Word: babe
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...brave and bright, good-natured and ambitious, naive and vulnerable. All in all, he's probably the most winsome orphan to appear on the screen since Freddie Bartholomew impersonated David Copperfield 60 years ago. To be sure, Babe is a piglet, but hey, these days you take goodness where you can find it--and resolutely deny whatever snooty qualms anthropomorphism raises...
...would like to think that Babe's surprise success at the box office is a tribute to the good cheer with which its eponymous hero reminds us of our better selves. But it also has the enchantment of an extended magical illusion--91 minutes of wondering how they did it. Mostly, it would seem, with a lot of patience. Producer and co-writer George Miller (of the Mad Max films) bought Dick King-Smith's children's story, on which the movie is based, nearly a decade ago. Co-writer and director Chris Noonan worked six years to bring...
...tale is simple. Farmer Hoggett wins Babe in a raffle, then leaves him to fend for himself in the barnyard. A motherly sheep dog adopts him, a fatherly sheep dog growls dubiously at him, and a kooky duck gets him in trouble. But Babe wins respect, animal and human, when he drives off some sheep poachers, in the process gaining his first sense of vocation: he'd like to herd sheep himself. The dogs think he's too nice a guy for that line of work. But the sheep, tired of being nipped and woofed at, take a shine...
...charges. Miller and his staff raised 60 pigs by hand to gain their trust. It took 26 weeks to educate the first batch, by which time they had outgrown their optimal cuteness; the training was eventually shortened to 13 weeks. In all, 48 pigs appeared onscreen as Babe...
...sometimes after a late night drinking), tape his legs from buttocks to ankle, then go out and hit tape-measure homers. Unlike the aloof Joe DiMaggio, whom he replaced at center, Mantle was generous and funny and self-effacing. Even in 1961, when he and Roger Maris were chasing Babe Ruth's home-run record, Mantle was supportive of Maris. "I'll always be a Yankee," he once said, and indeed, he followed the fortunes of the club religiously...