I may be picking this up just to get the 10 minute Song of the South segment.
As far the "Disney 10" go, here's my take on a DVD status report, based on my recollections of HTF reports. Everyone, feel free to chime in.
1. Snow White (1937) - No grain but looks great. Great extra features. 2. Pinocchio (1940) - Plenty of grain. I think it looks fine. Others claim that colors and contrast are off (I've never seen a print). No extras. 3. Fantasia (1940) - Looks great. Slight visual edits to cover offensive material. Nice extras. Can't comment on grain. 4. Dumbo (1941) - Looks great. Decent extras. Can't comment on grain. 5. Bambi (1942) - Not available on DVD. 6. Cinderella (1950) - Not available on DVD. 7. Alice in Wonderland (1951) - Same as Snow White. 8. Peter Pan (1953) - It's out and I've watched it, but my memory fails me on the details. 9. Lady and the Tramp (1955) - DVD is out of print. It's OAR but not 16x9. Appears to be a laserdisc port (and not a good one). No extras. 10. Sleeping Beauty (1959) - DVD, like Snow White, is overly scrubbed and grain free. Bigger problem is framing - picture is cropped on all sides. Nice extras.
Honorary # 11: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) - DVD is good and grainy with plenty of dirt and dust and other flaws, but in it's own way, it looks great. Decent extras.
So, Lady and the Tramp cannot be found in stores and Bambi and Cinderellas are unavailable. Some of the other DVDs (e.g., Snow White) are also out of print, but new copies can be had at retailers if you look hard enough. In my experience overpriced mall retailers are good places to find them.
Fantasia is mostly great in terms of grain... but I wonder if some parts were taken from dupe materials. The Sorceror's Apprentice, Nutcracker, Toccota and Fugue, and Rite of Spring look flawless. The live-action segments seem to have been "wet-gated" since during fade-in's and fade-out's, there is some very light scuffing. Pastoral, Dance of the Hours, and Night on Bald Mountain seem to be a tinge grainier.
The first segment of Dance of the Hours has "color jumps" at nearly every splice.
1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (12/21/1937) 2. Pinocchio (2/23/1940) 3. Fantasia (11/13/1940 - includes brief live action interstitials) 4. Dumbo (10/23/1941) 5. Bambi (8/13/1942) 6. Make Mine Music (8/15/1946) 7. Melody Time (5/27/1948 - includes brief live action introduction to "Pecos Bill" w/Roy Rogers, Bobby Driscoll, and Luana Patten) 8. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (10/5/1949) 9. Cinderella (2/15/1940) 10. Alice in Wonderland (7/28/1951) 11. Peter Pan (2/5/1953) 12. Lady and the Tramp (6/16/1955) 13. Sleeping Beauty (1/29/1959)
Live-Action/Animated Features from 1937-1959
1. The Reluctant Dragon (6/20/1941) 2. Saludos Amigos (6/6/1943) 3. Victory Through Air Power (7/17/1943) 4. The Three Caballeros (2/3/1945) 5. Song of the South (11/1/1946) 6. Fun and Fancy Free (9/27/1947) 7. So Dear to My Heart (1/19/1949)
Walt Disney's ALICE IN WONDERLAND: A Brief History
For American Animation buffs, it is no surprise that Walt Disney would one day make an animated feature based on Alice in Wonderland. The real surprise is that it took so long.
The history of Walt Disney's association with Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books (Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass) stretches all the way back to 1923, when Disney was still a twenty-two year old filmmaker trying to make a name for himself in Kansas City. When his first series of short cartoons, the Newman Laugh-O-Grams, failed to recoup production costs, the struggling young producer tried to create other short films hoping that one of them would point the way forward. The last of these Kansas City works was called "Alice's Wonderland", and it featured a live-action girl (Virginia Davis) interacting with cartoon characters. While charming, the short failed to receive much notice, and so Walt Disney made the hard decision to abandon producing animated films, and he left Kansas City to become a live-action film director in Hollywood.
