More than you ever wanted to know about 1986’s Babes In Toyland

About five years ago, I was occasionally writing for one of the SyFy channel’s now defunct blogs. My niche was weird stuff from the 1980s, which would get posted as “x number of thoughts we had while watching [thing].” One of my pitches involved the 1986 made-for-tv movie Babes in Toyland, starring Drew Barrymore, Keanu Reeves, Eileen Brennan, and Pat Morita. My editor said, great, write it up and send it my way, and put a lot of emphasis on Keanu, since we’re doing a whole month about him.

Reader, I sent twenty-two pages.

Obviously, SyFy did not post my entire work. They would have looked dangerously unhinged. Since I have no qualms about that, I asked if I could post the entire uncut thing to my blog. I got a probably not, because NBC Universal now owned the content and they probably wouldn’t be down with it, so I didn’t pursue it further. But then the blog closed, time went by…

And I’m like, fuck it. Like, I got paid a hundred bucks to write that (I don’t think I even invoiced them anyway), and the blog has been closed for five years now (it’s possible that the content of that article might have had something to do with it). If they want to come for my blood, I’m more than willing to return the one hundred dollars that I frankly don’t even think I asked them to pay me, anyway, because I’m notoriously bad at invoicing.

So, in the spirit of Robin Hood and all that bullshit, I’m robbing my work back from a major media company and presenting it in its entirety. All twenty-two pages dedicated solely to 1986’s Babes In Toyland, or, more specifically, twenty-two pages dedicated solely to 1986’s Babes In Toyland with references to the blog’s Keanu-specific theming removed.

Merry Christmas. I got you a present and it is horrible.

Imagine, if you will, a made-for-TV holiday movie retelling of an obscure 1960s Annette Funicello star vehicle based on a 1903 operetta whose popularity spawned several tours and Broadway revivals, making it the Wicked of its age.

Now, imagine that this made-for-TV holiday movie starred Keanu Reeves.

Ding-dang, have I got good news for you, reader. Such a wonder of holiday magic exists.

How does one begin to describe the many weird layers of this yuletide tale? I mean, Keanu in a made-for-tv movie with Drew Barrymore? Sold! But I didn’t mention the part where he sings an ode to Cincinnati, and his enthusiasm for the scrappy Ohio city results in a car accident and Drew sustaining a traumatic brain injury. Do I go on to talk about the plethora of feathers in bad guy Richard Mulligan’s costume and how weird it is that he went from having an evil bird as a sidekick to starring in a show called Empty Nest? At what point does this entire thing start to sound painfully made up? Eileen Brennan as a neglectful mother? Pat Morita commanding an army of toy soldiers? Walk with me now through the incredible world that is 1986’s Babes in Toyland.

After an excessively long, impressionist credits sequence that would make Van Gogh weep at its beauty, we join Lisa, an eleven-year-old Drew Barrymore, in her living room as the weatherman on television warns viewers to stay at home. A freak Christmas Eve storm has delayed Lisa’s mother, Eileen Brennan, and brother Joey, a child actor whose lines are clearly dubbed in by an adult woman, at a service station. You get the impression from the way Lisa picks up her older sister Mary’s (Jill Schoelen) shoes and promises to have dinner on the table by the time their mother gets home that Lisa is kind of keeping their barely functioning family on track. I mean, when Mary boasts about the amazing present she bought Lisa for Christmas, Lisa’s first guess is that it’s a blender. Something is not great in this house.

Despite the arctic blast, Mary’s evil boss, Barnie (Richard Mulligan), has his employees at the toy story on the full-time hustle. When he’s not busy barking orders at his workers, he’s giving out inappropriate backrubs to young women.

For what is Christmas, truly, if none of us are confronting workplace harassment?

Back at home, Lisa becomes more and more alarmed about the severity of the storm. Now, it might seem weird that she’s watching the weather report while she’s making Christmas Eve dinner for her family who seem content to let a child function as the only adult in the house but it’s not actually that weird. I mean, that last part is, but as someone who was alive and operating a television at the time, a major weather event like a blizzard dominated all three channels. There just wouldn’t have been anything else to watch. When the storm knocks out the phone lines, Lisa bundles up and heads out into the snow probably as much out of boredom as any real concern about her family.

