Thanks for taking a look at this. I’ve spent decades trying to figure out this film but no one at all anywhere seems to have ever seen or heard anything about it!
Era: 70’s-early 80’s
Country of Origin: Unsure. STRONG likelihood it is European.
Visual Medium: Color
Similar to: 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Wizard of Oz
Where/When seen:
Family Film Festival. A southern California show, hosted by Tom Hatten, that aired movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from the late 70’s through to the early 90’s. It’s fare was supposedly determined/provided by Reader’s Digest. I lived in Los Angeles and saw it on that show. It only aired once as far as I ever saw.
What I remember:
Much like the Wizard of Oz, the film centers around a young protagonist who finds him or herself transported to another world, embarks upon an adventure to free themselves and does so, freeing others from the subjugation of a main bad guy and his henchpeople.
The hero in our story is a young boy with sandy blonde hair. He lives in the “modern” world, which appears to be set in the 70’s or maybe, just maybe the early 80’s.
It is very hard to put a finger on the country of origin because it has been so long since I’ve seen this movie. It could be American but I got the distinct impression that it was from somewhere in Europe. Scandinavian? British? Eastern European? I’m really not sure.
The boy is having an OK to not-so-great day. It might even be his birthday? He gets sent on an errand to pick up something from the store. I do believe it was ice cream.
For some reason he stops for a rest on his way back. He falls asleep. He awakes in another world. The world is somewhat darker and a bit post-medieval, post-Renaissance looking. Think perhaps of a messed Oliver Twist. There’s a big castle involved. The bad guy lives there with his henchmen.
The bad guy has somehow come to imprison or enslave a bunch of children. Whether they are the kids from that world or are from Earth I cannot recall.
Anyhow, the kid escapes or evades this bad guy.
Our hero figures out how to turn the tables on the bad guy. I think it involved somehow winning the help of some monstrous person who might have had a bit of a pig-face going on as well. He wore some kind of large dark blue pea coat. That monster person had some association with the bad guy. Maybe his son or key servant?
Anyhow, somehow or other the kid gets the bad guy beaten, all the imprisoned kids are freed and people celebrate in general.
The boy wakes up from this dream adventure and hurries to get home with the ice cream he was sent to fetch before it melts (though it may already have at that point).
It was a reasonable little movie and I’ve wanted to check it out again since it came out, since it was kind of surreal. But after not being able to find it for decades, and having yet to run across one single person who has ever seen or heard of anything like it, it’s become an obsession!
Someone somewhere has to at least remember seeing this, right? Anyone?