Percy Kent Bag Co, Inc 'Ken-Print' Feedsacks - Character Merchandise Division Catalog Page

Time for another series, this time we are leaving the world of production art and moving into the world of promotional licensed merchandise - in this case feedsacks.

It used to be that people bought flour and other dry goods (including animal feed) in large fabric sacks, and then made staples like bread from the flour rather than purchasing bread outright.  These feedsacks or flour sacks were often printed in colorful patterns that could be repurposed in any number of ways - usually in quilts or similar needle work.  Disney (among others) licensed their characters for print fabric used in these sacks.  In 1951 Disney licensed the Alice characters for a series of these sacks in 3 patterns:  Garden of Live Flowers, March of the Cards, and Mad Tea Party.  Of these three, only two seem to have been produced; I've never seen a sack with the below Mad Tea Party artwork.

Over the next several days we'll be exploring the various patterns and colors released as a part of this promotion.  Stay tuned!

Character Merchandising Division Model Sheet - Alice A-1-50

In a comment a few posts back for one of the puzzles, I alluded to a model sheet used by the Character Merchandising Division, here is that model sheet.

Although it is labeled as Rough, and Not to be Used, we see these poses on Alice merchandise of the period quite frequently.  The full figure Alice in particular turns up all over the place.  The Alice with her head in her hands was very nicely rendered by a Tobler postcard that I posted back in the first year of the blog.

This is the only vintage CMD model sheet I've ever come across, dated January 1950 via the code A-1-50.  There certainly must be others for each of the main characters, but none have surfaced to my knowledge.  But, there are a whole lot of animation model sheets, at least 25 that I am aware of.  Stay tuned!

Jaymar Wooden Inlay Puzzles - Do They Exist?

One of the interesting things about reading through the Character Merchandising Division catalog is seeing just how many items were planned that seem to have not been produced.  Jaymar as we know did a vast number of puzzles across the entire spectrum of Disney characters, in a variety of formats.  But this page from the Alice CMD announces a new format, the Jaymar Wooden Inlay Puzzles.

This announcement prominently features art for four different Alice puzzles in this wooden inlay format.  I'm sure most of you have played with this kind of puzzle when you were a wee tot, big wooden board with very large pieces that fit nicely into place.  I myself have a vivid memory of playing with one when I was on Romper Room waaaaaaay back in 1969 at the ripe old age of 4.

Unfortunately it appears as though these particular puzzles were never made.  I've never seen nor even heard of one in existence.  Perhaps by the time the puzzles were ready to be manufactured the writing was on the wall for Alice and Jaymar cancelled them.  Of course this is all speculation on my part, and if there is anyone out there with one or a picture of one, please share!

Small Fry Shoulder Bag by Salient

Years ago I acquired this cute little girl's shoulder bag that featured art of Alice and the White Rabbit with a Rocking Horse Fly (you don't see that every day).  For years I did not know who the manufacturer was, but I suspected it was a company called Salient Inc. of East Longmeadow, MA, who (according to Tomart and the CMD) had a license to produce children's purses and wallets for the years 1951-1952.  Salient is listed in the CMD, but there is no merchandise page in the CMD.

Flash forward a few years, probably around 1998, and I was at the Atlantique show in Atlantic City NJ (now sadly departed) when I came across this brown cardboard box.  The dealer had one of these handbags sitting on the top of it.

I opened the lid and saw this:

Holy crap!  A full box with original built-in store display for the Alice shoulder bag (throw in a few Donald Duck and Pluto for good measure).  While it is difficult to read, the lid has a stenciled 'Small Fry Shoulder Bag' on the top, and a smudge that was probably the item count.  This box held 18, I don't know if that is correct as it is really, really full.  My guess would be that it originally held a dozen.  And how clever is it to create a built-in store display in the shipping box itself?  I love it.  Here is a cleaned-up scan of the inside lid/counter display.  Shoulder bags for little ladies indeed!

There must have been a small find on this bag back in the 1990s, as they turn up every once in a while in mint condition - I have a few extra as well in the Wonderland Bazaar if you'd care to have one.  But this is the only full box with all three styles I've come across.

The Great Cookie Conundrum

While perusing the CMD for other posts, I came across the page for Leeds.  

On that page (which was on the back side of an Alice page, when will I learn to TURN the page) was the listing for the Alice cookie jar by Leeds, which I originally posted last year.

