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She looks awfully calm about the giant toy soldiers.
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The main story of Babes in Toyland has to do with Mary Quite Contrary, a nursery rhyme character who is very bad at financial planning. Mary is coming into a huge inheritance but for some reason has no idea about it. The old miser Barnaby does know, I assume that this can only be because of his miser powers, and decides to marry Mary in order to get her money. The problem is that she is marrying Tom the Piper's son, but he fixes that by hiring some thugs to kill Tom.
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| I think people would respect me more if I dressed that way. |
Its a well known fact that gypsies buy babies, and apparently grown men as well. So the thugs sell Tom and the gypsies train him to be one of them. In the space of a few hours he has learned all there is to know and goes to find Mary. But meanwhile Mary has realized that she can't support all the children she kidnapped over the years and so decides to marry Barnaby. The children run away trying to find the sheep that I forgot to mention were lost and pretty soon the children, Mary, and Tom all find themselves in the forest of no return.
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And that's how the movie ends. Trapped in the forest of no return this small and strange family realize that they will have to live there forever.
Well okay its not the end, but it is the end of the copy I had recorded as a kid. It turns out there's a good forty minutes after that. They go to Toyland and discover that's its closed down. But Tom has a great idea!
Why not put the children to work, day and night, until the toys are ready? And so they do. The children work at an assembly line (seriously), but meanwhile Barnaby attacks and shrinks So, for those keeping score, Tom has now instituted child labour, and committed what I assume would be a war crime if it was possible.
The problem is that the second half of the movie is really boring while the first half is fun and quirky and has all of the rhyming couplets you could ever desire. So either nostalgia has hopelessly clouded my opinion of the first half of this movie or I liked it because it didn't have a second half.
And that is why I have decided that it didn't have a second half and rather it ends in the forest of no return. Creepy. But oddly satisfying.
The Forest of No Return (the real end of Babes in Toyland):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grLfr_GIeuU&feature=related
Mary didn't kidnap the children. They're her siblings...? friends..? foundling children she is caring for...?
ReplyDeleteI honestly think the reason nobody has ever heard of this movie is because they watched the second half. The first 40 minutes are a masterpiece and very shakespearean.
It was really hard to find those pictures. I wanted to find some of the child labour but I couldn't find any. I was going to put up real sweatshop pictures but decided that was in bad taste.
ReplyDeleteActually, I think this is a case where Disney took too much liberty, from the 1930's Laurel and Hardy version, and without explanations to justify the changes. In the Laurel and Hardy version, Tom-Tom is is in love with Bo-Peep, not Mary-Mary Quite Contrary, but Disney made Bo-Peep a small child in their version, so Tom-Tom would be quite creepy if he wanted to marry Bo-Peep. Also, Bo-Peep is supposed to be the child of Old Mother Hubbard who lived in a Shoe, along with Bo-Peep and her many nursery rhyme siblings. So you see, they changed the character, her siblings, mother and even their 'shoe' home. I guess they assumed everyone would be familiar with the earlier movie version and just transfer that knowledge onto the changes in the Disney version.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. So they're supposed to be Old Mother Hubbard's children. That still doesn't explain though why she doesn't know she's going to inherit a fortune.
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