QAA Podcast - Premium Episode 153: Babes In Toyland (Movie Night) Sample

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

Fuck you and Merry Christmas. Do you think this is a joke? Keanu Reeves. Drew Barrymore. Mister Miyagi. Are you even celebrating??? Thanks for supporting us on patreon! Liv Agar: https://twitter.com/Liv_Agar / http://livagar.com Editing by Corey Klotz. Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 153 of the Q&Nan Anonymous podcast, the QAA movie night, Babes in Toyland, 1986 episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Julian Fields, Liv Egar and Travis View

Now, when people hear the name Babes in Toyland, they usually think about the 1961 film produced by Walt Disney himself. If they're a little more well-read or forced to have taken a theater history course, they might think about the 1903 operetta written by Victor Herbert

on which the popular Disney film was based. What nobody is thinking about is the 1986 adaptation of Babes in Toyland starring Drew Barrymore and Keanu Reeves. Unless, of course, you are my demented partner who used to watch this every Christmas as a kid and clude me into its existence. You can tell her, I mean,

my wife told me to tell you that the psychic damage that you literally owe her for it. She's going to bill you. So, uh, my, my soon-to-be wife, uh, she had this on VHS. Oh, that's wonderful. And watched it every Christmas. Nice.

This was the Christmas movie in her house. So it says a little, and it says a lot. It's terrifying. The spiritual poverty. Just the, oh, that's like a dark souls family. It is. So this version of Babes in Toyland is the one we will be watching for this episode. And let me assure you, it is guaranteed to make Julian lose his mind.

No, I've come prepared. I have a table of various sharp objects and weapons. and we're going to do a kind of a Marina Abramovich performance piece on you. Oh, okay. Julian took a sanity role for this, and I think it's either he rolled really well or really poorly, and it's hard to see.

We'll find out later in the episode. I won't crack. I will say that Jake misspelled the word here in the first sentence. Why? That's all I'm saying. We don't publish scripts, nobody sees him. Nobody needs to know. Look, as I said, as I've now said two times,

I have two sties in my eye, okay? Look. So that's four styes if he's said it twice. Cut me, cut me some slack. Okay. Well, I'm sorry to say that if you want slack, you pick the wrong movie, buddy. Liv texted me last night and asked if she was going to be watching the 1961 version. And I said, no, no, no.

This is the 1986 version. I'm glad I asked that before I watched it. Because imagine having to watch two babes in Toyland movies in one night. They're both not great. I mean, the original isn't all that good either. It's listed online as a TV movie. Correct. This is like one of the earliest straight-to-VHS Christmas films.

Yes. So Babes in Toyland, 1986, is a made-for-TV film directed by Clive Donner. The film was produced by Orion Pictures and distributed by MGM, Warner Brothers, and Sony. So everybody wanted to pile in on this trash. Christ. This is like they invented a color picture. Yeah. I can only imagine the traffic person behind this movie had a massive,

1980s-style cocaine problem and was funneling the entire budget up her nose. I do talk about how the sets look like they're made out of paper machet. They're so bad. I can tell the conversations, do you think it looks cheap?

Well, I mean, it's a, you know, it's a toy land, so it's supposed to. Yeah, it's supposed to be made out of cardboard and duct tape. Oh, yeah, that looks good. So the movie was shot entirely on location in Munich, Germany, oddly enough, and it originally aired on NBC.

on December 19, 1986, almost exactly 35 years ago to the day. Wait, wait. How is it shot in Munich? This is a lot. Were there some weird quirks about like age of consent laws in Germany in the 80s or something? Probably. It's the only way I can consider this. It's like, oh man, I really need these child actors to work for 12 hours.

Where has legal laws? They went there because they wanted to shoot the movie cheap on their lot. That would be the obvious, you know, for something that looks this bad. But instead, they had to have Ui Boll as, like, an advisor. And he also ate up a good part of the budget. Yeah, and there's, yeah, there's the whole, like, gang of child prisoners of, like, nursery characters. Oh, yeah, for sure, all those people are slaves. All those.

Yeah, this is the Project Monarch, like, advertising. It's like a, it's an hour and a half ad for Project Monarch. Every kid in this movie, maybe with the exception of Drew Barrymore, looks so sad. Just, just completely downtrodden, maybe. held against their will. So the movie was then released on VHS in 1991. While some of the plot is intact from the original, the 1986 version, as outdated as it seems, made a lot of ideal updates from the 60s Disney version. For example, in the Disney film, the main love interest played in this version by Keanu Reeves, was sold to a band of gypsies? Okay, so I'm sure he means

detinerant people, or perhaps the ROMs, but my god. No, but like in the movie, it's like, we've sold him to a band of gypsies. Were you a voice actor on the film? Overdub the whole movie. I've watched it twice. I've watched it twice now. So it's, I'm ruined.

