OVP: Babes in Toyland (1961)

Film: Babes in Toyland (1961)

Stars: Ray Bolger, Tommy Sands, Annette Funicello, Ed Wynn, Tommy Kirk

Director: Jack Donahue

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Costume Design)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Annette Funicello: click here to learn more about Ms. Funicello (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Disney has long had a way of knowing exactly which stars it needed to keep in its orbit before they left, and Annette Funicello was no different.  After the end of The Mickey Mouse Club, the series' breakout hit was still under contract, and used throughout a variety of Disney properties, including Zorro and Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, as well as today's film Babes in Toyland, her second (of four) theatrical films with Disney.  She also became something of a jukebox star during this time frame, coming out with several hit songs including "Pineapple Princess," "O Dio Mio," and "Tall Paul," the latter a Top 10 hit and the biggest tune of her career.  Babes in Toyland is a pretty good encapsulation, though, of why Funicello would eventually need to escape the Mouse House, given the 19-year-old star wasn't being asked to stretch her abilities much within the Disney universe.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie (tangentially a Christmas movie, which feels nice given today is the day the Hallmark ornaments are announced, a tradition to pour over in my family, so I'm fully Christmas in July) takes place in a land of make believe, one that is still fully capitalistic as we have the villainous Barnaby (Bolger) trying to wed the beautiful Mary Contrary (Funicello) even though she is engaged to Tom Piper (Sands).  The reason he wants to marry her is that she is set to inherit a large fortune, something she is unaware of, and will go to her when she becomes betrothed (and he intends to steal the fortune).  He does this first by trying to have Tom killed (but his henchmen are unsuccessful in doing this), and then in having him shrunk when they reach the Toymaker (Wynn) and his assistant (Kirk) in the forest while looking for Mary's sheep.  Mary & Tom, though, defeat Barnaby, save Christmas (by having enough toys built for the holiday), and end up blissfully wed.

The movie has a lot of plot holes, more than you'd expect even from a live-action Disney film in the 1960's.  We never discover what Mary thinks of being an heiress, what happened to Barnaby, or what happened to the sheep.  The film feels like from scene-to-scene it's a patchwork picture, and I'll be honest-it's not a great movie.  I think it has a lot of heart, and there are warm performances (it's easy watching this to understand why Funicello would take on the role of America's Sweetheart so well-her song "I Can't Do the Sum" is the musical highlight of the picture), and the art direction is lovely (better than the Oscar-nominated costumes, though those also have their moments like Mary's yellow dress), but it's too juvenile.  Your mileage with this movie as an esteemed holiday classic will largely depend on if you had a copy of it on VHS in your parents entertainment center growing up or not...watching it cold as an adult, you see the songs are only okay, and that Tommy Sands as a lead is a bit charmless.

On the flip side, I quite liked Tommy Kirk, who along with Ed Wynn steals most of the picture.  Kirk would work with Funicello eight times in his career, but this is the last of the films we'll track with the two of them this month, so I thought it would be appropriate to discuss his unusual (and sad) career path to end this week.  Kirk is best-known today for his role as the young boy in Old Yeller, but he was a major star for Disney in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  He had mammoth hits in The Shaggy Dog and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, a movie that was such a big hit that Disney essentially had to unfire him to make the sequel, as Kirk had been caught having gay sex at a Burbank swimming pool, and Walt himself personally fired him after the discretion.  Kirk, though, was gone from Disney after the sequel was also a hit, and while he would work in several of the beach party films (including a couple opposite Annette Funicello), his career was washed up by the end of the decade, and years of drug abuse (and his public sexuality, which was made known in the early-1970's after Disney had initially covered it up in the wake of Merlin Jones success) meant that by the 1970's one of the top box office draws of the 1960's was working as a waiter in Los Angeles.  Thankfully, a successful small business (and access to residuals from his many Disney films being released in syndication and on home video) meant that Kirk eventually got to have a happy ending to his life, and was made a Disney Legend in 2006 from the studio that had once fired him.