Celebrate Halloween and Christmas With Ichabod and Mr. Toad

The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are two classic pieces of literature, but I wouldn’t have thought to put them together. Disney did, though, and the result was the 1949 package film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. It’s unusual in that it tells just two stories; the package films typically include several different segments, each of which is shorter than either tale told here. What it amounts to is about half an hour per story, so there’s room for some decent development even though neither one is individually of feature length.

The main thematic tie between the stories seems to be that they are literary classics, one from England, one from America. Other similarities can be found; for instance, both integrally involve a holiday and a horse-drawn cart. Mostly, though, the tie between the two is that these are books that could be sitting on the shelf next to each other. Basil Rathbone is the sophisticated narrator of the first part of the film, which focuses on the reckless Mr. Toad, and his warm voice is perfectly suited to the task. Bing Crosby feels like less of a natural narrator for the second half, which deals with Ichabod Crane, but the role allows him to do some singing, which is the task at which he really shines.

I prefer the first tale, which is much livelier, in part because each of the characters is played by a different actor and there is quite a bit of dialogue. Toads seem to be inherently troublesome creatures, more so than frogs, which have a bit of a reputation in fiction for steady dependability. After all, look at Kermit the Frog (at least, when he’s not blowing a gasket). The contrast is strongest in Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series, and silly, sulky Toad with his peculiar whims would certainly have a kindred spirit in Mr. Toad. They’re not bad fellows, but trouble seems to follow them, and sometimes they bring it upon themselves.

The story of Mr. Toad is set in the idyllic English countryside, where the eccentric millionaire is constantly wreaking havoc with his dangerous obsessions. It’s up to his faithful, long-suffering friends to keep him out of trouble and to try to prove his innocence after he runs afoul of the law. Toad is rather obnoxious but lovable nonetheless. Severe Angus MacBadger (Campbell Scott), who oversees his affairs, is a fun character, particularly because of his pronounced Scottishness, but he is less prominent than the even-keeled Rat (Claud Allister) or my favorite character, mild-mannered Mole (Colin Campbell). Other characters, including Mr. Toad’s horse and a freakish-looking villain named Mr. Winky, come into the picture, but this is the core quartet. It’s a raucous romp and a touching story of friendship set partially against the beauty of a pristine English Christmas, and it’s quite satisfying.

I’m not quite as fond of Ichabod’s story, partly because it’s just plain creepy. It makes me chuckle that in a film that includes a Christmas story, Crosby, who is so associated with the upcoming holiday, narrates the tale set at Halloween. It also strikes me as funny that the Christmas story comes first. The animation of a fiery New England autumn is quite appealing, but the human characters aren’t quite as enjoyable to look at as the animals in the first story. Ichabod in particular is a bit goofy-looking, though this would not necessarily be a drawback if he were a more likable character. Unfortunately, this gangly schoolteacher is a lazy womanizing glutton who can’t wait to hitch his wagon to the richest girl in town so he can live like a king for the rest of his days. Hence, although he’s the protagonist, he doesn’t exactly inspire a great deal of affection from me. It doesn’t help that there’s so little actual dialogue in this story, and what’s there is mostly voiced by Crosby. This makes the characters in this segment feel much more distant, leading to a definite sense of detachment.

The meat of the story is the rivalry between Ichabod and burly Brom Bones, who both want the pretty heiress Katrina Van Tassel for a wife, though love doesn’t seem to be a factor for either of them. They both appear to see her as more of a prize than a person. Brom reminds me a lot of Gaston from Disney’s much later Beauty and the Beast except that he is not quite so immensely popular. Still, he makes a potent adversary, and his dramatic ghost story is enough to give Ichabod a major case of the heebie-jeebies. Me too. The headless horseman scene that follows is truly terrifying, no matter what your interpretation of the incident is.

I’m not sure that this is the most natural pair of stories to put together, but it works well enough, and each is memorable in its own way. While I personally don’t want anything to do with Sleepy Hollow except around Halloween, I’m happy to pay a visit to Mr. Toad any time of year.

A Boatload of Bakers Means Bushels of Baloney in Cheaper By the Dozen

Remakes seem to be rampant in theaters lately. One of the many to hit the big screen in the past decade was Cheaper By the Dozen, a remake of a 1950 classic that I never saw. As a fan of Steve Martin and Smallville’s Tom Welling, I’d wanted to check it out for a while, despite the high probability of cheesiness. I can’t make comparisons with the original, but now that I finally got around to seeing it, I liked it better than I expected. Is it corny? Yes. But I also found it funny and touching.