In the eighties, we had to make our own fun.

Now, here’s where we get to the most important—and confusing—part of this entire movie: Keanu.

Here’s why it’s confusing:

This adorable little piece sits himself down at Mary’s workstation and suggests they go out and get a pizza. And what does Mary, inexplicably, say to this? No, sorry, future star of The Matrix and Canadian heartthrob Keanu frickin’ Reeves, I’ve got other offers.

Now, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to cheer Mary on here. She has two other guys wanting to take her for pizza and they’re both better options than Keanu Reeves? 1986 Keanu Reeves? He’s so fresh-faced. So guileless. The innocent neighborhood boy who’s mowing lawns for cash to save up for a rad Trans-Am. And you’re just a concerned MILF who has all this lemonade and no husband at home to share it with on this scorching hot July afternoon. Mary’s got something better than that on the burner? Good for you, Mary.

Lisa makes her way to the toy store to warn everyone about the dangerous storm. But do you think Barnie the humbug manager can be moved to let his employees go home before the worst of the front hits? Absolutely not. He’s got time to openly proposition Mary, though, sending her temper through the roof. She excoriates him and his “smutty thoughts” in front of concerned customers then tells him that she’s leaving. This is what we with “at will” employment experience know as “refusal to work” and it predictably results in her getting fired. Barnie also cans Keanu and his friend/Samwise Gamgee stand-in George (Googy Gress), so Lisa doesn’t have anything to lose when she gets on the PA system and incites a full-on panic. With a few more parting shots to Barnie, the ragamuffin group of unemployeds depart the store with Lisa’s Christmas gift, a sled, in tow.

Because this is 1986, Mary warns Lisa to buckle the sled into the seatbelt when they pile into Keanu’s—okay, fine, Jack’s, I’ll use his character name—Jeep and head off on the treacherous roads. With Lisa unbelted, riding on the sled and struggling to keep the soft-top closed, Jack breaks into a rousing musical theater number celebrating Cincinnati, penned by Leslie Bricusse.

Yes, that Leslie Bricusse. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Leslie Bricusse. Someone at NBC really believed in this project.

While listing the many attractive attributes of the “Maserati” of Ohio (and yes, they painfully force the word to rhyme with “Cincinnati,” which you will always be able to spell reliably after listening to the song), the car weaves all over the road. When a tree falls in front of them, Keanu is unable to avoid a sharp stop, launching Lisa and her sled out of the Jeep and down an embankment, where she Ethan Fromes backward into a tree.

All is darkness.

To the strains of “Toyland,” one of two numbers from the original 1903 production that survived the gauntlet of remakes, Lisa rides her sled through the sky, descending upon a quaint village of candy-pink houses, populated by teddy bear policemen and gossiping toad housewives. Her wonder at the scene is soon broken by the realization that she’s gonna land in a wedding cake big enough for two scantily-clad ladies to jump out of. She plows into the tiered celebration of buttercream in front of the horrified townsfolk.

The police bear does nothing.

I don’t want to be that person who thinks they could do better at another person’s job, but immediately on the heels of an aerial attack, two hunchbacks sneak through a fence and right up to the scene of the crime.

I will refer to them as Riff-Raff and Uncle Fester. And if I were chief of the teddy bear police, I would refer to the guy above as “no longer working for our department.”

After a commercial break, we find Lisa falling into step with the citizens of the town as they march toward some unspecified destination. Every furry in Burbank came out for this casting call, resulting in a surreal parade of impressive Halloween costumes and unimpressive regional amusement park characters. Never questioning her participation in what could be some kind of storybook death march, Lisa goes with the crowd flow and meets Georgie Porgie who is, you guessed it, George from the toy store. In Lisa’s coma, however, he’s just a walking fat joke, a guy with cookies in his hat and a job as the official taster for the local industrial bakery. He sadly informs Lisa that his best friend, Jack, is about to lose his beloved, Mary, in an arranged marriage to the evil Barnaby.

The villainous Barnaby lives inside a giant bowling ball which he peevishly rolls through town, injuring residents, whenever it suits him. Obviously, I’m making that bit of bonkers world-building up, right?

If there’s one thing I don’t joke about, it’s Richard Mulligan’s character’s homes. Some things are sacred.

