I remember reading Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney. A magnificent book, supposedly the first to tell of the man’s warts as well as his wizardry, at least with Disneycorp’s cooperation. I also remember being rather surprised that his 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland was such a failure in its initial release.
It must have been a boot in the jaw. Disney made his name with a series of Alice shorts filmed in Kansas City, