More than any other Laurel and Hardy picture, BABES IN TOYLAND is associated with Thanksgiving and the Christmas seasonr. With its storybook characters, its colorful sets (even in black and white!), its joyous, happy score and charmingly animated wooden soldiers, BABES IN TOYLAND has captured the hearts of many children during the many decades it has been with us. Though this musical comedy has been revived times on stage, and was remade and re-adapted several times over the years, there is no doubt that when people speak of BABES IN TOYLAND, they speak of the Hal Roach classic from 1934.

      What may surprise some people is that, as originally conceived, BABES IN TOYLAND was inspired by THE WIZARD OF OZ. Not the MGM movie, nor the L. Frank Baum book, but the stage production. Baum's book, published in 1900, was such a successful enterprise for the author that he decided to attempt to parlay the book's success into other areas, like the Broadway stage. Producer Fred Hamlin and director Julian Mitchell took Baum's stage adaptation and ran wild with it, creating what could now as then be termed an "extravaganza", brimming with songs, stunts and effects (and, it should be said, losing much of Baum's simple, elegant story in the process). THE WIZARD OF OZ stayed on Broadway for 293 performances and toured for long after that. (Baum later filmed his own series of "Oz" stories, to little success, but silent clown Larry Semon made his own version of THE WIZARD OF OZ - casting a young "Babe" Hardy as the Tim Woodsman.)

      "Bigger and better" being the never-ending rallying cry of hungry producers, Hamlin and Mitchell decided to try their hand at creating another fairy tale for the stage. They came up with a story (if it can be called that) filled with a veritable Who's Who of Mother Goose: Little Miss Muffett, Little Bo-Peep, Tom-Tom the Piper's Son, Little Red Riding Hood, and more. Glen MacDonaugh, who had previously worked on THE WIZARD OF OZ, wrote the libretto and famous composer Victor Herbert was called on to write the music.

      The "anything goes, story be damned" style of THE WIZARD OF OZ worked so well that BABES IN TOYLAND, the title chosen for the "sequel", was fashioned as another nearly plotless musical comedy revue. What little story there is concerns Contrary Mary and her brother Tom, and the evil Barnaby's efforts to do... well, something or other, evil no doubt. What matters is that the bulk of BABES IN TOYLAND takes place in a magical world inhabited by storybook characters dressed in gorgeous colorful costumes, a world where huge black bears fight giant spiders, and where everyone sings or plays beautiful Herbert melodies such as "Don't Cry, Bo-Peep", "Hail to Christmas", "March of the Toys" and the eternal "Toyland". BABES IN TOYLAND, hitting the New York stage in October of 1903, was another smash hit for Hamlin and Mitchell.

      Much of the background of the Roach version of BABES IN TOYLAND can be found in our entry on that film, but here is a short re-cap. Hal Roach bought the film rights in 1933, and, not having much of a narrative to work with, wrote his own story. He pictured his star comedians, Laurel and Hardy, as Simple Simon and The Pieman. Having, in his own words, "worked like a sucker" on the story, he presented it to Stan Laurel, who immediately rejected it. After several bouts, Roach deferred to Stan's own ideas (wisely so, if Randy Skretvedt's telling of the Roach story is anything to go by) and the BABES IN TOYLAND we know began filming in early 1934. Released just in time for the Christmas season, BABES IN TOYLAND became a holiday hit, popular with audiences and critics alike.