Mary has to marry Barnaby in order to save her mother’s house from foreclosure, as the vile man has, like Bank of America in 2008, bought the mortgage and jacked up the terms. Even worse, Barnaby is Jack’s uncle. As Mary walks down the aisle, Jack appears in the crowd, heroic and heartbroken as he watches the woman he loves wed another in front of a crowd of animal-human hybrids.

I’ve always thought that you can tell how good an actor is based on how seriously they take themselves in a truly ridiculous role. Keanu Reeves is fully aware of what’s happening in this scene. He knows he’s surrounded by extras in rented mascot suits and recycled costumes from a community theater production of The Marriage of Figaro. But he doesn’t care. He’s committed to delivering intensity and despair. That’s why Speed worked but Speed 2: Cruise Control didn’t; Jason Patrick couldn’t look past how ridiculously bad the script was in order to fully immerse himself the way Keanu did on the first Speed, which is also just the most preposterously stupid premise. I’m sorry, I know it’s a classic and all but if I don’t speak the truth, who will?

Decked out in his retroactive Jareth-from-Labyrinth cosplay failure, Barnaby arrives at the wedding, revealing himself to be Barnie the lecherous toy store manager.

Let’s all keep uncomfortably in mind that the stuff that’s happening is part of a Wizard of Oz-style concussion dream in which characters and events are inspired by real-life counterparts, meaning that Lisa’s unconscious brain is constructing this arranged marriage out of the experience of witnessing a middle-aged man sexually harassing her teen sister. And at no point in what I can only presume was the cocaine-fueled all-night brainstorming session that resulted in this movie did anyone stop and go, “You know, maybe we should keep this light.”

The Justice of the Peace apologizes to the couple on behalf of the Toy Master, a mysterious figure in Toyland who is in charge of making all the toys for Christmas. He’s too busy to attend the wedding but sends his regards, as well as a cryptic statement about true love conquering all. That’s not good enough for Lisa, who wants to know why, if this Toy Master guy is so powerful and good, is he allowing the wedding to happen? And when this philosophical mystery isn’t answered to her satisfaction, she confidently offers up an objection at the last minute.

Barnaby, enraged by the interruption, tells Lisa to mind her own business, but don’t even get Lisa started, okay? She shames Eileen Brennan, her mother’s Toyland doppelganger, for basically selling her daughter to a pervert. Barnaby sics Riff-Raff and Fester on Lisa and in the commotion, Jack breaks free from the teddy bears holding him back. It probably doesn’t need to be said, but yes, Keanu Reeves fully commits to fighting off teddy bears in police hats who are trying to restrain him. He rushes up to the altar and sweeps Mary off her feet, leaving a humiliated Barnaby to stalk back to his bowling ball. The village celebrates with a big, weirdly Sousa-esque ensemble march that praises Lisa for loving freedom and showing up in their town.

I mean, she didn’t really do anything to fix the situation. If anything, she’s made it way, way worse.

In his bowling ball lair, Barnaby consults his one-eyed, psychic bird and formulates a plan to sabotage the cookie factory. That is a sentence that I just wrote.

Why would Barnaby want to attack a cookie factory? Check this: not only is Jack Barnaby’s nephew, but he’s also about to take over operations at the cookie factory. Like Buffy, Jack has inherited a sacred destiny: he is next in line to take responsibility for all the cookies in Toyland. Cookies are a big deal, Mary explains, as they serve not just as delicious treats and the village’s main food source, but they’re also the currency that Toyland trades with.

I don’t want to be that person who punches holes in a child’s post-impact hallucinations but why hasn’t Barnaby just seized control of the cookie factory? It’s clear the residents of Toyland aren’t going to rise up against him. He could have formally installed himself as Toyland’s dictator by now.

Not that Barnaby hasn’t tried; he got a law passed stating that Jack must be twenty-one and married before he can take over at the cookie factory, thus installing himself as something of a cookie-manager-pro-tempore. So, yeah, this is the part of the plot you can sew up real tight but we can leave your cookie-based economy dangling.

