I choose to accept this explanation because I’ve exhausted every other natural explanation on this Earth, and I’d rather not consider the alternative. It would explain the Mouse’s jerky movements and unpredictable behavior. If you look at the still frame up above, that kinda sorta looks like a hairy tail.
Today, the internet seems to have come to a sort-of consensus on it.Īllegedly, the Mouse is played by a Capuchin monkey, the kind who played a villain in MONKEY SHINES and a hero in the NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM movies.
LAUREL AND HARDY MOVIES MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS MOVIE
I had to get up early Christmas morning and wait through the entire movie just to see the parts with the mouse in them, and I couldn’t rewind. In fact, I had to wait a whole year in between screenings to get another look at that mouse. Please keep in mind I’m old enough to remember a time before YouTube clips and smartphones. This question haunted me for years. I asked almost all the film experts and luminaries I’ve ever met about it, when I should have been posing far more intellectual questions. Was it a 1930-something equivalent to Nelson De La Rosa, the actor and dancer and one-time world’s smallest man, friend to Marlon Brando and Pedro Martinez? (You know him from THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU.) It’s got to be some variety of person, right? It doesn’t move like any of those things. March Of The Wooden Soldiers (1934, 77 mins.): Stannie Dum (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Oliver Hardy) are well-meaning but brainless Toymakers in Toyland. It’s shown next to the Three Little Pigs and the Cat more than once, so it’s clear whatever’s inside that costume is smaller than even the smallest person. The Mouse in BABES IN TOYLAND rides in various tiny vehicles and clearly has usable limbs. Now, let’s see all of the above in motion… Then you had the Cat with his Fiddle, which would appear to be a short-ish man in a costume.īut that Cat gets up to a lot of horseplay with a Mouse, which looks like a dead-eyed, just-barely-off-brand Mickey Mouse. You had the Three Little Pigs, who were either little people or children wearing costumes. MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS played on WPIX every single Christmas when I was growing up, and sometimes it was colorized and sometimes it wasn’t, but there was always a constant: Every single year, I completely and absolutely obsessed over one very specific character, out of a cast of hundreds.Īs much as I enjoyed the slapstick antics of Laurel & Hardy (in the roles of “Stannie Dum” and “Ollie Dee”) and their trip through a phantasmagorical storybookland, as much as I rooted against mean old Silas Barnaby (played by Henry Brandon, of THE SEARCHERS and ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13), those emotions were absolutely dwarfed in scale - no pun intended - by my absolute confusion over some of the storybook characters in the film. For example, the dart-slapping scene is magic to a youngster born to the tri-state area, but I didn’t know until today that other creative people fixated on it the way I fixated on my own mysterious element of the film.
It’s a film containing many mysteries, and depending on the beholder those can vary. It was rarely seen in public after a poor Walt Disney remake in 1961 and, when it was shown, the censors had often butchered it.There are many questions about MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS, the Laurel & Hardy movie also known as BABES IN TOYLAND. Better known as Babes In Toyland, the film was the best of their feature-length operettas and certainly had the most lavish fantasy sets. This priceless nine-reel comedy from veteran Laurel & Hardy producer Hal Roach was the personal favorite of Oliver Hardy. But their toy army comes in handy when the evil Barnaby (Henry Brandon) and his furry bogeymen invade Toyland, and the boys end up as heroes when they save the Widow Peep's daughter Bo (Charlotte Henry) from his clutches.
They misinterpret an order from Santa Claus for 600 one-foot-high toy soldiers and come up instead with 100 six-foot-high soldiers.
March Of The Wooden Soldiers (1934, 77 mins.): Stannie Dum (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Oliver Hardy) are well-meaning but brainless Toymakers in Toyland. Stan and Ollie have a few hysterical scenes in this comedic gem that also features Rosina Lawrence, Jack Haley, Patsy Kelly, Mischa Auer and Jimmy Finlayson. Movie Struck (1937, 69 mins.): A gas station attendant tries to help his girlfriend achieve success in Hollywood when she wins a local beauty contest. 3 Feature Length Films on 1 DVD Starring the Kings of Comedy.īogus Bandits (1933, 88 mins.): Ollie and Stan play Ollio and Stanlio, a pair of incompetent bandits who are hired as Menservants to Fra Diavolo (The Devils Brother), a real bandit played by Dennis King, who, in his other guise, is known as the Marquis de San Marco - an aristocrat who uses his position to discover the whereabouts of the treasures worn by the ladies in high society.
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