MacDill Happenings

The Sunscreen Film Festival presents the  classic 1934 Laurel and Hardy holiday film “Babes in Toyland” tonight.  The movie will be presented at north of the Museum of Fine Arts at North Straub Park at 225 Beach Drive NE in downtown St. Pete at 7pm.  Seasonal refreshments, including popcorn, coffee and hot chocolate, will be available for purchase. No alcohol is allowed. Make sure you bring chairs or blankets to sit on! The film’s story takes place in Toyland, which is inhabited by Mother Goose and other well known fairy tale characters. Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee (played by Laurel and Hardy, respectively), live in a shoe (as in the nursery rhyme There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe), along with Mother Peep (the Old Woman), Little Bo Peep, a mouse resembling Mickey Mouse (and actually played by a live monkey in a costume), and many other children. The mortgage on the shoe is owned by the villainous Silas Barnaby, who is looking to marry Bo Peep. Stannie and Ollie set out to get the money for the mortgage from their boss, The Toymaker. But after the Toymaker finds that Stannie has mixed up an order from Santa Claus (building 100 wooden soldiers at six feet tall, instead of 600 soldiers at one foot tall) and one of the soldiers wrecks the toy shop, Stannie and Ollie are fired without getting the money. Ollie and Stan tell their story to Old King Cole (the King of Toyland) and the townspeople as two Bogeymen scale the wall and open the gate. The crowd flees in panic as the army of torch-wielding Bogeymen attack Toyland. Ollie and Stannie run and hide in the toy shop. There they discover boxes of darts and use them to fight off the Bogeymen. Stan and Ollie then empty an entire box of darts into a cannon, but as the two search for the last remaining darts, they realize instead that they should unleash the wooden soldiers. The “march” alluded to in the film’s title begins as the soldiers march out of the toy shop (filmed in a stop-motion animation sequence by Roy Seawright[2]). The scene changes to live action as the soldiers attack the Bogeymen with the bayonets of their rifles. Barnaby and the Bogeymen are defeated and driven back into Bogeyland, where alligators appear to feast on them, although this is never made clear. The kingdom of Toyland is saved.