TV REVIEW : NBC OFFERS A BLAND ‘BABES’

Here’s some offbeat scheduling: NBC is preempting its three macho shoot-’em-up series tonight for a three-hour movie musical whose most violent moment comes at the climax, when one group of characters throws fruit and vegetables at another.

Fans of “The A-Team,” “Miami Vice” and “Crime Story” will not be pleased.

Neither will viewers of “Babes in Toyland,” a new adaptation of the Victor Herbert operetta that airs from 8 to 11 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39.

Not because it isn’t more violent. Because it isn’t more charming or fanciful.

A Christmas fantasy about Toyland ought to look like Neiman-Marcus. This one looks like K mart. The village is a collection of plain wooden buildings; its inhabitants drive cars that look like they were borrowed from Disneyland’s Autopia and the underground ghoulies who attack them are perhaps the least threatening and most ridiculously outfitted TV monsters since “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”

There are a lot of people dressed up in cute bear, cat and goose costumes, but all they do is move about in the background; the principal characters, regrettably, are all humans.

Paul Zindel, who adapted the lackluster remake of “Cinderella” that ran on CBS last season, has done the same here, drawing as much on “The Wizard of Oz” for inspiration as the earlier versions of “Babes in Toyland.”

Drew Barrymore stars as 11-year-old Lisa, who, like “Oz’s” Dorothy, is knocked unconscious and dreams she is in a magical place where people from her real life are now Mother Goose characters such as Jack Nimble (Keanu Reeves), Old Mother Hubbard (Eileen Brennan), Georgie Porgie (Googy Gress) and Mary Contrary (Jill Schoelen).

Instead of the wicked witch and the good witch, there is an evil uncle (Richard Mulligan) who wants to rule Toyland and a benevolent toymaster (Pat Morita) who helps Lisa and her friends find a way to help themselves.

Under the direction of Clive Donner, the conflict is minimal, however: The bad is all bluster and the good is all gooey. Leslie Bricusse’s colorless musical score only adds to the mush.

“When you’re all grown up,” the toymaster tells Lisa, “you must remember to keep the child in you alive.” Watching this “Babes in Toyland” won’t do the trick, however. It only reminds you that “TV’s in Doldrums.”