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“This is really weird.”–Raggedy Andy, when a camel asks him to climb on and join him as he chases an invisible caravan in the sky

DIRECTED BY: Richard Williams

FEATURING: Claire Williams, voices of Didi Conn, Mark Baker, Fred Stuthman, Niki Flacks, George S. Irving, Marty Brill, Joe Silver, Alan Sues

PLOT: On her owner’s birthday, Raggedy Ann and her brother Andy meet Babette, a snobbish new doll from France. Babette is quickly abducted by snowglobe pirate Captain Contagious. Ann and Andy venture out into the night, where they encounter a camel, a taffy pit, and an inflatable Loony king, before finally confronting the pirate ship.

BACKGROUND:

• Raggedy Ann began her life as a mass-produced rag doll in 1915. A series of children’s books based on the character followed in the 1920s, continuing until the 1970s. Fleischer Brothers studios made three animated Raggedy Ann and Andy shorts in the 1940s. The dolls are still produced today.
• This feature film was loosely adapted from the 1924 children’s book “Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees.“
• Director Richard Williams took over for originally-slated director Abe Levitow, who died before production began.
• The adaptation was originally conceived as a Broadway musical, then a TV special, before becoming a feature film. An actual Broadway musical with many of the same characters (but a different plot) followed in 1986.
• The film ended up costing more than double its original budget, and was a box office failure. It was released on VHS, but has never officially been released on DVD or Blu-ray.
• Voted onto the Apocrypha by readers in this poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Greedy, an inexplicable being who inhabits the Taffy Pit and exists as a sort of candy-themed, eternally mutating Lovecraftian horror-cum-cupcake.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Ghost camel caravan in the sky; expanding looney king

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Raggedy Ann was a hobo doll, the cheapest and most unassuming children’s toy imaginable. Throwing this plain Jane toy into a backyard “Alice in Wonderland” scenario shouldn’t have produced results as odd as it did. A Musical Adventure is uneven, but in its insaner moments, it genuinely goes for broke.

Original trailer for Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

COMMENTS: “Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening… and then ZANG!”

The same goes for Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure as goes for Hunter S. Thompson‘s experience with mescaline, though on a different time scale. The first thirty minutes of Raggedy Ann is all waiting. About fifteen minutes in, the only mildly weird thing you’ve seen—and it’s more irritating than weird, really—are a pair of nude, copper-colored, chipmunk-voiced twin dolls who only speak in song-and-dance. You start cursing the guy who recommended the movie. Nothing is happening. And then the mentally-ill camel shows up and begins hallucinating about ghost caravans traversing the Milky Way, and ZANG! You’re off! The movie barely ease up on its strangeness after that.

The drug comparison is appropriate here because Raggedy Ann fits into the informal category of “children’s psychedelia,” a loose 1960s-1970s subgenre of movies and TV shows aimed at kids. These gently weird films seem to have sprung from the addled minds of clueless, coked-up producers asking the question “What are kids into these days?” and answering “Acid, right?” Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Hugo the Hippo, and the collected works of Sid and Marty Krofft (parodied in the Mr. Show sketch “The Altered State of Drugachucetts“) are all representative entries. The entire “movement” was kicked off by 1968’s Yellow Submarine, which made the drug connection pretty explicit.

“Children’s psychedelia” is, of course, an ironic and not-serious cliché, mostly made from stoner’s whimsical projections onto children’s entertainment that happened to chronologically overlap the hippie period. But there are times when it seems that the logic of drug trips had to be on producers’ minds. Consider the introduction of the Camel. He immediately begins hallucinating–his eyes dilate with oscillating radiating rainbow circles, a trippy trope if ever there was one—as he sees a train of ghostly dromedaries parade before his eyes and march into the starry skies. The trip intensifies as the newly-formed trio is catapulted into the movie’s peak of strangeness: the taffy pit, a sickly-orange lake of ever-shifting sweets, where the Greedy, a grotesque mutating blob with lollipops and candy canes projecting from his face at odd angles, arises and demands Ann’s “candy heart.” From there, it’s an easy transition to Looney Land, where a diminutive dictator inflates various body parts when he laughs, deflating just as quickly. By the time we get to the high seas finale with an octopus tickle-monster, it’s almost as if we’re starting to come down.

It’s overstating the matter to say that kids who saw Raggedy Ann during its original release were baffled and traumatized by it. Going by Internet reminiscences, grown-ups mostly recall it fondly; at the time, it seemed like normal entertainment to them (their parents might have felt differently, however). The wild imaginary landscapes of the movie’s central portion make quite an impact, overshadowing the film’s many weaknesses. There’s that incredibly slow start. There’s the mostly unmemorable characters (Ann is a dud, Andy is scarcely better, Babette is just annoying, and the melancholy Camel, while great, doesn’t show up until the middle of the film). The songs (by Sesame Street’s Joe Raposo) are well-done, but there are far too many of them, interrupting the action and frequently slowing the film to a crawl. And the animation, while at times great, is inconsistent: the over-budget project ran out of money, causing some scenes to be rushed and left almost incomplete. The movie is also bathed in a much softer palette than we’re used to seeing in cartoons, perhaps in an attempt to distinguish itself from Disney’s brighter colors, and perhaps as a nod to the 1970s earth tone aesthetic. But while uneven, once it gets going, Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure is a wonder—and when it peaks, it’s well worthy of a psychedelic ZANG!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Bizarre, strange…and fascinating to watch… on this journey, the two rag dolls encounter psychedelia that could have only been brought to the screen during the 70s.”–Michael Lyons, Cartoon Research

“What mostly registers from the movie, though, is its unfettered weirdness; and this is something that will be felt differently by every viewer. For myself, I was delighted by the way the animators chased their ideas down to extreme degrees without holding anything back, seeing how the discipline learned from Disney and Warner could produce some exquisitely warped surrealism.”–Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

IMDB LINK: Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

“Can ‘Raggedy Ann’ Compete With Disney?” – A contemporaneous New York Times preview of the movie (complete with animator bios)

“’Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure’ at 40″ – 40th anniversary appreciation written for a 2017 screening

The FREAKIEST Raggedy Ann Movie – Nostalgia Critic – Part of a series on “freaky” movies from the YouTube comedian/critic

LIST CANDIDATE: RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE (1977) – Pete Trbovich‘s original List Candidate review for this site

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

John Canemaker, “The animated Raggedy Ann and Andy: An intimate look at the art of animation its history, techniques, and artists” – Mostly focused on the production of A Musical Adventure, this tome was published to coincide with the film’s release

HOME VIDEO INFO: For unknown reasons, Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray, or licensed to streaming services. It is possible to find it on VHS (buy used) in a washed-out, full-frame presentation. In an era when every property imaginable has been resurrected and repurposed as “content,” Raggedy Ann‘s absence from the media landscape is a mystery that can only be attributed to unspecified intellectual property tangles. An unauthorized restoration can be found through a simple online search, but we’ll leave it to the reader to conduct that exercise.