And the ingenue in the original film, Mary Contrary, is forced to marry the evil Barnaby Barnacle because she can't figure out how to manage her finances. Oh, my God. There's actually a whole song about it in the original. Here, check it out.

This is so melted. If you're over the age of 35, this is how much earwax is trapped in. That was specifically targeted at you. You have weird ear contraptions in your car. I know, I know. They always send me the worst shit, of course. Yeah, really. Brutely owned by the ad algorithm.

Bill, Bill, Bill. The price of milk and eggs and bread is rising every day. Now with our bankbook in the red, these bills are hard to pay. If we stopped buying chocolate cake and lived on green string beans, exactly how much would it take to live within our means? Oh, oh, oh, oh, put down beans and cross out cake, let me see, oh dear me, what a job to undertake. Milk plus bread, oh, my head, add the track and won't apply till you're overcome. This is much too hard for us, we can't do the sum.

Oh, I'm a dumb brought after all. I'm a dumb brought after all. I mean, wow. Okay, so that makes sense because this movie does feel like they had to remove some of the vital organs and, like, the corpse was reanimated missing. The idea that being in, like, dead peonage is kind of quirky. Does fit really well at the overall theme. Well, no, she has plenty of money coming in.

She's just too fucking dumb. That literally is the plot. In the original, she's like an heiress to this huge fortune. but she can't balance her checkbook and figure it out. So she's like, oh, I guess I must be sold into slavery to the evil Barnaby Barnacle. God damn, man. So, yeah, it's probably better that we're not doing that version. But the 1986 version isn't all that much better, as Travis pointed out in a text last night.

In the first 20 minutes of this movie, there's a boss sexually harassing his underage employee and a child bride. And that's just the first 20 minutes. That's just, yeah, just like the first act. Like, I get, I get to see in both the real world and in Babes and Toyland, played by the same actor, was it Richard Mulligan? Yeah, Richard Mulligan. Praise the toy store owner and Barnaby Barnacle. Yeah, early in this, yeah, there's like, he's like basically weirdly coming on to what seems like a teenage employee, an aggressive and hostile way. Then, yeah, there's the weird, like, child bride scene.

So I was like, I was like, what, this is supposed to be like a Christmas movie? Yeah, a Christmas kids movie. I get, listen, listen, I suppose if you want to make a really, you know, a villain that people can, that's easy to hate, just make them a pedophile. Just make them, just like, just introduce your villain and say that he's a pedophile. It's a, it's compounded by the fact that Keanu Reeves plays the same character he did in my own private Idaho. Correct. Same outfit, too. I'll get to that.

I'll get to that later. Now that I'm here in Toyland, I'm wondering if you. There's some older gentlemen that might sponsor my lifestyle. And so, without further ado, join me on the floor of the cookie factory as we eat our way to the gooey center of Babes in Toyland. The first scene in the movie has the most bizarre conversation where the mother, played by Eileen Brennan, is calling a young Drew Barrymore who plays Lisa in the film to let her know she's running about an hour late. It's revealed that she has a young boy with her, Joey, played by Chad Carlson, Lisa's youngest sibling. At first the mother doesn't seem to care at all about Joey and is more

concerned with putting chains on her tires for the snowstorm. But then the conversation ends with the mom like absolutely losing her shit about getting Joey something to eat. I mean, you'll say, the dialogue in this and the acting is wild. It's, it's so bizarre. I'm extremely hazardous as the evening wears on. But the best advice is to just stay home. Repeat, stay home. Any word from mom yet? The following traffic advisories have just been issued. That'll be her.

U.S. 30. I wonder where she's stuck this time. Hi, Mom. Lisa? I'm at a gas station in Midvale. I'm having chains put on the car. I'm hungry, Mom. Okay, Joey.

I have a couple of more things that I have to do. Uh, so I'll be home in about an hour, okay? Okay. Do you be all right? for a little bit till we get home. Don't worry about a thing. Just take care of yourself and Joey and dinner will be ready when you get home.

Pam, we put on your chains. Your chains. Honey, I got to go. I got to go find Joey's something to eat. Okay? Great. Bye-bye. The mother is so desperate in this scene.

It's so weird. Yeah, and when she reappears, she's like a horror version of herself. Right. The mom really gets the shit end of the stick in this movie. Yeah, she really shows up in Toiland, kind of looking. like a James Wan ghost.

