Book Review: Baby's Day Out

Title: Baby’s Day Out

Author: Ron Fontes

Date: 1994

Publisher: Troll Associates

ISBN: none

Length: 127 pages

Illustrations: 8 pages of color photos from the movie

Quote: “Baby Boo, today you shall go on a wonderful adventure!”

This is not a novel. It’s the printed version of a cleverly filmed revision of the oldfashioned “slapstick” comedy where the humor was watching actors simulate fear and pain. In order to make that kind of act funny the characters supposedly howling in pain have to be played as both stupid and nasty enough to deserve to suffer, so in this movie audiences got to laugh at the misery three incompetent kidnappers inflict on each other while the kidnapped baby appears to be crawling happily all over the city and having a wonderful time.

In real life, of course, the baby wouldn’t crawl across very many rough streets before it flopped over and howled for Mommy, and while animals often do tolerate babies (or calm, peaceable people) while they go into threat or attack mode toward anxious, aggressive people, the probability of the gorilla sequence...well, actually, it highlights the extreme improbability of the whole melodrama. Baby’s parents guilt-trip about having left baby with a nice, kind nanny whom the baby actually loves, though actually the problem arose when they removed baby from the nanny and left him with the photographer. They meet a few people less wealthy than themselves who are ordinary human beings, some more decent than others, and shower money on them impartially. Baby Bink’s favorite word is “boo-boo,” which he uses to mean a picture book about Baby Boo who gets a day out with his nanny, and the baby is particularly thrilled because he crawls through the same sort of places Baby Boo visits before coming safely home to his own little bed.

So all anybody learned from this story was how John Hughes spliced the image of a happily crawling baby through the images of a bustling city, and how four grown-up comedians imitated the anxiety of a worried mother and the pain of three criminals who spend a day getting hit and falling down. In one scene, which did make me laugh by its improbable literalization of what everyone always knew was a metaphor, Baby Bink is tucked under the jacket of a kidnapper sitting on a bench and finds a lighter in the man’s pocket, and the liar’s pants really appear to catch fire.

If you want a moral in a story you can probably find one, and I’m not entirely pleased with the moral of this story. Baby is lucky—well, in a comedy the baby has to be lucky. Kidnappers are unlucky—ditto. Baby’s parents don’t know how to deal with non-wealthy people and shower cash on the deserving and undeserving ones alike—that’s the left-wing propaganda cropping up. In the real world that does happen, and the story leaves me looking for a realistic resolution. Two are possible:

(1) Baby’s parents continue to appease their guilt by throwing more money into left-wing social handout programs, while they stop doing the one thing they were doing right: providing steady work to a nice girl who has in fact bonded with Baby Bink. That’s what Hughes seems to have had in mind, but for a complete resolution the story would need to show how badly it works in real life.

(2) Baby’s parents follow up on their acquaintance with the non-wealthy people they’ve met and are able to help the Totally Deserving Stereotype earn more money while cutting off handouts to the con artist, on the basis of that acquaintance. That does work if people commit to doing it.

The copy of this book I physically own was knocked onto the floor right below where a fire hose was aimed at the ceiling, and got plaster dust stuck between the pages. I’m not impressed by the story the book tells, but I will admit that the survival of the book itself is congruous with the story, and makes me smile.

If you want to laugh at the idea of kidnappers getting a beating that makes what supposedly awaits them in prison seem mild, all by themselves, through their own incompetence, without anyone having to soil a hand by hitting them, Baby’s Day Out is for you.