If Jack doesn’t succeed in seizing control of the factory, Barnaby becomes “keeper for life.” And Jack might be dodging a real bullet on that one, to be honest. The Toyland Cookie Factory is a nightmare of OSHA violations, with workers on rollerskates navigating cramped confines amid bubbling copper pots, blazing ovens, and machine presses. At this point, it’s all overseen by Barnaby, who stockpiles cookies in a secret room under the factory floor and lets his goons play baseball with cakes. What if Jack pulls it off? What if he takes over the factory and this underground cache of embezzled baked goods and all those unsafe practices are uncovered? Or is that Barnaby’s plan, all along? Feel-good holiday family musical extravaganza or taut psychological game of cat-and-mouse? It doesn’t matter because Keanu can handle anything you throw at him except Received Pronunciation.

Despite her living arrangements, Eileen Brennan is not playing The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe, but Mrs. Hubbard. She bought the shoe after the Old Woman moved out, having had so many children she had to upgrade to a pair of boots. But don’t let the backstory fool ya; Mrs. Hubbard got down. A long line of nursery rhyme children follows her everywhere. Wee Willie Winky, Peter Piper, Jack and Jill, Little Boy Blue, Jack Horner, all of them sprang from her fruitful loins. But love has burned her, saddling her with a lifetime of poverty and stress. She is to Babes in Toyland as Fantine is to Les Miserables, only the tigers that come at night in Toyland are probably wearing waistcoats.

Hang on, I bet the ones in Les Miserables were also wearing waistcoats.

That’s not the point.

The more we find out about Toyland, the darker it becomes. For example, it’s always daylight in Toyland due to too much enthusiasm for Daylight Saving Time. That’s a harrowing thought to have when you’re as high as I am while writing this. We just did Daylight Saving Time. Is this going to happen to us? Are we going to turn into terrifying toy-animal humanoid hybrids? Will the only record of our civilization exist in nursery rhymes? Even more ominous is the fact that the Toy Master was the person who implemented this “daylight only” rule. This village is controlled entirely by a mysterious and unseen figure nobody thinks to question.

When Jack arrives at the toy factory, he literally sweeps Mary off her feet and asks, “What would you say to a big kiss?” Now, a lot of women my age will cite David Bowie in Labyrinth as their sexual awakening. Not me. Oh no. For me, my entire romantic life was formed by Keanu Reeves sweeping a girl off her feet and then asking if she wanted him to kiss her. No “fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave,” nonsense. Just swoon-worthy, cute horseplay and consent couched in playful banter. That’s the kind of man you want. Not a middle-aged rock star in a codpiece throwing conditions on his love.

Anyway, Barnaby’s frame job works. The teddy bear police arrive to take Jack into custody for trying to “create a Federal cookie deficit.” Direct quote. But here’s how you know this is fantasy: the guy who got caught tanking the economy actually gets arrested for it.

I probably don’t need to note that even as he’s handcuffed and loaded into a little choo-choo train, Keanu plays the scene like he’s starring in an Oscar-bait movie about the Enron scandal.

After a brief song in which Drew Barrymore lip-syncs badly to the clearly adult woman dubbing her parts, the movie takes a turn for The Fugitive. While Mary reunites with Jack in the Toyland jail, Lisa and Georgie make an appeal to the judge. When he can’t be moved, Lisa distracts him with tales of the great city, Cincinnati, so that Georgie can steal the keys to the jail.

So stealthy.

Mary and Jack serenade each other through the bars of the jail cell and the people who made this movie made absolutely no attempt to match the voices of the dubbed singers to the speaking voices of the actors on the screen. It actually sounds like two different actors to the ones who dubbed Mary and Jack in the Cincinnati song, which is just mind blowing. And when all this marijuana convinced me to go down a fact-finding rabbit hole, the official soundtrack credits list Keanu and Jill Schoelen as having performed this duet. This is demonstrably not true. Someday, I’m going to meet Keanu Reeves. And I’m going to be like, “Mr. Reeves. Look me right in the eye. Right in the eye, right now. I’m a human lie detector, broseph. Bro. Bro. Look at me. Did you actually sing those songs in Babes in Toyland in 1986?”

And he’s not going to lie to me because Keanu Reeves does not lie.

Georgie arrives with the keys to set Jack free, at which point Jack calls him fat. Seriously, he says they could make three heroes out of Georgie. Thanks for the rescue, fatty. Let me just bash down your self-esteem to repay you. 

