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
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| 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 QAnon Anonymous podcast, the QAA Movie Night Babes in Toyland 1986 episode. | |
| As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, Liv Agar, 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 clued 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 gonna bill you. | |
| So, my soon-to-be wife, 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. | |
| That'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 gonna do a kind of a Marina Abramovich performance piece on you. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Julian took a sanity roll 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? | |
| Why? | |
| That's all I'm saying. | |
| We don't publish scripts. | |
| Nobody sees them. | |
| Nobody needs to know. | |
| Look, as I said, as I've now said two times, I have two styes in my eye, okay? | |
| Look, cut me some slack. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, I'm sorry to say that if you want slack, you picked 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 that 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 papier-mâché. | |
| They're so bad. | |
| I can tell the conversations. | |
| Do you think it looks cheap? | |
| Well, I mean, you know, it's a Toyland, so it's supposed to. | |
| Yeah, it's supposed to. | |
| 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 19th, 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. | |
| That's the only way I can conceive of this. | |
| It's like, oh man, I really need these child actors to work for 12 hours. | |
| Where has the lead get, you know, 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 Uwe Boll as, like, an advisor. | |
| And he also ate up a good part of the budget. | |
| Yeah, and there's the whole gang of child prisoners of nursery characters. | |
| Oh yeah, for sure all those people are slaves. | |
| Yeah, this is the Project Monarch advertising. | |
| 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 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 a 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 itinerant 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!" | |
| *laughter* Where you a voice actor on the film stage? | |
| He's overdubbed the whole movie. | |
| I've watched it twice. | |
| I've watched it twice now. | |
| 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. | |
| Brutally owned by the ad algorithm. | |
| Build, build, build. | |
| 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, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, 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 a second multiply till you're overcome. | |
| This is much too hard for us. | |
| We can't do the sum. | |
| Oh, I'm a dumb broad after all. | |
| I'm a dumb broad after all. | |
| I mean, wow. | |
| Okay, so that makes sense because this movie does feel like they had to remove like some of the vital organs and like the corpse was reanimated missing a couple of essential parts. | |
| The idea that being in like dead peonage is kind of quirky does fit really well with 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, I guess I must be sold into slavery to the evil Barnaby Barnacle. | |
| Goddamn, 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 it's just the first 20 minutes. | |
| Yeah, just like the first act. | |
| I get to see, in both the real world and in Babes in Toyland, played by the same actor. | |
| Was it Richard Mulligan? | |
| Yeah, Richard Mulligan. | |
| Who plays 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 in an aggressive and hostile way. | |
| Then, yeah, there's the weird, like, child bride scene. | |
| So I was like, I was like, what? | |
| Is this supposed to be like a Christmas movie? | |
| Yeah, a Christmas kids movie. | |
| I suppose if you want to make a villain that's easy to hate, just make him a pedophile. | |
| Just introduce your villain and say that he's a pedophile. | |
| 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 later. | |
| Now that I'm here in Toyland, I'm wondering if there's some older gentleman 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 see the dialogue in this and the acting is wild. | |
| 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? | |
| That'll be her. | |
| I wonder where she's stuck this time. | |
| Hi, Mom. | |
| 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. | |
| Will you be alright 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, you put on your chains. | |
| Honey, I gotta go. | |
| I gotta go find Joey 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 Toyland kind of looking like a James Wan ghost. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And she basically plays the role of Ghislaine Maxwell. | |
| Yeah, trafficking Wee Willie Winkie and Peter Piper and all of the other children. | |
| That's something that's really revealing as well, even with the villain's pedophilia, where I want to say that it's pitched as like, isn't he so strange that he's calling this child 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 is 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 Sholin, off to work. | |
| The sister is dressed in the strangest outfit, a bright pink vinyl rain slicker and floppy beret. | |
| Also, please notice how bizarre the dialogue is in this scene as well. | |
| At some moments it seems like they're improv-ing 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. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| It's a sled. | |
| (gentle music) | |
| A sled? | |
| 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 rat. | |
| Okay, take it easy and watch TV until Mom and Joey get home, okay? | |
| 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, uh, loving home is like, so they have no point of reference. | |
| So, uh, yeah. | |
| So, yeah, the lines are, like, delivered very strangely, like, almost under their breath. | |
| You're a rat. | |
| Was that, is that what she said? | |
| Yeah. | |
| 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 will look we'll see later matches the upbringing that 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, it didn't feel comfortable around other children Like she would prefer the company of older people and stuff. | |
| Mm-hmm, but we'll get into that later Yeah, you're giving them a lot more credit than they deserve. | |
| No, listen, we're not going to look at the actual work here. | |
| We can only fantasize. | |
| We can only bake a new and interesting 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 but speak. | |
| Oh yeah, I knew he said that. | |
| Um, 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 is just very unhuman. | |
| Especially because they're about to walk into, like, an abusive workplace, uh, 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 And Drew Barrymore is, you know, she's in 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 gust has 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 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 villain's a pedophile, not a murderer? | |
| Yeah, Scream clearly stole a lot from this. | |
| This movie walks so Scream can run. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's more terrifying than screaming. | |
| 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 gonna 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 QAnon Anonymous and subscribe. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thanks. | |
| I love you. |