This musical-fantasy-nursery-rhyme concoction seems to be a sentimental favourite for lots of people, but it just doesn't stand up. It's a live-action film that imitates cartoons, and the cartoons are better in most ways. The problem here is the forced jollity of the conceit, a romp through story-book land. The actors are wooden, the writing is dismal, and not even the scary Crooked Man scenery-chewing of Henry Brandon as Silas Barnaby or the good-natured fumbling of Laurel and Hardy can save it. Perhaps the nadir is the climactic battle scene between Old King Cole's people, helped by a platoon of tall wooden soldiers built mistakenly by Laurel and Hardy, chasing Barnaby and his ogre henchmenthey're all wearing shaggy brown Dr. Denton pajamas and ugly masks and little hornsinto the river. Every once in a while one Tom-Tom the Piper's Son or Little Bo-Peep burst into song. I wish they wouldn't. There are some exceptionally ugly puppets, the three rubber-headed little pigs, a fiddling cat, and a pesky mouse that looks a lot like Mickey if he had been carved from a block of soap and rolled around the sound stage by some obscure magnetic force. There are some good lines and some good bits of businesswhen Stan pretends to be Bo-Peep and gets married to Barnaby, Ollie is ready to leave him there because, after all, he is marriedbut nothing can save this well-intentioned, badly written, feverishly energetic, garish movie. A minority opinion, but nearly any other film version of the world of children's literature is heaps better than this.