiddie show patrons out there? I was one on several occasions during the seventies and eighties. Here’s the situation --- a theatre schedules a program you’ve just got to see. Trouble is, they only play it for matinees, specifically the ones designed for little kids. What to do when you’re 18, or 21, even 30, and there’s Gorgo, The Time Machine, or Jack The Giant Killer beckoning to you from a boxoffice lined with six-year-olds and their mothers, the latter casting uncertain looks in your direction as you gingerly approach the ticket window --- by yourself. Gosh, lady. I don’t want to prey on your child. I just drove down to see "The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad." Try selling that explanation to a doubtful exhibitor as you enter his auditorium with a gaggle of small fry. I don’t think they’d even let me in today. Maybe it’s as well they’ve stopped running things like Rodan, Horror Of Dracula, and Republic serials at kiddie shows, for even at the age of 52, how could I stay away? A first encounter with March Of The Wooden Soldiers was no small embarrassment in that respect, but it was worth it. To my utter dumbfoundment, the Winston Theatre (in Winston-Salem, naturally) played M.O.T.W.S. in 1972, and I can claim without fear of contradiction that I was the only high school senior attending that day. My peers, had they known, might assume I’d entered a twilight zone way beyond simple geekdom, but my best friend accompanied me, and he was only a year younger (are you reading this, Brick?). At least I distinguished myself in being the only kid in that audience who had to put coins in a parking meter, and better yet, this was a brand-new print. March Of The Wooden Soldiers never looked better. We stayed and watched it twice!





Hal Roach had started out writing his own treatment for the proposed Babes In Toyland. I’ve read his synopsis --- it sounds awful. Stan Laurel thought so as well. He and Roach fought over the story until the producer gave up and allowed Stan to do it his way. The estrangement that caused would fester with Roach into old age. He’d maintain Babes In Toyland was lousy, and a commercial disaster besides. Fans would argue it’s neither, though we lack the figures to show whether it made or lost money. Laurel wanted to do Babes in Toyland in the tradition of Christmas pantomimes he’d grown up with. The concept was simple and straightforward. Disney’s 1961 remake shows what can happen when you overstuff one of these pageants. Laurel and Hardy are better integrated into the story than is customary for their features. Usually, the narrative stops to allow for extended routines. Good as it is, The Devil’s Brother tends toward this, and later ones like Bonnie Scotland and Swiss Miss are pretty rough going when L&H concede the spotlight in favor of insipid romantic subplotters. Their situation was not unlike The Marx Brothers. Ninety sustained minutes of these comedians was thought excessive in those days. Audiences needed relief from too much fun making. Now it seems ludicrous to have turned the camera’s gaze away from our heroes, but no one seems to have questioned the formula then. Stan wished later that Babes In Toyland could have been made in color. Had it been four years hence, that dream might have been a reality, but no major studio was shooting Technicolor features in mid-1934, this being a transition period between the old two-color process and the introduction of a substantially improved three-color system. The only Technicolor sightings for audiences that year would have been novelty sequences in otherwise black-and-white features --- The House Of Rothschild, Kid Millions, and The Cat and The Fiddle. Granted Babes In Toyland would have looked fabulous in color, but its timing was wrong for that, and besides, with the print we now have on DVD, the movie looks as good as one could hope for in black-and-white.





Extras on this DVD are bountiful. There are actually Castle Films here! Christmas Toyshop was produced in the mid-forties. It’s the sort of reel Dad bought to show the family on their new home movie projector. 8 and 16mm camera sales boomed after the war. Parents who could afford it were anxious to capture their kids on film. Castle provided entertainment subjects to supplement the family’s own efforts. Judging by the volume of these reels that turn up on ebay, there must have been tens of thousands sold. Christmas Toyshop presents a comforting fantasy for post-war suburbia --- Mom, Dad, and the two kids listening to radio on Christmas Eve (and they haven’t even put up the tree yet!) --- kids dream of an encounter with Santa, during which he narrates them through an early thirties cartoon relic depicting his workshop. Meanwhile, Dad makes blundering effort to set up the tree and disguise himself as the Jolly Fat Man. All ends happily within nine or so minutes. According to Scott MacGillivray’s excellent Castle Films book, these subjects were often cobbled together from old Yuletide trailers done for theatres, animated footage of yore (some of it by Paul Terry), and whatever new material could be shot, very cheaply, to link it all together. The Babes In Toyland DVD also includes Castle’s Night Before Christmas and a really strange Howdy Doody’s Christmas, produced, according to Scott, in 1951, specifically for Castle. I’ve very little memory of Howdy Doody from television, and judging by this subject, that may be just as well. Guess this is one of those shows where you really had to be there. How many of these old kinescopes survive? For all I know, this may be the only time the act was captured on film, as opposed to being shot off a TV monitor. Is it me, or does Howdy seem overburdened with strings? I kept waiting for Clarabelle to come along with shears and collapse him altogether. What a traumatic moment that would have been! The clown’s routine made me flinch, especially when he (or she?) drove a nail into a mantelpiece with his/her forehead. I don’t know that I needed to see that. Buffalo Bob comes on strong toward the fragile Howdy, forever jutting his finger at the puppet and barking in his ear. For reasons too obscure to recount here, they all decamp to the North Pole (in a stock footage Flash Gordon rocket!), where a deranged stooge called Ugly Sam is holding Santa Claus prisoner. I assume Sam was a staple on the vid program. Suffice to say a little of his shtick goes a l-o-n-g way. Howdy stands (hangs) by impassively as Bob, Sam, and Clarabelle wrestle briefly on the floor. Santa effects a reconciliation and there’s a dissolve to his animated departure from the Pole (courtesy a Van Buren, Iwerks, Terry --- who knows? --- cartoon). Howdy Doody’s Christmas is one priceless artifact. No telling how many fathers threaded this one up on the Bell&Howell each holiday season between 1951 and 1961 (the years it was available from Castle’s catalogue). Kids at home must have been thrilled to watch Howdy on the family’s own movie projector. I know I was plenty thrilled to see it on DVD.

UPDATE: Lo and Behold, they've gone and released an even better Babes In Toyland since this posting went up in November 2006, this time from the negative's owner, MGM/UA. It's really terrific and highly recommended.