Trivia

The stop-motion animation for the "March of the Wooden Soldiers" scene was created by special-effects director Roy Seawright and cinematographer Art Lloyd. They used 100 wooden toy soldiers, each standing one-foot high, which had to be meticulously posed and shot frame by frame. Eleven of the toy soldiers seen in this sequence are known to survive: one drummer, one trumpeter, and nine riflemen. A Roach studio executive saved 10 of these figures and passed them down to his family, who publicly revealed their existence in 2020; that same year they sold one at auction for $14,520. Another toy soldier is owned by Laurel & Hardy historian Randy Skretvedt, who occasionally loans it out for museum exhibits.

Hal Roach signed Henry Brandon to play Barnaby after seeing him play the evil old Lawyer Cribbs in the long-running Los Angeles stage melodrama "The Drunkard". Roach wasn't aware that Brandon was only 21 at the time, and demanded to know where the old man was when Brandon appeared at his office. Heavy makeup made Brandon credible as the old Barnaby, a role he repeated in Our Gang Follies of 1938 (1937).

Framed photographs on the back wall in the Three Little Pigs' house show a plate of sausages as "Mother" and a football as "Father".

Filmed almost entirely inside sound stages at Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, California. The only "outdoor" scenes are when the Bogeymen cross the river to invade Toyland, which were filmed at the water tank (essentially a big swimming pool) on the Roach back lot. An exterior set was built along three sides of the tank, with the rocky Bogeyland on one end and the gates of Toyland on the other. These scenes were shot at night (as dictated by the story) and with diffusion filters to give them an artificial look consistent with the stage-bound settings of the rest of the film. Stock footage of crocodiles was inserted to give the impression that the water was teeming with carnivorous reptiles.

Filming this picture caused a great rift between Stan Laurel and Hal Roach. Roach had written a long treatment of the plot, but when he gave it to Laurel to read the star rejected it outright as being too far astray of the familiar Laurel and Hardy characters. Laurel also wanted to shoot it in Technicolor, but Roach didn't have the budget. In later years Roach claimed the film lost "a ton of dough" (which it didn't).

Charley Rogers: as Simple Simon.