#JusticeforTrollog
Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.
But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.
Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.
I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.
So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.
Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.
Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.
The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.
Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.
This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.
Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.
To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon, where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:
“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”
Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.
I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.
He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.
That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.
After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.
With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):
“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”
Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.
The end.
But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
