One of the largest national promotions for Alice's original release was the tie-in with Royal Desserts during the months of August and September 1951. As they had previously done for movie stars and baseball players - and would later do for Howdy Doody - Royal printed 16 scenes from the film on the back of their packaging. According to the campaign book, the tie-in was set to appear in more than 250,000 retail stores.
A later publicity press release sets this number at more like 200,000. Radio spots were recorded with Kathryn Beaumont and were to be played on 154 stations throughout the US. It also mentions that newspaper ads were planned, but the same later press release does not mention it so I don't know if these ads were ever created.
Royal also ran full-page color ads in comic books, with an estimated distribution of 34,000,000! That's a lot of comics. Consequently, the comic book ad page is fairly well known.
The cards were on the back of all their various products including pudding, custard, gelatin, and *new* lemon.
Despite the (presumably) large number of product packages produced, very few of these have survived. I have never seen a complete set, and only have 9 of the 16 myself.
The packaging mentions that you could send away for an album to hold the collection of 16, I have never seen one.
Thanks to Tick Tock Toys for sharing their images of cards 7, 8, 9, 11 and 16.
Ah, the 1950s, when every advertising campaign had some sort of jingle or rhyme to it. Some of these are pretty dreadful.
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