"The Mother Goose Treasury Featuring The Old Mother Hubbard Collection" (Vol. 4)

The last and final volume of the series featuring mostly the other cast members.

"All good things must come to an end."

That's a philosophical statement that we arguably must accept in this life. This is the last and final film of the Mother Goose series.

The scene opens where Bertram outside his front door hoping the rainy weather would stop. Mother Goose admits to liking rainy weather, for Bertram despite singing "It's Raining, It's Pouring," dislikes rain. While singing, the rains stops and the time Bertram finishes singing and laughing at the story, it begins to rain again. Unable to go out, Mother Goose calls Bertram in to read a story. Here we see a rare shot of Mother Goose's house inside, as she finds she ran out of porridge for Bertram. In the meantime, she reads a story about Old Mother Hubbard, which was performed synchronized with Mother Goose's reading and Bertram's comments. If you notice, the arrangement of Mother Hubbard's home is similar to Mother Goose's, notably the cupboard.

After, the rains stops with sun shining and Bertram is off for a walk. He eventually runs into Jack and Jill who are planning to race up the hill (of course, what else will Jack and Jill do?). After the duo ran off, an odd moment occurs with Bertram: he starts reiterating the hilarious story about the old man who jumped into bed unable to get up in the morning. Suddenly it rains and Bertram yells and begs he doesn't want it to rain...then the rains stops. Yes, very odd I found.

That oddity transitions to a scene featuring Jumping Joan. If you thought Joan finding where her little dog gone back in volume two wasn't admirable enough, given her beauty, I think you'll enjoy this. Even in high heels, she's able to jump joyously. (Reminds me of The Man Show where a girl in a bikini not only jumps, but jumps on a trampoline.) She sings and performs "Jumping Joan" then jumps into town and performs with the rest of the cast. After that, Gregory Griggs butts in and shows off his wigs.

On the other part of the village features The Numbers Lady who miraculously appears in the middle of crowd, singing and tap dancing to the song "One, Two, Three, Four." After, she disappears like a magician and Bertram continues on. Meanwhile, Mother Goose sits outside her home when a mystery man makes an appearance. He's playing the flute to the song "Tom, He Was A Piper's Son" which sounded quite good, apparently.

While Bertram greets the folks in the village, he finds a lamb guessing it belongs to Mary. It wasn't long that Bertram runs into Mary (be still, my beating heart) who points at the water drain where a spider is tucked in. Angelically, she starts singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and includes more and more folks to join her in the song, making a simple kid's song sound orchestral. Bertram then calls in Mary and tells her his favorite story being "It's Raining, It's Pouring" which Mary admits to knowing the words to the story. Mary calls in the same folks again and musically performs the song in the most fun choreography I've seen (I memorized this well when I was a kid). Suddenly, the cast sings the song quickly as they all partner up and dance to the song. (Since Mary didn't have a partner, I'll be happy to oblige.) And once again, Gregory Griggs jumps into the scene showing off his wigs.

It's the scene you've been waiting for: Jack and Jill run up the hill. Closing in about a few feet away from the well, they fall and tumble, as Bertram recites the whole story. Jack and Jill then relax at the see-saw and Bertram comes in making sure that Jack is okay admitting the lesson he learned. So Jack can build a house with no problem and make a safe landing when jumping over a candlestick at point-blank range, but can't climb up a hill with Jill: is there anything missing here?

The next scene features a wonderful musical performance of "Tom, He Was A Piper's Son" with the same cast that performed previously with The Numbers Lady and Mary. I found this to be the most eloquent, yet soothing performance; I liked this a lot. On the scene was the farmer, who made an appearance during the scene of "This Is The House That Jack Built" in volume three. While the song continues on fading to the end, it transitions to Gregory Griggs who asked Bertram about his wigs. Wearing nearly all the wigs in his inventory, Gregory performs the story showing off his wigs. As a child that time, that's when I became frightened of wigs, being glad that the hair on my head was real.

You then see a shot of Goosebury Glen and the time showing it's eight o'clock. Gregory then tells Bertram that it's time to go home and Bertram knows he's late (so Goosebury Glen is located in Utah?). Out of the blue, Wee Willie Winkie appears and performs his song. This is when I learned that eight o'clock is sleep time but I never adapted to it, given all the homework we were assigned in my elementary school days.

Bertram arrives home safely and enters in the house where Mother Goose prepared porridge for supper. Mother Goose sees a lone star in the sky and recites "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

"Goodnight little star! And goodnight to you too."
- Mother Goose

You just read the last and final words of this series. The film ends with credits. As usual, the very end features Bertram promoting the previous three volumes.

This was the only volume where Mother Goose made the least amount of appearances throughout the scenes. You also don't see much of the puppetry of the kids showing up. All in all, nearly all of the scenes were performed by the cast members themselves.

As a matter of fact, this was the first volume I watched as a kid that got me hooked into the series, despite it being the fourth volume (my mom bought this first at the time). With the great musical performance, and some funny scenes, I really enjoyed this series. Watching and reviewing them brought back some serious memories.

One thing: my tape rendered glitchy during the end credits and thus couldn't jot down all the names of the cast, but made a few close guesses with the folks I'm already familiar with. Nevertheless, having obtained all four volumes, I may have heard some rumor about a fifth volume, or at least a fifth unreleased volume (when my mom collected this for me as a kid, I'd ask if there was a fifth volume). I never found such a rumor so this is unconfirmed. However I found that Mother Goose was a real woman—wife of Isaac Goose. Read it here. Interesting stuff.

That about does it for this series! Mother Goose marks as the first series to be watched, reviewed and completed entirely here at SHOWSOTROS. Now that that's done, let's get right to the good stuff:

If you are one of the cast members, backstage crew, and/or producers of this series, I would like to interview you on this website. Please provide full details and proof that it is you, making sure I'm talking to the right person (word from your manager/agent will help out a lot). You may use the Contact form on our contact page. The questions I ask you and your answers will be posted here for fans to see. I look forward to hearing from one of you!

(Let me know a time and day on which works best for you, as I will send you the questions to answer via email. The questions and your answers will be posted immediately. To all fans: please spread the word as majority of the cast members' IMDB profiles aren't complete, and information about them are of no avail.)

UPDATE: Check out our interview with the star of the Mother Goose series, Mother Goose herself, Cheryl Rhoads!

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he managed a personal blog made back in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming (software development) and video production, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, playing old video/DOS games, digital video archiving, and listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

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