Tom Baker (Martin) is a small-time coach with a great big dream: to coach college football at his alma mater in Chicago. His wife Kate (Bonnie Hunt) has pretty big dreams too: writing and publishing a book. Both of these dreams have a shot at becoming a reality at once, which might be cause for excitement alone in an ordinary family. But this is no ordinary family. No, the Baker brood includes 12 children, 11 of whom still live at home. With Mom headed off to New York City to kick off a major book tour and Dad gearing up for what he hopes will be a winning season, who is going to keep an eye on a house full of rambunctious kids resentful that they had to leave their farmhouse home for life in the big city?

The movie does a decent job differentiating the characters, though some of them still blend together for me. In many cases, it doesn’t much matter who’s who; we just have rapid-fire chaos, some of which is funny, some of which is just cringe-inducing as one disaster follows another. Of the 12, about half are more a part of the collective than really interesting stand-alone characters. These include twins Nigel and Kyle (Brent and Shane Kinsman), the energetic youngest of the clan; Mike (Blake Woodruff), their slightly older brother; twins Kim and Jessica (Morgan York and Liliana Mumy); and their brother Jake (Jacob Smith). Generally, they just add to the cacophony of the household without standing out too much as individuals.

The rest are more well-defined. Nora (Piper Perabo), the oldest at 22, lives in Chicago with her boyfriend, a dopey, egotistical aspiring actor played by Ashton Kutcher in typical obnoxious mode. While I started out feeling sorry for him, especially after the kids play a prank on him that is both crude and dangerous, it wasn’t long before I found him as unlikable as the rest of the Bakers do. Nora herself is fairly sweet but torn between loyalty to her family and devotion to her boyfriend. I was a little disappointed not to connect much to Welling’s character, angsty senior Charlie, who spends most of his time being sulky and sarcastic, though I did feel for him as he bemoaned the fact that he and his girlfriend would now be hours away from each other.

Hillary Duff starts out in full-on bratty teenager mode as Lorraine, a fashion-conscious high schooler, but she gradually becomes more likable as she sticks up for her siblings in trying situations. Henry (Kevin G. Schmidt) is a rough-and-tumble bully type, while devious Sarah (Alyson Stoner) is smart-mouthed and always has some sort of devilish plan up her sleeve. Kate seems to have everything pretty well organized so that the kids mostly stay out of each other’s way and disasters are kept to a minimum, but Tom can’t quite hack it. I love watching Martin in goofball dad mode, though as his stress increases over the course of the movie, his parenting skills suffer greatly.

My favorite Baker is Mark (Forrest Landis), a delicate, bespectacled child who is accident-prone and lonely. Subjected to a humiliating nickname that alludes to what an oddball he is within his own family, he seeks solace in his pet toad and the gorgeous tower room he manages to snag for himself in their Victorian mansion. Of the several sub-plots running throughout the movie, I found Mark’s the most compelling as he battles his insecurities and isolation and tries to figure out just how he fits in, and I was gratified to see that his journey is ultimately what brings together several of those loose threads and takes us to the movie’s most moving moment.

Yes, some of the kids’ hijinks get a little old. I’ve never been a big fan of destroy-the-house-style comedy, and we definitely get a fair bit of that here. The running gag with a falling chandelier is pretty tired by the time it’s run its course, though I suppose there is something inherently amusing about watching Wayne Knight fall off a ladder. The Bakers’ new neighbor Tina (Paula Marshall) is pretty hard to take with her shrill over-protectiveness, though I found her easy-going husband (Alan Ruck) and son Dylan (Steven Anthony Lawrence), who is extremely sheltered and longs for some excitement, pretty likable. The movie is heavy on the slapstick and the sap, but I didn’t mind the latter and the former wasn’t enough to turn me off of the movie. On the whole, I enjoyed this chronicle of one big sometimes-happy family trying to have it all. In fact, the sequel is already in my queue.