After months of trying to find work in live-action, and failing, Walt Disney partnered with his older brother Roy to create the Disney Brothers Studio, and they revived the idea of producing animated shorts. The independent distributor M. J. Winkler screened Walt's 1923 Alice short and found it promising, and so Winkler agreed to distribute a series of "Alice Comedies" for the Disney brothers. Jubilant, Walt contacted his former Kansas City colleagues and brought them to Hollywood to work on the new series (a group that today reads like a who's who of American animation legends, including Ub Iwerks, Rudolph Ising, Isadore "Friz" Freleng, and Hugh Harman).
And so, from 1924 to 1926, the Disney Brothers Studio produced over fifty short Alice Comedies. The success of this silent film series established Disney as a film producer, and while many credit the invention of Mickey Mouse as the first great Disney success, without the Alice Comedies, it is doubtful that there ever would have been a "Steamboat Willie" in the first place.
Much has been written about Disney's longtime affection for Mickey Mouse, but what many do not know is that Walt Disney also had a long-standing affection for Alice in Wonderland. As soon as he began discussing making feature-length films, he returned repeatedly to the idea of making a feature-length version of Alice, but for various reasons, these attempts were never realized.
Prior to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney planned on making Alice in Wonderland his first feature-length film, not Snow White. Like the early Alice Comedies, he planned on using a combination of live-action and animation for the "wonderland" sequences, and in early 1933, a Technicolor screen test was shot with Mary Pickford as Alice. This first attempt by Disney at producing an Alice feature was eventually tabled when Paramount released a live-action version of Alice in Wonderland in 1933, with a script by Citizen Kane scribe Joseph Mankiewicz and an all-star cast that included Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.
Disney did not abandon the idea of making an Alice feature. After the enormous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs -- as Leonard Maltin writes in his history of Walt Disney's film career, The Disney Films, Walt Disney officially recorded the title "Alice in Wonderland" with the MPAA in 1938. As preparatory work began on this possible Alice feature, the economic devastation of the Second World War as well as the demands of the productions of Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi pushed the "Alice" project aside.
After the war, in 1945, Disney proposed a live-action/animated version of Alice in Wonderland that would star Ginger Rogers and would utilize the techniques seen in Disney's Three Caballeros. This, too, fell through, and in 1946, work began on an all-animated version of Alice in Wonderland that would feature art direction heavily based on the famous illustrations of Sir John Tenniel. This version was storyboarded, but was ultimately rejected by Walt, as was yet another proposed live-action/animated version of Alice that would star Luanna Patten (seen in Disney's Song of the South and So Dear to my Heart).
In the late 40's, work resumed on an all-animated Alice with a focus on comedy, music and spectacle as opposed to rigid fidelity to the books, and finally, in 1951, Walt Disney released a feature-length version of Alice in Wonderland to theaters, eighteen years after first discussing ideas for the project and almost thirty years after making his first Alice Comedy.
Disney's final version of Alice in Wonderland followed in the traditions of his feature films like Fantasia and Bambi and The Three Caballeros in that Walt Disney intended for the visuals and the music to be the chief source of entertainment, as opposed to a tightly-constructed narrative like Snow White or Cinderella. Indeed, Lewis Carroll's Alice books have no real plot to speak of, and because of the literary complexity of Carroll's work, they are essentially unfilmmable. Instead of trying to produce an animated "staged reading" of Carroll's books, Disney chose to focus on their whimsy and fantasy, using Carroll's prose as a beginning, not as an end unto itself.
Another bold choice was decided upon for the look of the film. Rather than faithfully reproducing the famous illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, a more streamlined and less complicated approach was used for the design of the main characters. Background artist Mary Blair took a Modernist approach to her design of Wonderland, creating a world that was recognizable, and yet was decidedly "unreal". Indeed, Blair's bold use of color is one of the films most notable features.
