An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Director: GUS MEINS. Director of scenes and segments in which Laurel and Hardy appear: CHARLES R. ROGERS. Screenplay: Nick Grinde, Frank Butler. Based on the 1902 operetta Babes in Toyland by Victor Herbert (music) and Glen MacDonough (book and lyrics). Comedy scenes devised by Stan Laurel with the assistance of a team of gag men including Frank Terry. Photography: Art Lloyd, Francis Corby. Film editors: William Terhune, Bert Jordan. Music director: Harry Jackson. Additional song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" by Ann Ronell and Frank Churchill. Special effects: Roy Seawright (director), Art Lloyd (photographer). Barnaby's make-up: Jim Collins. Assistant director: Gordon Douglas. Sound recording: Elmer R. Raguse. Producer: Hal Roach. A Hal Roach Studios Production. Copyright 28 November 1934 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation. New York opening at the Astor: 12 December 1934. U.S. release: 30 November 1934. U.K. release: April 1935. Australian release: 13 March 1935. 79 minutes Re-issue titles: REVENGE IS SWEET, MARCH OF THE TOYS.SYNOPSIS: Stannie and Ollie are boarders in a shoe owned by the Widow Peep but mortgaged to Barnaby (the meanest man in Toyland). The boys undertake to borrow the mortgage money from their employer, the toy-maker, but this ploy fails when the boys are fired after a series of mishaps. When the mortgage becomes due, Barnaby not only throws the widow and her daughter, Bo, into the street but accuses the boys of pignapping.NOTES: Re-made by Walt Disney (as "Babes in Toyland") in 1961. Disney and Roach were close friends. In the Disney version, Ray Bolger starred as Barnaby, Tommy Sands played Tom Piper, Ed Wynn was the toy-maker and Annette Funicello portrayed Mary Quite Contrary. The original stage musical opened on Broadway in 1903. Directed by Julian Mitchell, it starred William Norris, Bessie Wynn, George W. Denham and Mabel Barrison. It ran a most successful 192 performances.The "mouse" who shares some delightful scenes with the cat and flies a balloon at the climax of this movie, was reportedly enacted by a monkey!COMMENT: An absolute delight, "March of the Wooden Soldiers" (as it is now known) was produced on the most expansive budget ever utilized on a Roach feature. And it's all up there on the screen in magnificent costumes and eye-popping sets. Thanks to Gus Meins' lively direction, the pace is fast and furious. Many of the Toyland characters flit by at the speed of knots. Laurel and Hardy fortunately emerge unscathed (they worked in a different unit, nominally under the control of director/actor Charley Rogers), contributing many delightful moments including a priceless bit of foolery when Stannie wishes Ollie "Good night!" We also enjoyed Miss Henry (Alice of Alice in Wonderland) as a radiant Bo-Peep and Florence Roberts (who replaced Margaret Seddon) as the shoe-living widow. Felix Knight has a wonderful voice which does more than justice to Herbert's melodies. And of course Herbert's still-famous "March of the Wooden Soldiers" accompanies the wonderfully glorious climactic free-for- all as hundreds of bogeymen run amuck in the vast Toyland sets.OTHER VIEWS: A superb example of collaborative film-making skill, "March of the Wooden Soldiers" was filmed simultaneously by two units under different directors, yet the result is a pleasingly harmonious whole with no visible seams. The sets are absolutely out of this world, the comedy bright, the songs tuneful, the climax a riot of action and fun. Although they play characters a trifle removed from their customary offerings, Babe and Stan are in top form.

The experience of watching this movie is worse than water boarding. The CIA should use this movie when they are interrogating terror suspects. There's only so much of 'Babe's in Toyland' a human being can take before he/she has a total psychological break down.I can't imagine anything worse than having to watch this movie again.As much as this may sound like a flippant, exaggeration - I am being absolutely, honest and quite serious. The fact that this movie has scored this high here on IMDb may at first seem to be a sociological mystery, yet there is a clear explanation for it.There are two types of people that like this movie - 1. Those that are unfairly rating it (giving it a good rating) due to unconscious positive associations from their childhood past. 2. Drug users who like to trip out on it while under the influence of psychoactive substances. It is absolutely terrible. The humor is beyond dated. The cinematography is a joke. 'Babes in Toyland' belongs in a museum - not in our living rooms during Christmas. Please, let's not torture our young ones with this movie over the holidays. The world is tough enough as it is for them. They deserve better than this.

This movie was ALWAYS on, each Thanksgiving and Christmas, and my sister and cousins and I watched it together for years and years. It brings back such incredibly fond childhood memories, I just love this film.I might just have to buy the DVD - it was released on 2008 or so. No holiday would be the same without it, only it is not shown on TV anymore, at least, not that I can find. Great movie for anyone born in the 50's/60's for whom it was a tradition. This movie, along with Miracle On 34th St., It's A Wonderful Life, White Christmas and the 60's cartoons It's a Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are holiday classics! Each one brings me right back to my childhood and the magic of the holidays.

The scariest dreams are tattered and not seamless. They are not like slick Hollywood special effects laden films, but like those lower budget masterpieces; Carnival Of Souls or the original Night Of The Living Dead. Thus the most scary villains to ever appear on screen in film may well be the semi-simian Bogeymen in the Hal Roach Studio's 1934 filmic adaptation of Glen MacDonough's and Victor Herbert's 1903 operetta Babes In Toyland, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, in what may not be their best film, in terms of pure screen comedy, but is easily their most memorable one. However, the film is not much like the original operetta, for only a few of the original songs remain. Of course, no one in this movie is killed, mutilated, raped, nor has anything worse than a clonk on the head or a dart in the ass happen to them, but this only reinforces the dream logic of the film. Thus, grown men in bad ape-like suits and phony masks are even creepier than paranormal ghouls, because they should not scare, but amuse. Yet….they scare, especially a child.How many times has a film shown someone knocked out with one punch, or a handy vase cracked over a skull, or some similarly unbelievable thing that occurs, with no logical reasoning behind it? Thus, a dissonance between the inner reality, or diegesis, of the film, and the real reality of the viewer is felt, if not cogitated upon, especially when nothing else fosters the suspension of disbelief within the movie. This does not occur in Babes In Toyland because there is no disbelief to suspend. The film, from its first frame, when Mother Goose (Virginia Karns) sings and flips pages of an over-sized book she's stepped out of, to the last frame, is wholly make believe. Thus, the Bogeymen, who come off as fifth rate Morlocks (see the 1960 version of H.G. Wells The Time Machine), are even scarier, especially to a four of five year old child- which was the age I first saw this film in its usual Thanksgiving showing, in between King Kong and Godzilla marathons….Babes In Toyland does everything a film or any work of art should do- it entertains, moves, and affects you in deeper ways than are immediately understood, even if none of this was intended. Art is not about intention, for if that were the case I guarantee you that this film would be a long forgotten period confection, not the holiday classic it is. There are Laurel and Hardy snobs (yes, they do exist!) that loathe this film, and with good reason, compared to some of their more classic Vaudevillian classics. Yet, they too are skewed, not unlike all the characters in Toyland, for they refuse to merely accept what is presented, and instead judge this terrific little film against what they feel a Laurel and Hardy film should be. Therefore it always falls short. But, if one merely sits back and lets the movie run free of presentiment or expectation it will not fail to entertain- on a first or hundred and first viewing, at the age of four, forty, nor eighty-four. Go ahead, prove me wrong!