      Operetta was nothing new for the Boys, having previously been comic relief in MGM's Lawrence Tibbett showcase THE ROGUE SONG and scoring a massive hit in their own version of Auber's FRA DIAVOLO. What was new, however, was the epic scale of the entire project. Never before had the team been in a film of such grandeur. Though dismissed by L&H scholar Charles Barr as "scrappy", BABES IN TOYLAND, at the time, was almost as much of an extravaganza as the original stage production. From the remarkable Toyland set, to the cavernous innards of Bogeyland and their monstrous, if clearly zipperbacked, inhabitants, to the 100 six foot high wooden soldiers marching in unison to save the day, to the appearance of St. Nick himself (checking up on inventory six months ahead of time), BABES IN TOYLAND was the most visual feature Hal Roach had ever produced. Wisely, Roach and company worked in as many as Herbert's songs as they could. Beginning with Mother Goose stepping out of a book to sing the beautiful "Toyland", BABES IN TOYLAND did justice to Herbert's outstanding score. While the musical sections may bore some in today's more cynical audience, there is no denying the charm of the major setpiece "Never Mind, Bo-Peep" or the excitement "March of the Toys" brings to the film's final battle between the Wooden Soldiers and the marauding Bogeymen. Other songs featured included "Go To Sleep, Slumber Deep" and "Castles in Spain", both sung by baritone Felix Knight. Some songs not featured vocally, such as "Jane, Jane", wound up as background melodies. "I Can't Do the Sum" ("put down six and carry two"), sung by Mary Contrary in the stage play, became Laurel and Hardy's memorable thematic motif for this film.

     BABES also featured an effective and unique cast for a Laurel and Hardy film - not a Finlayson, Gilbert nor Busch to be found.  Charlotte Henry, who had also previously appeared as Alice in Paramount's ALICE IN WONDERLAND, is a lovely Bo-Peep and Felix Knight hits all the right notes as Tom-Tom the Piper's Son.  Florence Gordon, who had never appeared with the Boys before (but had been a favorite of Charley Chase's) makes for warm Mrs. Peep (aka the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe). Best of all is Henry Brandon as Silas Barnaby ("the meanest man in town") who, at the tender age of 21, creates one of filmdom's truly great bad guys. Deliberately overacting in the fashion of THE DRUNKARD, the play he was starring in when Roach discovered him, Brandon is a one man evil factory, ripping off Ollie's mustache one minute, kidnapping one of the Three Little Pigs the next, and unleashing the whole of Bogeyland on the sleeping Toyland in the film's final minutes. As the film points out, Brandon's Barnaby is an R-A-T.

      While all of this razzle and dazzle could have easily overwhelmed Laurel and Hardy, they make it their film as soon as they appear on screen. With a nod to Lewis Caroll, they play "Ollie-Dee" and "Stannie-Dum", who cohabitate the Show with the Peeps. Within seconds of their first appearance, Stan falls out a window, Ollie gets hit in the face with a door, and Toyland fades into the background as the Boys go through their familiar but welcome paces. It is Stan and Ollie who keep the story moving at every turn, and, though they do nothing here that they haven't done in countless other films (with the exception of playing pee-wee), their moments together have all the usual magic. Best of all are the all too few scenes they share with Brandon, who's crotchety wickedness provides a marvelously suitable contrast to the innocent antics of the true "babes in Toyland", Stan and Ollie.

      Through the years, BABES IN TOYLAND has been re-issued under many titles: TOYLAND, REVENGE IS SWEET and most famously, MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS. It is also one of the most widely available Laurel and Hardy videos in the States, and was colorized twice. (Though many L&H fans are emphatically against computerized colorization, there seems to be a general concensus that if any film is going to be colorized, it might as well be BABES IN TOYLAND.) But like MGM's THE WIZARD OF OZ and Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, BABES IN TOYLAND's reputation grew by annual repeats on television.  In my own family, BABES IN TOYLAND (though we knew it as MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS) was not just another movie, but an event. In New York City, it was a Thanksgiving treat for many years, along with KING KONG and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, and still appears on local broadcast television between Thanksgiving and Christmas, now coupled with The Live Ghost, for reasons known only to God and Channel 11.

      All Stan and Ollie films are recommended for children, but BABES IN TOYLAND is possibly the one L&H film no no child should grow up without. The original trailer for the movie urged 1934 audiences not to "send the kiddies - Bring them! You'll enjoy it as much as they will!"

      Those words are as true now as they were then.

---- John V. Brennan