There is a lot of white guilt in the review section. This movie is great. Get over yourselves

In "I Am Richard Pryor" they kind of blasted this movie as being horrible....And here I am thinking it was a beloved childhood classic.

They won't remake it now, the PC police would be all over them...despite the fact that it was Richard Pryor and he was BLM long before there was a BLM.

And, honestly, I can see how the people that made "I Am Richard Pryor" would look down on this, I mean...it's childish.

But it's also childish fun, and just because Pryor is cleaning things up a bit for the film, just because he's not vulgar and not dropping the N-bomb every few seconds doesn't mean he's not hysterical.

And let's be hones, he had more family friendly and less adult movies in the past as well. His movies don't have to be as gritty as his stand up is. You can enjoy both, liking one doesn't mean you like the other any less.

So, OK, it's not a review, just felt the need to defend it. If you walk in expecting the Mack, you clearly didn't read the back of the box.

The Westgate Cinema in New Castle, PA wasn't a fancy or clean theater. Yet for most of my childhood, that's where we saw films for $1 before 5 PM, with my family often sneaking into multiple showings or even more than one film a day. The Toy was one of those films, a movie lost in the miasma of the years between ten and twelve, mixed in with other moves like The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the Jerry Lewis vehicle Hardly Working and The Cannonball Run.

Jack Brown (Richard Pryor) is in danger of losing everything - his marriage and his home - and becomes so desperate for a job that he dresses up like a traditional Southern maid to serve lunch to businessman U.S. Bates (Jackie Gleason).

He's quickly fired, but Bates' spoiled son Eric (Scott Schwartz, who yes, went on to appear in A Christmas Story and perhaps more infamously adult films like Scotty's X-Rated Adventure) - upon being told he can have anything in the store - asks for Jack. Yes, he wants to own a black man as his toy, a fact that powers the whole film.

Bates' henchman Sydney Morehouse (Ned Beatty) sets up a deal where Jack will be Eric's live-in friend in exchange for enough money to save his house. The trouble is that the humiliation isn't worth any money. Yet this is an 80's movie, so of course, the kid's rough edges get smoothed out and the two come an understanding, eventually working together to expose the father's brutal personal and business demons.

This was the movie that Richard Donner followed his work on Superman with. Gleason is, as always, a delight. He was supposedly rough on Schwartz during filming, as the comedian loved to ad lib and it threw the young actor off.