MEMORIES:
NostalgiaTV remembers...I first saw"The Daydreamer!"at The Wakefield Movie Theater in The Bronx,NYC back in 1966. The film was a more accurate ... More »
Posted on 03/28/07
Cast:
The Second Tailor...Victor Borge
Thumbelina...Patty Duke
Papa Andersen...Jack Gilford
The Mole...Sessue Hayakawa
Mrs. Klopplebobbler...Margaret Hamilton
Father Neptune...Burl Ives
The Rat...Boris Karloff
The Little Mermaid...Hayley Mills
Chris...Paul O'Keefe
The Sandman...Cyril Ritchard
The First Tailor...Terry-Thomas
The Emperor...Ed Wynn
The Pieman...Ray Bolger
Big Claus...Robert Harter
Studio:
Release History:
A film retelling of five Hans Christian Andersen stories, The Daydreamer used Rankin/Bass’s “Animagic” process, the same stop-motion technique seen in the evergreen Christmas TV favorite Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. “The Little Mermaid,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Emperor's New Clothes,” “Thumbelina” and “The Garden of Paradise” were meshed together in a little boy named Chris’s daydreams and the real-life adventures.
A poor boy, Chris can’t even partake of a sweet treat from the Pieman. His Papa, a simple shoemaker, tells him the story of the Garden of Paradise, a magical place where the flowers are the candy of knowledge. That night, Chris is taken by the Sandman on a succession of dreamy trips through the world of the imagination.
After plunging into The Little Mermaid’s underwater world, Chris wakes to meet a live-action Ugly Duckling; then in a daydream he visits the land of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the wee domain of Thumbelina, and at last the Garden of Paradise itself. But is the mystical Garden so edenic after all?
Andersen’s fairy tales didn’t always have happy endings, but there was always a moral to the story. The Daydreamer stuck with the stories’ original spirit. The “galaxy of stars” proclaimed by the print ads were mostly there to give voice to the “Animagic” characters. Jules Bass (of Rankin/Bass) wrote the lyrics to the songs, which included “Simply Wonderful,” “Wishes and Teardrops,” and the title track, which was sung by Robert Goulet.
