Babes in Toyland

Babes in Toyland is a 1934 musical fantasy comedy set in a storybook land where nursery-rhyme characters live side by side. Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee, two bumbling employees of a toymaker, lodge with the widowed Mother Peep and her daughter, Little Bo Peep. The villainous Silas Barnaby holds a mortgage on Mother Peep's shoe and pressures the family, hoping to force Bo Peep into marriage. When the pair fail to raise the money they need, they resort to trickery against Barnaby, which only provokes him further, and the trouble escalates into a full-scale confrontation in Toyland.

The film was directed by Charley Rogers and Gus Meins and produced by Hal Roach for Hal Roach Studios. Laurel and Hardy star as the two leads, with Charlotte Henry as Little Bo Peep, Henry Brandon as Silas Barnaby, Felix Knight as Tom-Tom Piper and Virginia Karns as Mother Goose. The screenplay was written by Nick Grindé, Frank Butler and Anna Alice Chapin, and the credited cast runs to 35 performers.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.1 from around 8,200 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.3 from a much smaller sample of 164 votes. A critics' rating of 8.5 from 16 reviews places it noticeably higher than either audience measure, suggesting a stronger reputation among reviewers than among general viewers. It runs 78 minutes.