With Jack out of jail, Lisa and the Toyland trio are all officially criminals. Georgie asserts that they need to go straight to the Toy Master, but Lisa wants to know why this guy hasn’t intervened already. Things start to skirt dangerously close to a philosophical debate over the existence of God and such a being’s influence over cosmic justice, with Lisa taking the position of an atheist and the rest of them arguing that while the Toy Master’s ways are mysterious, they are part of a greater plan.

Either that or I’m reading way too much into this.

Within two minutes arriving at the Toy Master’s (Pat Morita) workshop, he lies to Jack twice. One: he says he’s never too busy for Jack. Okay, where were you when the love of Jack’s life was seconds away from getting married? That’s right, you sent a note about how you were too busy to be at the wedding. Two: He says he knows everything that’s been going on in Toyland. But if he knew, why didn’t he intervene? Why let bad things happen to good people?

I knew I wasn’t reading too much into this!

The Toy Master is actually a pretty terrifying figure. Not only does he keep an army of haunted-looking toy soldiers crammed into a cupboard he also “seeks out the evil in the world” and keeps it in a bottle. What the hell is this guy’s long game? First, he messed with time until he tricked the sun. Then, he built an army of man-sized soldiers. And he’s got all the evil in the world in a bottle behind his desk. Look, these kids have been drawn into a conflict the magnitude of which they have no understanding. This isn’t just about Jack taking over the cookie factory. This is about two powerful men locked in a supernatural battle.

Through the eye of his psychic cyclops chicken, Barnaby learns about the bottle of evil. He wants to gain control of it, while the Toy Master plans to capture Barnaby’s evil inside it.

Does anyone else feel like the worldbuilding in this is way too complicated for the type of program it is? We started with a cute song about Ohio and a child being involved in a car accident. Now, we’re breaking people out of jail, talking about grand larceny, communicating with powerful wizards and investigating crime scenes. Yeah, that’s right. Since the teddy bear police won’t do their jobs, our quartet of vigilantes return to the factory to collect evidence. Jack finds the trap door where Barnaby was hiding the cookies, but before he can tell anyone the hatch gives way, spilling him down a tunnel and into a jail cell in Barnaby’s bowling ball fortress. Here, he is forced to witness a jazzy take-home number that’s actually sung by Richard Mulligan instead of a studio singer. As catchy as the song is, it muddles Barnaby’s motivations. Previously, we believed his plan was to maintain control of the cookie factory. The lyrics suggest that his endgame is the total obliteration of the toy industry. And that doesn’t even track with the fact that his job outside of Lisa’s coma hallucination is a toy store manager. He wanted to sell toys and make money, not discourage toys in the marketplace.

Or is this a statement on capitalism and the commercialization of Christmas destroying the innocence of children?

To add yet another subplot to this already complicated tale, Barnaby used the cookies he stole to feed a race of monsters he’s created. Barnaby threatens to feed Mary to the monsters if Jack doesn’t write a letter breaking up with her. This is a step in Barnaby’s plan to control Toyland completely. And I just gotta point out…he’s been in charge of baking the currency of the entire village for years now. He could have taken over a long time ago, without all this convoluted nonsense.

They had to fill up the two-and-a-half-hour run time somehow.

At the cookie factory, Lisa, Mary, and Georgie trip the alarm and alert the teddy bear police. Barnaby conveniently arrives with a signed confession from Jack that outlines his plan to take the purloined cookies and live it up somewhere else as a rich man, without Mary. Heartbroken, she returns home, where Barnaby continues his romantic pursuit. But Lisa creates an intentional mix-up with a bouquet to convince Mary’s mother that Barnaby’s true interest lies with a more mature resident of the Hubbard shoe.

Because there wasn’t enough going on in the story already.

Lisa, Georgie, and Mary decide to storm Barnaby’s bowling ball, certain that Jack must be there. Emboldened by true love, Lisa crawls around in the holes of the ball until another trap door delivers her straight into Jack’s arms. Imprisoned together, they have no way of stopping Barnaby and his ghouls from going after the Toy Master.

This movie contributed greatly to my overestimation of how much time I’d spend being locked in cages throughout my life.

