You’ve got to feel sorry for Kevin Corcoran, don’t you? On the Wikipedia page for this movie, there is actually the parenthetical observation that he’s better known as Moochie. Which, okay, so he is. But also Arliss and Jimmy Bean and Francis. And a long and productive career behind the camera as well, not that much of anyone talks about a career with highlights such as “first assistant director on three episodes of Quantum Leap,” even if one of them is “Shock Theater,” one of the best episodes of the series. But the man died a year and a half ago at age 66, and even now, he’s still getting called Moochie. Oh, well; it could be worse. I once saw his brother Brian billed as “the brother of the kid who plays Moochie.”

Toby Tyler (Corcoran) is an orphan child living on the farm of his Uncle Daniel (Tom Fadden) and Aunt Olive (Edith Evanson). One day, he is supposed to be feeding the hogs, but he sees a poster for the circus and runs into town to watch the parade. He is offered a job by concessionaire Harry Tupper (Bob Sweeney), but insists he has a responsibility to his aunt and uncle. Only when he gets home, it turns out that the hogs broke out of their pen and into the turnip patch because they hadn’t been fed, so he runs away after all. He befriends a chimp named Mr. Stubbs, like you do, and also humans named Ben Cotter (Henry Calvin) and Sam Treat (Gene Sheldon).

Toby works hard for the frankly odious Tupper. He is talking to the circus’s girl trick rider, Mademoiselle Jeanette (Barbara Beaird), which makes the boy trick rider, Monsieur Ajax (Dennis Olivieri), jealous. Ajax shows off, falls off, and breaks his leg. Toby had been telling Jeanette that he could ride—a lie—so of course they draft him to be the new trick rider. Meanwhile, Tupper has been stealing Toby’s letters from home, because his aunt and uncle want him to come home and Toby’s making Tupper a lot of money.

It’s actually an astonishing picture of child exploitation. Toby is getting paid a dollar a week by Tupper, and he’s so innocent—and frankly has grown up so poor—that he doesn’t know the difference between a nickel and a lead slug, and also he doesn’t know what a tip is. And there is no one looking out for Toby enough to be sure that he gets what’s coming to him. Ben keeps Tupper from physically abusing Toby, but since Toby’s deal is with Tupper and not the circus, that’s apparently Toby’s fight. And while I think Sam would stand up for Toby if he knew, he doesn’t think to ask. He takes care of a lot of other things with Toby—including making sure he’s fed, ye Gods—but he doesn’t know about the money.

Also, there is no designated person to watch and make sure that Ajax doesn’t, say, take off the safety belt during rehearsal and injure himself. Circus owner Colonel Sam Castle (Richard Eastham, who looks not unlike Walt), yells at Ben, but Ben is the strongman and one of the drivers and seems to be somehow at least partially responsible for the monkey cage and was assigned to look after Toby even though Toby is Tupper’s employee. I think we can assume that Jeanette and Ajax are also orphans, because certainly we never see their parents.

The reason I chose this movie for this week is that the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed on the twenty-first after 146 years in operation. People don’t want to go to the circus anymore, and that’s partially because of its long history of exploitation. Really, Dumbo would also have been appropriate, but this one is more obscure and therefore more in this column’s wheelhouse. At any rate, the circus is a complicated subject for us. It’s got this connection to Americana, but at the same time, we do kind of have to ignore how awful the circus has long been for its participants. Toby is proud to be in the circus, but I think it’s telling that Ajax basically disappears once he’s injured. No one even really mentions him again.

While no one in this movie is a huge draw, and indeed there seems to have been a lot of focus on the appearances of Calvin and Sheldon because of the Zorro connection, it’s really impressive to look at the credits of the performers nonetheless. Olivieri was in both Forbidden Zone and Phantom of the Paradise. Edith Evanson was a minor character in Citizen Kane. James Drury, who plays a character named Jim Weaver for a couple of minutes, would go on to do 249 episodes of The Virginian as the title character. I grant you that some of the credits were after and could not have been predicted, but still. It’s an impressive cast.

Really, though, Disney was banking on three of the names. Corcoran, of course, who had been working for Disney for several years at that point and had already made The Shaggy Dog and Old Yeller. But Henry Calvin and Gene Sheldon will always, I think, be known for the eighty-episode (two season!) run of Zorro, where they were Sergeant Garcia and Bernardo. In fact, this may well be the only thing I’ve ever seen where Sheldon talks. It makes me sad, honestly, because he’s quite good in this. I do insist that playing a silent character is harder than playing a talking one in a lot of ways, especially if you’re the only silent character, but still. I get that he had a long, productive career that just mostly wasn’t filmed, but I enjoy him in this and would have liked to get away from his mugging as Bernardo for a bit.

Most impressive in his own way, though he has no lines, is band director Oliver Wallace. The only credited person with no character name, in fact. I’m pretty sure he’s the only Oscar winner in the piece. For, appropriately enough, Dumbo. He was also nominated for White Wilderness. He worked in the Disney music department. He was a composer who did literally hundreds of scores. (Weirdly enough, not this one; it was scored by Buddy Baker and Will Schaefer.) He was nominated a total of five times for Oscars, all for Disney fare. Though I grant you Victory Through Air Power is not typical Disney! And, okay, that “literally hundreds” includes about 150 shorts. Still, he worked with Disney on some of the most iconic scores of the ’40s and ’50s. He didn’t do all the songs for Dumbo, but when your feature career at the studio starts with writing the music to “Pink Elephants on Parade” and “When I See an Elephant Fly,” and goes on from there, you deserve a little attention.