Yeah. And she basically plays the role of Galane Maxwell. Yeah, trafficking Wee Willie Winky and Peter Piper and all of the other children. That's something that's really revealing as well, even with like the villains pedophilia, where I want to say that it's like, it's pitched as like, isn't he so strange that he's calling this child like attractive? He's got such peculiar taste. Yeah, it's not like this guy.

is evil to the bone he's a real fucking sicko it's like no well at the end he does reveal that there is no good in him and so maybe it is like an indictment of pedophiles that's true it's a critique of capitalism of the boss structure after getting off the phone with her mother lisa hangs up and goes to see her teenage sister mary played by jill sholan off to work uh the sister is dressed in the strangest outfit a bright pink vinyl rain slicker and floppy beret also please please notice how bizarre the dialogue is in this scene as well. At some moments it seems like they're improvving even. You didn't put these away again, Mary. I got you a great present. Don't ask what it is. It's a surprise. I bet it's a new blender. Well then what

is it? I won't tell you. You're a rat. It's a sled. It's a sled. A sledge. I thought for a change you might want something fun. Oh, I think a sled's a terrific present. I love you. You're a wrap. Okay, take it easy and watch TV until Mom and Joey, you know. Okay. Okay. There's no need to redecorate the house or anything before we all get back.

Are you warm? Yes. Okay. Okay, bye. Bye. Take care. Like, doesn't it seem like the dialogue is, like, what would be written and performed for, like, a high school sort of video project? Yeah. It's like Hollywood actors doing an impression of what they think regular people and their families talk like.

They're like, I don't know. I'm so alienated from this. I think the direction was just so poor. Yeah, like, none of these people really know exactly what Loving Home is like, so they have no point of reference. So, yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, the lines are, like, delivered very strangely, like, almost under the breath that you're a rat. Was that, is that what she said? Yeah, you're a rat.

They say it back to each other, which is, I think that's actually one of the things that rings true. But her face, when she says, SLED, like, it's really unclear what she thinks of anything at any point. And they're really actually setting up now, now I can see it, but I couldn't see it during the first watch. Of course, me neither, yeah. They're setting up the fact that she's basically, like, I want a mixer for Christmas, like, and she likes to decorate the house. Like, she's an old lady. child or something. Yeah. She's very serious. And this, we'll see later, matches the upbringing that she had, where she didn't really have a childhood because it was very directly supplanted by very adult

things super early. And she always, apparently Drew Barrymore always, you know, didn't feel comfortable around other children. Like she would prefer the company of older people and stuff. But we'll get into that later. Yeah, you're giving them a lot more credit than they deserve. This is. No, this is Listen, we're not going to look at the actual work here. Like, we can only fantasize. We can only bake a new and interesting, you know, reality from these chicken bones. Yeah, this is like, it's a reflection of reality that the writers did not try to create, but just created in virtue of the fact of how awful Hollywood is.

We'll be looking at the unconscious filmmaking. Yes. As Lacan says, the unconscious cannot help it speak. Oh, yeah, I knew he said that. Yeah, and the sister just, like, looks. so demented, like her, the way that her, I don't know, the looks that she's giving, it's just very unhuman. Especially because they're about to walk into like an abusive workplace with lots of like stress and sexual harassment immediately. And yet they insist on making everyone so chipper that

they seem like children. I mean, even the kind of teenagers are playing, I don't know, someone with reduced faculties here. Like they seem to be childish, you know, in their excitement and all of that. And Drew Barrymore is, you know, she's in the this weird phase of like adolescence that I know all too well where she's not quite a teenager but not little enough to be a kid kid you know she's 11 yeah yeah that's that age you're not quite a teenager but you're not like young enough to be like a little kid you know what i mean a little kid yes i also thought it was super weird how at the beginning of that scene drew barrymore is like you left your shoes out again and then just places the shoes in the center of

the staircase right off the bat this movie is making me lose my mind merry christmas we cut back to Lisa alone in the house, now holding a large mixing bowl of God knows what. The family is gone and she's decided to make Christmas cookies or something. On the news, an anchor who is clearly reading cue cards warns that the large, quote, Canadian storm is growing in strength. But the TV fizzes out. A strong gusts is blown over the antenna on the roof. Lisa immediately picks up the phone to call someone? There's no cell phones and her mother is out on the road, so it's unclear exactly who she's going to call. Just then, another guy. gust of wind takes out the power lines.

It's the beginning of scream, except a 1986 made for TV Christmas remake. Lisa throws on her coat and hustles out into the storm alone. It's scream except the villains a pedophile, not a murderer. Yeah, it's, the scream clearly stole a lot from this.

This movie walks so Scream can run. Yeah, yeah. It's more terrifying than Scream. Yeah. That's true. That's true. We cut to a toy store in the neighborhood, filled with hustling and bustling. Outside, a group of children sings the most aggressive Christmas carol I've ever heard.

We cut inside and see one of the employees, Jack, played by a young Keanu Reeves, making his way through the shop towards the register. He's wearing a Santa hat and carrying a large inflatable goose. His full name, by the way, is Jack Nimble. Yeah, Jack Nimble. We're going to get to that later. I've got criticisms about that choice. You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous.

We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way. For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire library of premium episodes. So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous and subscribe. Thank you. Thanks. I love you. Jake loves you. Thank you.