Finally, in an effort to retain some of Carroll's imaginative verses and poems, Disney commissioned top songwriters to compose songs built around them for use in the film. A record number of potential songs were written for the film, based on Carroll's verses, and many of them found a way into the film, if only for a few brief moments. "I'm Late" remains one of the more famous Disney songs, and yet the entire number is less than a minute long. Alice in Wonderland would boast the greatest number of songs included in any Disney film, but because some of them last for mere seconds (like "How Do You Do and Shake Hands", "A, E, I, O, U", "We'll Smoke the Monster Out", "Twas Brillig", "The Caucus Race", and others), this fact is frequently overlooked.
All of these creative decisions were met with great criticism from fans of Lewis Carroll, as well as from British film and literary critics who accused Disney of "Americanizing" a great work of English literature.
Disney was not surprised by the critical reception to Alice in Wonderland - his version of Alice was intended for large family audiences, not literary critics - but despite all the long years of thought and effort, the film met with a lukewarm response at the box office and was a sharp disappointment in its initial release. Though not an outright disaster, the film was never re-released theatrically in Walt Disney's lifetime, airing instead every so often on network television (in fact, Disney's Alice in Wonderland aired as the 2nd episode of Walt Disney's "Disneyland" TV series on ABC in 1954). Walt surmised that the film failed because Alice lacked "heart" and was a difficult character for audiences to get behind and root for. In The Disney Films, Leonard Maltin relates how animator Ward Kimball felt the film failed because, "it suffered from too many cooks - directors. Here was a case of five directors each trying to top the other guy and make his sequence the biggest and craziest in the show. This had a self-canceling effect on the final product."
Almost two decades later, after the North American success of George Duning's animated feature Yellow Submarine, Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland suddenly found itself in vogue with the times. In fact, because of Mary Blair's art direction and the long-standing association of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland with the drug culture, the feature was re-discovered as something of a "head film" (along with Fantasia and The Three Caballeros). The Disney company resisted this association, and even withdrew prints of the film from universities, but then, in 1974, the Disney company gave Alice in Wonderland its first theatrical re-release ever, and the company even promoted it as a film in tune with the "psychedelic" times.
This re-release was successful enough to warrant a subsequent re-release a few years later, where it played on a double feature with the live-action Disney film, Amy.
Still, Alice in Wonderland was never a blockbuster on the order of the other established Disney animated classics, and so, with the advent of the home video market in the early 80's, the Disney company chose to make Alice in Wonderland one of the first titles available for the rental market on Beta, VHS, and Videodisc, and the film has been a home video staple ever since.
While it has not been critically re-evaluated as a visionary "ahead-of-its-time" masterwork on the order of a Fantasia, the reputation of Alice has improved substantially over the last thirty years. Modern appreciation for the film stems from the overall growth in the appreciation of animation in general, and respect for the film's imaginative visuals have come to somewhat outweigh the criticisms over the film's episodic storyline.
Disney's Alice in Wonderland will probably never rank among the most popular of the Disney animated features, but no longer is it seen as a failure, either. As the tradition of hand-drawn Disney animated features draws to a close in the wake of the CGI era, Alice in Wonderland will remain a film that fans of animation will deservedly admire for many years to come.
Would you mind posting that great information over in the review thread? If you don't mind...I'd even like to cut/paste some into my review (giving you credit of course).
Seems to me that a ten-minute excerpt from SOTS may be a trial balloon for an eventual release....if no one screams over the excerpt, Disney may feel it's more or less safe to release the full feature, perhaps in the more tony Treasures series. Stay tuned for more....
Fantastic film history lesson, Ernest. Thank you very much. As one who had little yellow records of the songs of Alice in Wonderland as a child (78's if I remember correctly), this is one that has stuck in my memory mainly as auditory rather than visual. I loved your comments about the music, and for me, the songs have always had a very special aura. I look forward to picking up this DVD.
I wonder if they'll ever release the non-animated version with W.C. Fields, et al? I've seen it on TV a couple of times.
I'm of the opinion that the songs for Alice in Wonderland are the best ever written for a Disney film. Heard in their complete form, they are a joy. The abbreviated versions heard in the film actually don't do them justice. I also had the "Alice" yellow-label LP as a child, and the songs on that LP were the "full" versions -- and they linger in my mind even today.
