Through the Looking Glass and Jello Commercials

So my family and I went to the new Burton-esque Alice film (meh). But what was amazing was during the pre-show (I love the pre-shows at the Alamo Drafthouse) they used MY video clip of one of the Alice Jello commercials. Pretty cool.

Alice Comedies Drawing - Alice's Circus Daze

For the first time on the Vintage Disney Alice blog I'm going back to the silent days of Walt's involvement with Alice in Wonderland to the very first cartoons produced at Walt Disney Studios.  While the association with Alice in Wonderland was tenuous at best even in the first cartoon Alice's Wonderland, nevertheless it remains a part of vintage Disney Alice in my mind.  Here we have a drawing from an Alice Comedy called Alice's Circus Daze.  How cool is this?

There is a notation on the back that says "Alice's Circus Daze - Rubber Man SC", so off I merrily ran to YouTube!

While the video quality is pretty crappy, you can make out the various different figures in the audience from the above drawing.  You can also see that the drawing was reversed to create the left side of the audience.  Pretty tricky for 1927.

You can  watch Alice's Circus Daze in it's entirety on YouTube.

I Couldn't Resist Linking These

As some of you may know, when I'm not cataloging Alice goodies from the 1950s, I'm a software guy with a Physics degree from Caltech.  These videos are awesome, produced by an enterprising AP Calculus class in Escondido.  Wish this technology had been available when I was in AP Calc lo' these many years ago...

Part 1

Part 2

Happy Birthday Lewis Carroll! The Disney Company's Worst Mistake Ever!!

Today is Lewis Carroll's birthday (or rather the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's birthday) and what better way to celebrate than to highlight the Disney Company's most monumental lapse in proofreading ever!

That's right ladies and gentlemen, Disney misspelled the author's name on the title card of the film. Now I realize the good reverend had been dead for several decades by this time, but come on, how bad is this? Notice also that they also got the title of the good reverend's book wrong: it should be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Gryphon and Mock Turtle - Jello Commercial

Ok, so when I said that the Gryphon and Mock Turtle were forgotten characters, that was only partially true. They never appeared on the big screen...but they did appear on the little one. This is a Jello commercial from the same video collection as this post. But unlike the previous one, this one is almost entirely new animation, including the Gryphon and Mock Turtle!



Alice sounds like Kathryn Beaumont, but still need to verify.

Jello Commercial with Cheshire Cat - 1956?

Here is one of two Jello commercials that I have featuring Alice in Wonderland animation. This first one is pretty standard stuff, it re-uses feature film animation exclusively (with some new live action of a little girl with Jello), but re-rendered for TV with thick black lines for the crappy TV pictures in the 1950s. This originally came from a collection of commercials entitled Cartoons Celing Commercials. The jacket of this collection lists the date of these commercials as 1956, but I have no other corroborating evidence to support that date.



Voice over is by Sterling Holloway, which is pretty cool, and Alice's voice sounds like Kathryn Beaumont, but have not confirmed that.

1955 Hudson Commercial

My new toy is finally installed, called VCR2PC it digitizes video tape directly to digital files on disk so you can edit and upload or burn to DVD. Woohoo! I can finally transfer some of my rare video to a more stable medium. First up is this bizarre Hudson commercial for the 1955 model year, so probably actually from 1954. Quality is not that great, but cool to see nonetheless.