Barnaby is the villain in Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough's famous 1903 operetta Babes in Toyland . In the original operetta, he is after his nephew Alan and his niece Jane's inheritance, and arranges for them to die in a shipwreck. However, they survive and make their way to Toyland, and in the end it is Barnaby who dies, by accidentally drinking a glass of poison meant for them. In the several film versions and even more numerous television adaptations of the operetta, the plot is either slightly or totally changed, but there are always many characters from the Mother Goose rhymes, and no matter which version one sees, Barnaby is always a greedy miser after someone's money. Whether or not he dies in the film versions is always staged in a way that is open to debate; for instance, in the Laurel and Hardy 1934 version, he and his Bogeymen are chased away from Toyland and have to escape from a moat full of alligators; we never know if they do. And in the 1961 Disney film, publicity stills showed Barnaby reduced to toy size and locked in a birdcage after losing a swordfight with Tom the Piper's Son, whereas in the film he appears to have been stabbed to death by Tom at the end of the swordfight.