Lisa and Georgie try once again to convince the Toy Master that his policy of non-involvement is going to lead to disaster but he’s still concerned with delivering all the toys to Santa on time. Why do they let this guy be their wise, distant ruler again? Because from where I’m sitting, he’s trying to put out a candle while the whole house burns down. He takes a Skywalker approach to Barnaby’s evil, insisting that there must be good in him, somewhere. This gives Barnaby the perfect entrance line. He bursts in and his henchmen subdue Georgie, Lisa, and the Toy Master. With the bottle of evil in his clutches, Barnaby delivers an expository monologue about his motivations which raises even more questions. He hates toys and cookies, but he wants to rule Toyland by…seizing the cookie factory? IDK, it just sounds like he has no idea what he truly wants. Maybe he needs to take a look inside himself instead of projecting his disappointments onto society.

His Bond-villain-esque soliloquy delivered, Barnaby leaves his psychic bird to torment our heroes. But the chicken accidentally bites the rope holding Lisa, enabling them to escape. They blind the bird with paint and push it into a trunk, but the monster is the least of their problems. They’ve got a new quest: to get that bottle of evil back.

More of the sexual tango between Mrs. Hubbard and Barnaby plays out, with Mrs. Hubbard inviting the villain back to her shoe for gumdrop wine. Then Georgie and Lisa plan for an armed assault on the bowling ball, at which point Lisa, cradling a baseball bat, thinks about how much she misses Cincinnati. While we already know from some badly-aged Pete Rose references that Lisa is something of a Reds fan, for a moment I thought the idea of running up on someone with a bat was a treasured Cincinnati tradition. When Georgie realizes that taking an eleven-year-old on a suicide mission is probably not the best idea, Lisa responds with a grim song about her inability to choose between Toyland and home.

Record scratch. Brake screech. Though it isn’t stated explicitly, the adult woman dubbing Drew Barrymore is singing a song about whether or not she should stay forever in the world of her coma dream or wake to reality. This song is the first draft of If I Stay.

Convinced of Lisa’s capability in a life-or-death combat situation, Georgie agrees to let her come with him and they both venture into the creepy dark forest. For reasons. The bowling ball is fully visible from Toyland. They only have to hop a fence to get there. But they take their bullshit shortcut and end up imprisoned by Barnaby, too. He plans to turn Lisa into his replacement chicken monster and releases some of the evil into the cell. As our four heroes breath in the gaseous green evil, they begin to writhe around in the throes of troll transformation. Lisa is the only one unaffected. What does she do to save the day?

She sings the song about Cincinnati.

It’s Chekov’s song about Cincinnati. We heard it in the first act and it went off in the second act. Off the freaking rails, that is. I mean, it works to save Jack, Mary, and Georgie from turning into twisted abominations but it also asks the viewer to believe that these people from Toyland, who previously had never heard of Cincinnati, could easily join in with a sing-a-long about the virtues of the city that is “Ohio’s Maserati.”

Did I mention before that they force that to rhyme?

Despite looking physically unaffected, the four are able to convince Barnaby that they’re his loyal monster subjects. Once they’re thrown into the mix of his monster army, it’s easy for them to escape. They flee as an enraged Barnaby commands his army to descend upon Toyland and avenge the blinded monster chicken.

At this point, Barnaby is kind of the John Wick of this piece. But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean Keanu doesn’t get to show off his budding action hero skills. The haunted forest is full of steaming chasms that need to be leapt across. He even swings Mary over one on a vine!

This movie might have actually been responsible for Keanu’s entire career. The role of Jack plays to every single one of his strengths. He’s comedic. Tender and romantic. There are thrilling stunts. There’s even a car chase!

I’m telling you: there is only one man who could have pulled off this role convincingly and they got that right man for the job.

The low-speed chase/demolition derby between the heroes and the zeroes—yeah, that’s right, I’m calling you a zero, Barnaby!—ends in Barnaby and his henchmen wrecking their cars into each other. Undeterred, Barnaby releases his evil army into the streets of Toyland. Lisa, Jack, Mary, and Georgie go to the Toy Master for help, despite the guy never being helpful before. He’s not helpful this time, either. He blames his powerlessness on Lisa’s lack of childhood and even launches into a song about how she needs to be more childlike and psyched about toys.

