- Directed by Ted Nicolaou
- Written by Ken Carter, Jr. and Frank Dietz
- Starring
- Jamie Renée Smith
- Kevin Wixted
- Saxon Trainor
- David Brooks
- Godfrey James
- Produced by Kevin Hyman and Vlad Paunescu
- Executive produced by Charles Band
After having seen so many direct-to-video children’s features cranked out by Charles Band’s various entities, I’ve gotten to the point that rarely does something contradict my expectations. Cheap locations, unknown actors, competent but forgettable staging and cinematography (that’s almost indistinguishable from the competent but forgettable staging and cinematography used for Surrender Cinema and other related adult fare), a thin script that includes a shallow-sounding pro-family moral, and a central prop of some sort. Write a simple program, and you could have these things cranked out by computer (or by Benjamin Carr in his sleep).
So with that in mind, let me assure you: I did not expect Magic in the Mirror. It caught me off-guard. Not that it was good, mind you; clinically speaking, it’s an unremarkable entry in the Charles Band kidvid canon. But at the same time, it’s just so… weird.
Beakers? Of colored liquids? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here!
Mary Margaret Gilbert (Jamie Renée Smith) is a nine-year-old from a typical family, at least by kids’-fare standards: Her father (David Brooks) is a botanist, and her mother (Saxon Trainor) is a noted physicist. Despite that kind of household (and despite consistently being called “Mary Margaret” by her mother, while her dad prefers the nickname “Daisy”), she’s turned out fairly well-adjusted. It must be the pull between her parents’ personalities; Mom is a stiff, unimaginative control freak with poor social skills (but great legs), and Dad is laid back and mellow – almost “groovy.” And yes, Mary Margaret has a couple of “imaginary friends,” Bella and Donna, but that’s not a concrete sign of a messed-up head, especially in a children’s movie.
Her great-grandmother Margaret having died a year before, Mary Margaret inherits an ornate antique mirror with a hand-carved frame, which clashes a bit with her bedroom decor. But more than that, it’s not exactly accurate in its reflections; Mary Margaret soon notices that the light fixture she sees in the mirror isn’t the same one that hangs from her ceiling. (As she makes this discovery, she’s holding a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which would be the wrong Lewis Carroll book for the occasion.)
It takes a while to get to the real plot, and we have to wait through Mom’s big experiment at the lab, where she and colleague Dr. Tuttle (Cristian Motriuc) are working on the counterintuitively-named “doppelganger,” a big raygun that they use to focus a beam of antimatter on an infinitesimal spot of matter to open up a connection with other dimensions. (This they do with no blast shielding, no on-hand personnel, and no protection aside from flimsy goggles.) Mom’s as overjoyed as Mom gets, so she has Dr. Tuttle and his wife over for a stiff and uncomfortable dinner. For one thing, Dad really doesn’t get what it is that they’re doing (and instead of explaining, Mom simply tries to make him feel like an idiot because he doesn’t have a PhD). Mary Margaret, meanwhile, quite justly feels ignored; when she tries to tell them about the first prize she got in the school sculpture contest, she gets hushed and marginalized. And then her imaginary friends toss a cup of tea on Mrs. Tuttle, getting Mary Margaret sent to her room.
Well, that’s one way to pop popcorn.
When she’s up there, weird things finally start happening, thanks to some strange golden berries she filched from her great-grandmother’s herbarium book that her father keeps away from her. (Great-Grandma Margaret sounds like she might have been one of those nature women that the locals call on for help when the baby falls sick, but then burn at the stake when the crops die.) In a fit of pique, Mary Margaret throws her sculpture at the mirror – and it passes right through. Though she can still see her own reflection, Mary Margaret can also see a room on the other side, a small sealed room occupied by a napping fellow whose bulbous nose and lop-ears don’t seem entirely human. When she steps through the shimmering surface of the glass and wakes him, his reaction confirms his own inhumanity: “You’re a people!” he shrieks.
This non-human “mirror-minder,” Tansy (Kevin Wixted) is soon joined by his “mirror-master” Melilot (Godfrey James), and together, the two of them dish out the necessary exposition, to wit:
“Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Mirror is. You have to see it for yourself.”