In that post I discussed and pictured the two know Leeds variations on the Alice cookie jar. The blue

and the white

I also previously posted an image from the campaign book, but I now have a better scan of that page

Also in that post I mentioned that while I had never seen this particular style of cookie jar for Alice, I had seen a Donald Duck jar in that style (in a variety of colors), which is also pictured on the CMD page.

This style matches the blue Alice jar.

What I had never noticed before though was this price sheet on the CMD page

Notice how there are two sizes listed for the Alice jar, as well as the Donald and Mickey jars.  Could it be that these two variations are really the two different sizes listed here?

Gund Character Dolls

Alternately known as Gund Soft Toys or Gund Stuffed Toys, Gund produced a set of three dolls of the Mad Hatter, March Hare and White Rabbit for the original release of Alice in Wonderland, pictured here in the campaign book. 

Oddly, while the CMD has a page for the Gund Stuffed Toys, it does not picture these three like the campaign book does, but rather pictures a concept image of an unproduced Alice doll.

By the time the August issue of Playthings was published, they had dropped the Alice and you see the three characters as produced.

 It has been my experience that for whatever reason, the March Hare is the most common of the three, although his construction tends to produce a hole in his left foot (as pictured) from the wire armature.  His ears also have wire armature and they can be posed.

The White Rabbit is of similar construction, and although pictured with a red heart on his chest in all the advertising, it is not always present.  The examples I have seen with the heart have always seemed to me to have been handmade rather than factory made.

The Mad Hatter is the most difficult to find, primarily because of his hat being a separate, and easily lost, piece.  Not to mention that the 10/6 tag is made of really cheap paper and is seldom found .

I must say that the rabbits look pretty good, but the Mad Hatter is a little scary.  I'm fairly certain that the Alice would have been quite frightening if it had been produced.

Parfait Soap Sets

Some of the scariest things I've ever seen are these two soap sets by Parfait.  The two sets are Alice and the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter and March Hare.

Each set comes with a soap figure, and a small bag of bubble bath in an illustrated clear plastic box.  The box design is identical for both sets, with just the character names differing.

The soap sets are listed in the Character Merchandise Division catalog for 1951, along with the White Rabbit sachet and a similar set of soap figures for Cinderella.

Eastern Jewelry Mfg. Co. (aka Coro) - A Page from the Character Merchandise Catalog

The Eastern Jewelry Manufacturing Company - also known as Coro - produced a wide range of costume jewelry for the original release of Alice in Wonderland. Pictured below is the page from the Character Merchandise Catalog for that line.

It pictures a total of 9 different items, some of which appear to have been sold in pairs as the pins pictured along the right side of the page share inventory numbers - all pairs included an Alice and another character.

There are some holes in the numbering, one can speculate about the missing items - and for certain I have an item not listed on this page that could very well fill one of those holes. Stay tuned over the next few days for more details on this line of jewelry.

1951 Walt Disney Character Merchandising Division Catalog

I've mentioned this item in several previous posts, thought I'd devote a post entirely to it - the Character Merchandising Division Catalog.

This is another one of those things that most people don't believe exists. And in a sense they are correct, it is not a traditional Kay Kamen catalog - his death bringing about an end to that era - but rather an internally produced merchandising division catalog, or as it says on the cover, News About Walt Disney Character Merchandise. Even still, so rare that it was thought not to exist, although there is a photo of the cover in the TOMART condensed edition on page 280.

I have only seen two of these ever - mine (which I got from the estate of a Retlaw employee) and one that Disney sold on eBay a few years back (when the Disney Auctionears was still in operation). Mine is a folder (like a Pee Chee for those who remember them) containing a large number of loose leaf, 3-hole punched pages. The one from Disney auctions was spiral bound, but I imagine it was similar, probably the folder was cut down to page size and then the whole thing bound. I do remember that the spiral binding was a little odd in that the spiral was longer than the actual height of the catalog by a couple of inches.

This is an invaluable tool, with tons of illustrations of rare, and sometimes unproduced, character items. It is not limited to Alice in Wonderland, but rather is a snapshot at what was planned for the 1951 season. Of course Alice dominates the catalog. Also included is a listing of the licensed manufacturers, unknown how complete this list is though. Its target audience was, I presume, the toy retailers.

