Back in the 1980s when I was a kid, my mother took me to see a film which I thought I remembered was called "The Little People." Years later, when we rented a video of Darby O'Gill and the Little People, I was expecting to refresh an old childhood memory, but no, that was a completely different story.
My memories of it are fragmentary now, and no amount of searching on the usual engines seems to turn up anything matching its description. What I remember is this: that there was something in it about finding a leprechaun at the end of the rainbow, but not the pot of gold for which the children were hoping; that it had these children traveling to a land of leprechauns or fairies or something; that the queen of these people had no children, and was therefore planning to adopt her human visitors as her own; and that she planned to do so by sending the children down a chute into a pit with some magical monster in it known as the slime-bo (or maybe slimbo) that had the power to transform and improve her subjects in some way (give them wings, for example).
Meanwhile, back in our world, there was a subplot about a man who'd somehow gotten ahold of some magic dust from a little person; the dust, which produced some kind of temporary telekinetic abilities in its user (lifting tables and chairs and so forth), was addictive, and using it was slowly driving the man crazy; the little person trying to recover the dust was doing so with the help of some kind of tall dark hobo character; this hobo and the children were the only ones who could see him, since they actually believed in the fairy-tales on which this story is based; and in the climax of the film, the man with the bag of magic dust loses control and accidentally zaps his grown-up daughter, who can then only be brought back to life through the magic in which only the kids and the hobo and their otherworldly associates believe (I think).
Does anyone have any idea what film this is? I don't remember ever seeing it again anywhere else but during its theatrical run.
Just a guess, but it might be THE SNOW QUEEN (1986). There are some screen shots here:
http://www.youngactressreviews.org/reviews/the_snow_queen/
Nice guess, but no. After a lot more digging, I finally came up with the answer: "The Great Land of Small" which is apparently a very Canadian film. (It's filmed in Canada and set in Canada with Canadian actors.) This would explain how I got a chance to see it: when I was a child, I used to live in Minnesota. After working with different combinations of key words from my fragmented memories, I turned up this site on it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6303340911/103-7406944-2200606?v=glance&n=404272
It's kid of surprising (I think) that this piece hasn't been made into a DVD yet. Practically everything else has including films that could be used as torture instruments. The mixed reviews I'm seeing so far indicate that for this film, either you love it, or you really, really hate it. I've got a copy on order now, so I'm about to find out what those pleasant memories are worth for myself.
I'll be sure to report back when I do.