By Michael van den Bos | December 2011
BABES IN TOYLAND (aka: MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS – 1934) Starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy / Directed by Gus Meins and Charles Rogers
Laurel & Hardy were one of the most beloved and funniest of movie comedy teams. They started their onscreen partnership in the silent era and were among the few comics to successfully make the transition to sound movies. Working for independent comedy producer Hal Roach, Stan Laurel (skinny and sweetly simple) and Oliver Hardy (rotund and easily exasperated) made a series of hugely popular short films, always playing the same characters: little boys in adult bodies. ‘The Boys’ (as they are affectionately known among their fans) also made feature-length comedies, which was important to producer Roach because—by the mid-1930s—short films yielded limited financial returns and the more profitable double-feature dominated movie programs; so in order to stay financially solvent, Roach had to produce longer-form movies.
Of all the features Laurel & Hardy made for Roach, their most endearing picture was Babes in Toyland, loosely based on Victor Herbert’s 1903 operetta. Released in 1934, Laurel & Hardy’s Babes in Toyland (retitled March of the Wooden Soldiers for theatrical reissues and eventually home video—beware of colourized versions!) takes place in a fantasyland populated by nursery rhyme characters and Santa Claus set to wonderful songs by Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough. With its fairy tale milieu, it’s easy to appreciate why Babes in Toyland is a favourite holiday movie at Christmas time.
The story is simple. Laurel & Hardy are Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee, lodgers in Widow Peep’s shoe-shaped house with her daughter, Bo-Peep, who is engaged to Tom-Tom the Piper’s Son. When the lecherous and treacherous Silas Barnaby demands that Bo-Peep marry him or he will foreclose on her mother’s mortgage, Stannie and Ollie go to their boss, The Toymaker, to borrow money for paying off Barnaby. When Stannie and Ollie arrive at the toyshop, the Toymaker fires them for mixing up Santa Claus’s order of 600 one-foot wooden soldiers by making 100 six-foot wooden soldiers! With no money to buy out the mortgage, Stannie and Ollie must figure out a way to defeat Barnaby and save the Peeps. What follows is a series of comedic sequences nicely interwoven into the engaging story. Stannie’s game with a toy called a ‘Pee-Wee’, the attempt to sneak Ollie into Barnaby’s house to steal the mortgage papers, the public dunking of Ollie and the scene where Barnaby believes he’s marrying Bo-Peep when it’s actually Stannie—demurely veiled—are among the comic highlights.
Babes in Toyland is a charmingly imaginative children’s movie with its whimsical sets and a selection of lilting songs taken from the original operetta. However, it’s also fascinatingly bizarre, with its black-and-white photography and surreal characters and settings. Toyland features an odd mouse that looks like Walt Disney’s Mickey—played by a real monkey in a costume—plus the disturbing Three Little Pigs and the scary Bogeyland location, where Barnaby unleashes his horde of creepy Bogeymen to attack Toyland, which is ultimately defended by the six-foot wooden soldiers in a rousing climax.