In the mid-90's, Disney released an incredible feature-packed laserdisc box set devoted to Alice in Wonderland, and it included dozens of the actual song demos. It was the first time I had heard those songs since listening to the Alice LP record I owned as a child (an LP that was eventually sold at a garage sale by my parents) and that laserdisc remains one of my most-valued Disney home video releases in my film collection. The Disney "Alice" laserdisc box also includes many of the storyboards for the un-filmed 1946 "John Teniel" version.
The new DVD ports over many of the features of that mid-90's laserdisc box set, but it only scratches the surface of the art galleries and song demos seen on the CAV LD box set. The Laserdisc set also includes a "music and f/x-only track", so you can watch Alice while listening only to the music and the occasional sound f/x, another bonus feature that the new DVD does not replicate.
If you have a laserdisc player, and you're a serious fan of Walt Disney's films, that LD box is well worth every penny.
One other final bit of trivia -- in the garden sequence, in which Alice finds herself in a flower bed and she sings the tune, "All in a Golden Afternoon", you'll notice something odd during Alice's solo. Late in the production, it was decided that Alice should sing her verse alone, even though during production, she was "accompanied" by a chorus of flowers in the background. Because the decision to drop the background vocals came so late in production, as Alice sings, you'll notice that the flowers behind her are mouthing their own vocals, silently.
It's a small continuity error, but if you've ever wondered why the flowers behind Alice are "singing mute" behind Alice during her solo moment, there's your explanation.
The only real complaint I have with the new DVD is the lack of a commentary track. The SE DVD of Peter Pan brought the voice of Wendy and Alice (Kathryn Beaumont) back into the studio along with Roy Disney and NYU animation historian John Canemaker for a lively and informative commentary track. No such commentary track was made for the Alice DVD, and if I'm allowed to look a gift horse in the mouth, that is my one real complaint -- no commentary track on the new DVD.
I was lucky enough to find a new copy at a local chain store. Unfortunately, it was missing the cardboard slip-cover, but since the keepcase was still sealed and the price was reasonable, it seemed silly to pass over it for just that.
I wonder if a commentary track with Roy Disney was recorded but removed when he began to piss off Ei$ner? Hmmm. I realize that the disc was most definitely finalized before Roy left the company, but he and Eisner were on the outs loonnnng before that. According to Jim Hill, Eisner was doing lots of little things to pick at Roy before the big split.
I'm sad that the new dvd doesn't have all of the wonderful storyboards and song demos of the ld set. Storyboards normally bore me, but the ones from the abandoned versions of ALICE were fascinating. I'm really glad that I still own the ld set.
Unfortunately, all we know is that it is on the Platinum schedule (which will be two a year starting in 2005 and end in 2007). Definitely not in 2004 (Aladdin only). So, either 2005, 2006, or 2007. Here's hoping that it's Spring 2005.
both of those are titles I can't wait to see properly released on DVD. Aladdin for the first time (should be stunning) and a proper 16x9 Lady and the Tramp...hopefully with a disc containing the 1.33:1 animated (not p/s) version in the same set!
Because of the success of the previous Platinum series disks, Disney was bumping up the release schedule to TWO per year instead of one. Now, not 100% sure if this is the most current, but this is the extraordinarily tenative projected release pattern for the remainder of the films getting Platinum treatment....
Cinderella: Platinum Series - March 2005 The Little Mermaid: Platinum Series - October 2005 Bambi: Platinum Series - March 2006 The Jungle Book: Platinum Series - October 2006 Lady and the Tramp: Platinum Series - March 2007 101 Dalmations: Platinum Series - October 2007
Pinnochio: Masterpiece Series - Late 2005/Early 2006
I've had this in my spreadsheets of releases for about 6 months now, so again, it's really rumored about the dates. But I'm still pretty sure that these are the exact films that they do have selected for the Platinum treatments...