Old mirrors can act as a portal between our world and theirs. Thus, every old mirror in their world is assigned a mirror-minder by their Queen Hysop to make sure such crossovers don’t happen. They can only happen, though, in the presence of “mirrorberries,” which are only available on Earth. Such commerce is dangerous because the other organized civilization in the other world is a society of “drakes,” or anthropomorphic ducks, who desire people to make tea with them (steeping them in boiling water for 60 seconds).
*blink* *blink*
No, really. The movie’s central premise is that we’re being protected from otherworldly ducks who want to boil us for tea. Throw in antique mirrors and magic berries, and we’ve got a quickie kidvid which is so bizarre, it borders on the surreal.
So. Most of the second act is Mary Margaret, Tansy, and Melilot trekking overnight to see Queen Hysop to inform her of the breach in the mirrors. There’s a nifty visual of a dozen ironbound doors standing in an isolated field – it looks like the minding-rooms are in some kind of inter-dimensional space – but it only underlines the question of a) why these mirror-minders, stationed in the hinterlands, have no weapons or other defensive capabilities, and b) why the mirrors are located so far from any other signs of civilization, with not even a road to traverse the distance. (Yes, Yes, I know the “real” reason of the latter: So that our characters can take up most of the second act traveling.)
The drakes, meanwhile, are represented onscreen by Dragora (Eileen T’Kaye), her chamberlain Swanston (Cristian Motriuc again), and General Dabble (Ion Haiduc), all in padded duck costumes and headpieces that… make Howard the Duck look really, really good. Now, I’m not demanding of verisimilitude in FX for lighthearted children’s films, but these were notably low-tech: A mask or hood whose duckbill moved in concert with the actor’s jaw, and a wide space around the eyes with the actor’s skin grease-painted to match the duck feathers. Other drake foot-soldiers were all represented in head-to-toe duck-shaped armor, to spare even the paltry expense of further drake masks.
“Take it from me, kid, running away to join the circus isn’t as much fun as it sounds.”
Oh, and Bella and Donna, the imaginary friends? Considering how much background they were given, their eventual role is pretty thin: They’re actually pixies, which were all originally from the far side of the mirror but were banished en masse to Earth (mostly because they tickle people). And they disappear from the plot a good distance before the end credits.
It’s pretty clear that, even more than Through the Looking Glass, this movie intended to draw on the general story outlines of none other than the classic movie version of The Wizard of Oz (1939): an unappreciated little girl traveling to a fantastical world and setting out on a quest, while being harassed by a power-mad harridan intent on relieving the girl of some magical materials (since she has the rest of Great-Grandma’s mirrorberries). The similarity even extends to reusing actors in our world and theirs; not only does Christian Motriuc pull double-duty, but when they eventually meet Queen Hysop, it’s none other than Saxon Trainor again, playing this role with an even icier detached demeanor than in her performance as Mary Margaret’s mom. And Queen Hysop even “tasks” Mary Margaret for the final act, much as the Wizard set Dorothy the task of retrieving the witch’s broomstick.
Naturally, the similarities only manage to throw Magic in the Mirror‘s paucity of both budget and storytelling finesse into stark relief. There’s not nearly as much that can be accomplished when your main sets are a middle-American home, a couple of acres of Romanian farmland, and the garden in which Queen Hysop holds court. (Dragora gets an honest-to-goodness throneroom, at least – until you notice that the dias on which her throne rests is actually the landing of a staircase which continues up an another angle, obviously shot in some old Romanian manor.) Most of the action follows the path of least resistance, wandering around in search of something interesting to happen, instead of tying into and reinforcing the story’s theme. The ducks are far less convincing, even to a preschooler’s eye, than the flying monkeys. And would Auntie Em’s role have been improved if she had had a big-ass inter-dimensional raygun at her disposal? I think not.
Well, at least she plucked her eyebrows.
But nevertheless. Ducks. On the other side of the mirror. Boiling humans for tea. We’re even treated twice to Dragora subjecting captured mirror-minders to her enormous teapot to supply her beverage needs. When was the last time you saw a children’s video that boiled characters alive for your viewing enjoyment? It’s a premise that seems the product of a fever dream more than the motion picture development process.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 2
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 2
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- Saxon Trainor (Mom/Hysop) played “Lt. Linda Larson” in the TNG episode “The Nth Degree”