I have been slowly scanning the pages, usually in support of a specific post on an item listed in the CMD. Posts with scans of pages from the catalog are tagged with the CMD tag. At some point I will consolidate the scans, perhaps making a PDF of the entire thing. But that is for another time.

Trimfoot Shoes - A Page from the Character Merchandising Division Catalog

This is one of those things that we'll probably never see, but I remain hopeful. From the Character Merchandising Division catalog comes this page featuring "Girls' and Teenage Shoes" by Trimfoot - The ALICE Look!

"Gay, capricious, sparkling..." who wouldn't want to wear shoes like that? I don't know about you, but I think those March Hare shoes are pretty cool.

The Trimfoot company is still in business today, still making kids shoes.

Plastic Novelties Pencil Sharpener - a Page from the Character Merchandising Division catalog

Second in the series of 'Matt is apparently blind and can't see the back side of pages' comes this page from the Character Merchandising Division catalog featuring the Alice pencil sharpener from this post.

The sharpener in my previous post had a smooth edge, but this particular ad shows the scalloped edge version, as below


Also interesting to note is that this sharpener and those pictured in the page do not have a © WDP on them, the but the sharpener in my previous post does...could these scalloped ones be earlier, and then Disney complained about the lack of a copyright?

Vira Greeting Cards - a Page from the Character Merchandising Division Catalog for 1951

While preparing another post, I came across this page in the Character Merchandising Division catalog.

Some of you may recall the series I did on Vira greeting cards back in November of 2008. I had overlooked this page at the time because it was on the back of a page, and in this particular catalog almost all of the Alice merchandise is on the front of the page...that'll teach me.

This page is really interesting, and it illustrates very well something I have noted a couple of times before - what was planned for release and what was actually released don't necessarily coincide. Case in point, card number 410, in the above it is a Mad Hatter card; but in reality card 410 is an Alice card, as seen here. The other designs are all pretty close, although some of these renderings are in fact much nicer than the actual produced card.

Another interesting thing to note is that this page only mentions a single set of 6 cards, but in fact it appears as though they produced a set of 12 cards, a birthday and get well card in each of the 6 designs (although I have only seen 4 get well cards to date).

Gund Vinylite Dolls

This page from the 1951 character merchandise catalog promotes some of the more unusual items to come out of the original release: a set of six vinyl dolls made by Gund. Advertised as 'vinylite', these dolls look more like figural pillows than dolls per se.

These dolls were also featured in advertisements in Playthings Magazine,
and had prominent placement in the National Screen Service campaign book.


In real life these dolls are very colorful, easy to clean, but have a tendency towards seam splits.


Characters made are Alice, White Rabbit, Tweedle, Mad Hatter, March Hare, and Queen of Hearts. The character merchandise catalog shows a seventh doll, a variant of Alice, but this was never produced to my knowledge, and the campaign book only lists the six pictured above.

Teacup Watch

Following on the heels of the inspired packaging for the Cinderella watch that came out the previous year (the Glass Slipper watch), Disney's packaging of the Alice watch for 1951 was no less so. I believe that this box/watch combination is from the first year of release as all the ads I have for subsequent years show only the pink box variations (see below for list of known variations), and all the 1951 material describes or shows the box in full color with US Time on the lid.

I ulcerated over this watch for years before I finally found this one. I hate to tell you what I (over) paid for it (ah, the pre-eBay days), but it does have its original shipping box and warranty card, so totally worth it <grin>.

Anyway, throughout the film's release (and beyond) the watch was promoted heavily and prominently. This is the ad from the National Screen Service campaign book,

and this is the page from the Character Merchandising Division catalog, both from 1951.

All this promotion paid off let me tell you, they sold a ton of them. The watch was available in one form or another for 7 years (1951-1957). The watch itself is fairly common, but the original packaging complete with plastic teacup is difficult to find in nice shape.

And for those completists out there (like myself) there are variations too. There are at least 4 variations of the teacup box (round full color US Time, round pink, round pink Ingersoll, square pink), 2 variations of the watch (plastic case, metal case), and 4 variations of the watch band (pink fabric with blue grommets, blue fabric with pink grommets, leather, and flexi). Oh, and there is a 5th variation of the box, one without a teacup, but instead an illustration of the Mad Hatter at the tea party with a cel overlay of Alice. More pictures to come...