It was at this point that I first realized that Pat Morita is using his Mr. Miyagi accent in his role as the Toy Master. This strikes me as a baffling choice, as Pat Morita didn’t actually speak with that accent. That means someone involved in the production of this movie went, “Yes, we know this takes place in a fantasy location entirely separate from Earth somehow, but the Toy Master should maybe be a little more Japanese.” Or, was that Morita’s choice? Was he worried that his Karate Kid fans wouldn’t recognize him under a slightly different beard and the accent was the touchstone that connected that segment of the audience?

Mysteries lost to time, sweet readers. Mysteries lost to time.

The Toy Master’s song makes Lisa realize that “the world” made her grow up too fast. I put “the world” in quotes like that because it wasn’t “the world.” It was her crappy family, who rely on her to clean the house and make dinner and remind them to wear scarves. No wonder Drew Barrymore grew up to play Cinderella. She’d already done it once.

Tearfully, Lisa tells them about her love for her teddy bear and how much she wishes she could enjoy toys and believe in childish stuff. As the monster army prepares to strike the heart of Toyland, Lisa frees the dead-eyed toy soldiers from their cupboards and they march right out of the Toy Master’s workshop.

This really does seem like it was a long time coming. I mean, these powerful foes both had amassed armies. The Toy Master just needed to harness the heart of a child to power his up. Lisa isn’t the catalyst for the conflict in Toyland. She’s just a pawn in a struggle between good and evil.

The Toyland residents, unaware that a golem-like regiment of unblinking clones is coming to defend them, take matters into their own hands. They build a barricade out of furniture and blocks, leading me to make the second Les Miserables reference of this recap. Things go just about as well for Toyland as they did for Les Amis.

Upon seeing the full might of the Toy Master’s forces, Barnaby retreats. His monsters face a firing line of rifles and canons that are clearly not toys at all. Smoke fills the streets, the brimstone scent of scorched gunpowder overpowering the sweet cookie aroma in the air. The shrieks of the dying fall upon every ear, siphoning the innocence from babes and waking the nightmare hearts of a people who have never known war but have now made its bloodthirsty acquaintance. The creatures are driven back into the spooky forest by the bayonet-wielding drones and finally, Jack is able to settle things with his uncle via some good old-fashioned fisticuffs.

The Toy Master banishes Barnaby to the forest, where he’ll have to live amongst his monsters, who mutiny and…devour him, I guess. It’s not really clear what they’re doing as they envelop his screaming form. The town celebrates, Jack is proclaimed cookie factory supervisor, and Lisa gets to be the flower girl at Mary and Jack’s wedding.

Which is, for reasons that must relate to delivering two-and-a-half-hours worth of commercial breaks, we see the entire wedding. That’s okay, though, because Keanu gets to flex more dramatic muscle. Look at this face:

This longing glance. The myriad emotions contained in a single frame as he watches his bride walk up the aisle. This performance was delivered standing on the porch of a pink house, in front of a crowd of adults wearing whimsical animal costumes. I demand a retroactive Emmy. Justice for Keanu!

After the wedding, Lisa prepares to return to Cincinnati or, as we know it, consciousness. The Toy Master advises her to avoid growing up too fast. As the town turns out to wish her goodbye, “Toyland” plays once more. Santa arrives on a sleigh pulled by wheeled wooden reindeer, his trunk already full of gifts. I expect that under his breath, the Toy Master is like, “No, that’s fine, bring your own shit. I didn’t stay up all night and almost lose the battle between good and evil to fulfill your inventory order or anything.”

But oh ho! What is this? The Toy Master was Santa Claus all along! He drives Lisa off on his sleigh to return her to her world as everyone waves like they’re watching Sandy and Danny soar off into the clouds. Apparently, this type of exit requires space travel, so I hope Greased Lightning had a functioning airlock.

Back at home, Lisa wakes on her couch. Not in the hospital. On the couch, where her mother has just been letting her snooze off her head injury rather than seeking medical treatment for her. Ah, the ‘80s. A simpler, way more dangerous time.

The real-life Mary, Jack, and George are there, too, so Lisa can explain their Toyland adventures to them. As she impresses upon them the importance of believing in the spirit of the holiday season, she spots a gift from the Toy Master, suggesting that she didn’t wake up and is merely trapped in a hellish loop. She will never truly escape Toyland.