It's Always an Adventure With Mr. Toad

In Arnold Lobel’s beloved Frog and Toad series, Frog is generally even-keeled, while Toad is passionate and impetuous. This seems to be a fairly common distinction. Kermit, known for his ability to sagely manage a theater full of loonies, is a frog. Then you have zany Mr. Toad, the wealthy troublemaker from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

Mr. Toad doesn’t mean to make trouble. Really he doesn’t. But he brings it upon himself by being obsessed with the latest and greatest modes of transportation. He seeks adventure and doesn’t think much about the consequences. It’s a good thing he has some faithful friends to keep an eye on him.

In The Adventures of Mr. Toad, an adaptation of the Disney film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, this warty fellow’s obsession with riding about in his gypsy cart is leading to his financial ruin. He keeps breaking things while he tears recklessly down the road, and then he has to pay for them. The solution? Keep him quarantined. But you can’t keep a good toad down for long, and no sooner does he escape the confines of his bedroom than he finds a new and even more dangerous obsession. What’s worse, when he sets his sights on a shiny new motorcar, he gets mixed up with a nasty gang of thieves.

This book is a tersely worded version of the tale we get on the screen. You can’t quite get the full effect of Toad’s wild nature without the benefit of motion, but the vivid illustrations and the fast-paced text are certainly a step in the right direction. There’s humor in the clipped nature of the sentences. I especially love this, when Toad is being held captive by his friends, who have locked the door to ensure that he stays put: “It was a good plan. There was only one thing wrong with it. It did not work.”

Along with Mr. Toad, who is so clever in some ways and so incredibly foolish in others, the short book is filled with colorful characters. Most are Mr. Toad’s friends: mild-mannered Rat and Mole, cantankerous Toad Hall caretaker MacBadger, devoted horse Cyril. Some are enemies: the nasty Weasel Gang and their mustachioed cohort Mr. Winkie. And then there are the members of law enforcement. If only Mr. Toad could convince them that he didn’t commit the crime of which he is being accused!

The Adventures of Mr. Toad is an exciting tale that demonstrates both the exhilaration and danger of Mr. Toad’s lifestyle. Its old-fashioned English setting makes the vehicles and landscapes especially interesting, while the ways in which Rat, Mole, MacBadger and Cyril help Mr. Toad show that true friendship sometimes means overcoming obstacles, even if one of them is the friend himself. We all should be so lucky as to have such great pals. I know I am!

Adrianne Lobel Unearths a Pre-Frog and Toad Poetry Collection

Children's literature is filled with wonderful friendships. One of my very favorites is the relationship between Frog and Toad in the four easy reader books Arnold Lobel published about the pair. Frog is tall, green and level-headed; Toad is short, brown and emotional. Together, they turn ordinary occasions into grand adventures and cause frequent bouts of laughter. I've read each of their stories many times, so I was delighted when my aunt mentioned to me over the summer that Lobel's daughter had unearthed several unpublished Frog and Toad stories.

I soon discovered, however, that this new collection of old material is not about the specific Frog and Toad I know and love. Instead, The Frogs and Toads All Sang features ten poems about various frogs and toads. The poems are short and are accompanied by paintings done by Adrianne Lobel, based on her father's line drawings. In the introduction, she explains how she came upon these poems and pictures, which were gifts given to family friends, and reminisces about her father. The bulk of the book, meanwhile, features the poem-and-picture pairs, with the words on one page and illustration on the facing page, except in one instance in which both stretch across a two-page spread.

Each of the rhyming poems is about 12 lines long, give or take a line. Some involve just frogs, some just toads, and some both. In keeping with the color scheme in the Frog and Toad stories, all of the frogs are green, while the toads are brownish or yellowish. Most are very cheerful, with a notable exception being the morose frog in Bright Green Frog, whose sadness is a result of a talent for an instrument for which he has no passion. Several end with a little joke. My favorite is Miss Frog Went in the Kitchen, which involves a frog who loves to bake but isn't too anxious to share her confections.  I also like the wisdom of Made for Toads, which concludes with the assertion, "In weather gray / Or weather bright, / For some, the day / Will be just right."

Frog and Toad books include five stories each. Though the tales are short, they feel much more substantial than these poems, which are fun to read but breeze by so quickly that ten hardly seems enough. While Frog and Toad have been known to make me laugh out loud many times, this book scarcely inspired a chuckle. However, I did smile throughout my reading of it, as I expect other fans of Lobel to do. As a stand-alone work, The Frogs and Toads All Sang might not make a very big impression, but as a peek into Lobel's past and a demonstration of a powerful father-daughter bond, the book is a lovely little treasure.