Filmic Friday 203: Toys (1992)

Back in 1992, Robin Williams made a movie that go widely panned. I did not see it until recently, and... I don't get it.

Toys is great!

I legitimately do not understand why this movie got crapped on.

Look at this. This is what this movie looks like.
It's like if someone filmed a Willy Wonka film on the set of the old Windows background!
You know the one - with all the rolling grass!

Also, it's technically a Christmas movie.

It's quite the bizarre opening.
Ballet, a living Christmas tree, Santa on a plane...

I tend to like movies that take place around Christmas, tbh. There tends to be either an innocence that appeals to the child in me, or it's magical, or it's adventurous. Toys is an innocent movie, which considering there's kind of a sex scene in there and people talk about very adult things and anatomy, is a strange thing to say. The adults in this movie are adults, but the whole movie is about toys, play, and innocence. It's about growing up without losing yourself in the misery of adulthood. It's about letting children be children. It's...

It's miserably prophetic of our current military industrial complex.

So.

What is Toys?

Toys is a Robin Williams movie from 1992 about a toymaker who dies and leaves his company to his brother, a war-obsessed general (played by Michael Gambon). Gen. Leland Zevo has very little patience for his nephew, Leslie (Robin Williams) and... unique niece Alsatia (Joan Cusack), and instead wants to create war toys (guns, tanks, etc). That is about as un-Zevo-toys as you can get, but he wants it anyway. Now, he's a bit bananas because he never got to 4 stars, which his father (Jack Warden) has never respected him for, so to give himself a boost, he comes up with an evil plot (because it's a 90s/80s film that someone came up with in the 70s and it shows) to basically replace the big expensive military with cheap, mass-produced toys.

And he wants them piloted by kids who think they're playing video games.

Now, I haven't even gotten into how awesome the factory is, how hilarious LL Cool J is as Michael Gambon's son Patrick, or how Leslie grows up because he falls in love with Robin Wright's Gwen Tyler, but wow...

Our introduction to Robin Wright's character in the duplication room is freaking hilarious!

There's a lot to this movie.

Like... a lot a lot...

This movie has so many good actors! Arthur Mallet, Jamie Foxx, Debi Mazar...

It's really a great group of people.

And set designers - that's a miniature Manhattan!

And prop designers! Look at all of this!

So, basically, I love this movie and everything it represents!

It's the story of a good man going to war, more or less, because in the end, Robin Williams' Leslie Zevo has to take on the armies of evil war toys that his uncle has produced in order to save not only Zevo toys and its legacy, but childhood itself.

Because kids would've been used to pilot these things into war zones.
...
We just call them drones now.

The fight scenes at first seem quite incongruous, but they're very natural to the storytelling. Of course there's a war in the toy factory. There's a mad general in charge. It could go no other way. Where there are guns and people who have been told they should use them, there will be war, whether anyone else likes it or not.

So yes, in the end the childlike innocence of the toys overcomes the guns and bombs of the wicked armada, but... Leslie has been forced to grow up. The toys have become weapons themselves. The innocence has been lost.

Even Alsatia faces terrible change.

But life returns to some semblance of normalcy afterwards.

It's...

it has a pretty dark outro, if you're paying close enough attention after all.

This movie has never deserved to be crapped on. It's a movie about adults behaving like kids to force kids to behave like adults. It's a movie about innocence not only lost but twisted into a shameful, weaponized thing. It's a movie about love and hate and how none of those emotions are simple or easy. It's a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously because it knows itself and doesn't have to pretend to be an opus.

It's a quintessentially 1990s film.

And it makes me want a lot more of Yolanda & Steve...

Go watch Toys.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

PS: Sorry I couldn't find a music video version of that song that didn't suck...