The Annotated Alice
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1972 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Executive Producer, Joseph Shaftel. Producer, Derek Home. Director, William Sterling. Musical Director, John Barry. Lyricist, Don Black. Alice played by Fiona Fullerton. Peter Sellers is the March Hare, Dame Flora Robson is the Queen of Hearts, Dennis Price is the King of Hearts, and Sir Ralph Richardson is the Caterpillar. Color. Wide screen. A lavish production, visually beautiful, slow moving. The Tenniel illustrations were faithfully followed. Sequences from Alice’s Adventures and Looking-Glass. Running time: ninety minutes.
1985 Dreamchild. The 80-year old Alice (Alice Hargreaves) is played by Coral Browne. Her young paid companion by Nicola Cowper. The young Alice by Amelia Shankley and Lewis Carroll by Ian Holm. A fictional story inspired by Alice’s visit to the United States in 1932.
1976 Alice in Wonderland, an X-Rated Musical Comedy. Alice is played by Kristine DeBell.
1988 Neco z Alenky. Directed and written by Jan Svankmajer of Czechoslovakia.
Alice Sequences in Other Feature Films
1930 Puttin’ on the Ritz. Produced by John W. Considine, Jr., directed by Edward H. Sloman. Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Joan Bennett is in a six-minute Alice in Wonderland dance sequence from this film.
1938 My Lucky Star. 20th Century Fox. Sonja Henie is an Alice on skates along with many other characters from the book, all on the ice. Approximately ten-minute sequence.
Cartoons
1933 Betty in Blunderland. Cartoon directed by Dave Fleischer. Animation by Roland Crandall and Thomas Johnson. Betty Boop follows Wonderland and Looking-Glass characters from a jigsaw puzzle via subway station down the rabbit hole. Running time: ten minutes.
1936 Thru the Mirror. Walt Disney Productions. A brilliant Mickey Mouse cartoon based on Through the Looking-Glass.
1955 Sweapea Thru the Looking Glass. King Features Syndicate cartoon. Executive Producer, Al Brodax. Directed by Jack Kinney. Color. Sweapea goes through a looking glass and falls down a golf hole into the “Wunnerland Golf Club.”
1971 Zvahlar aneb Saticky Slameného Huberta. Produced by Katky Film, Prague. Screenplay, design, and direction by Jan Svankmajer. This animation begins with a reading of “Jabberwocky.” “Sequence of images composed of seemingly nonsense activities.” Color. Running time: fourteen minutes.
Made for Television
1950 Alice in Wonderland. Television production staged at the Ford Theatre in December 1950. Alice is played by Iris Mann and the White Rabbit by Dorothy Jarnac.
1965 Curly in Wonderland. The Three Stooges in animation.
1966 Alice in Wonderland, or What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? Hanna-Barbera Productions. Book by Bill Dana. Music and lyrics by Lee Adams and Charles Strauss. Color. Animation. Alice’s voice by Janet Waldo, Cheshire Cat by Sammy Davis, Jr., White Knight by Bill Dana, Queen by Zsa Zsa Gabor. Running time: fifty minutes. Alice follows her dog through a television tube.
1966 Alice Through the Looking Glass. Shown November 1966. Script by Albert Simmons, lyrics by Elsie Simmons, music by Moose Charlap. Its cast includes Judi Rolin as Alice, Jimmy Durante as Humpty Dumpty, Nanette Fabray as the White Queen, Agnes Moorehead as the Red Queen, Jack Palance as the Jabberwock, The Smothers Brothers as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Ricardo Montalban as the White King. Running time: ninety minutes.
1967 Alice in Wonderland. BBC television production. Directed by Jonathan Miller. Presentation of Wonderland as a Victorian social commentary. Grand production with a star cast: Sir John Gielgud as the Mock Turtle, Sir Michael Redgrave as the Caterpillar, Peter Sellers as the King, Peter Cook as the Hatter, Sir Malcolm Muggeridge as the Gryphon, Anne-Marie Mallik, a young schoolgirl, as Alice.
1967 Abbott and Costello in Blunderland. Hanna-Barbera Productions. An animation.
1970 Alice in Wonderland. O.R.T.F. (French television) production. Directed by Jean-Christophe Averty. Burlesque with stunning visual and auditory overlay. Alice Sapritch and Francis Blanche as the King and Queen.
1973 Through the Looking-Glass. BBC television production. Produced by Rosemary Hill, adapted and directed by James MacTaggart. Twelve-year-old Sarah Sutton as Alice, Brenda Bruce as the White Queen, Freddie Jones as Humpty Dumpty, Judy Parfitt as the Red Queen, and Richard Pearson as the White King.
1985 Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Produced by Irwin Allen. Songs by Steve Allen. Natalie Gregory as Alice, with a cast of stars including Jayne Meadows, Robert Morley, Red Buttons, and Sammy Davis, Jr.
1999 Alice in Wonderland. Three-hour production directed by Nick Willing. There were 875 postproduction digital effects. Robert Halmi, Sr., and Robert Halmi, Jr., were the executive producers, and Peter Barnes wrote the script. Tina Majorino is Alice; Whoopi Goldberg, the Cheshire Cat; Martin Short, the Mad Hatter; Ben Kingsley, the Caterpillar; Christopher Lloyd, the White Knight; Peter Ustinov, the Walrus; Miranda Richardson, the Queen of Hearts; and Gene Wilder, the Mock Turtle. Robbie Coltrane and George Wendt are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The first Alice with extensive computer enhancement.
Educational
1972 Curious Alice. Written, designed, and produced by Design Center, Inc., Washington, D.C. Made for the National Institute of Mental Health. Color. Part of a drug course for elementary school children. A live Alice has a journey among animated characters. The Caterpillar smokes marijuana, the Mad Hatter takes LSD, the Dormouse uses barbiturates, and the March Hare pops amphetamines. The White Rabbit is a leader already into drugs. The Cheshire Cat is Alice’s conscience. Running time: approximately fifteen minutes.
1978 Alice in Wonderland: A Lesson in Appreciating Differences. Walt Disney Productions. Live action at beginning and end with the lesson in appreciating differences brought home by a showing of the flower sequence from the Disney feature and a discussion about how badly the flowers treated Alice simply because she was different.
MARTIN GARDNER is regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on Lewis Carroll and his work, with an egually formidable knowledge of everything from math theory to Sherlock Holmes. For twenty-five years he served as the mathematical games editor at Scientific American and has been hailed by Douglas Hofstadter as “one of the great intellects produced in this country in this century.” Gardner lives with his wife in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
LEWIS CARROLL is a pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was born on January 27, 1832. His most famous works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, which he wrote to entertain Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, and its seguel, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, which appeared in 1872. He died of bronchitis on January 14, 1898.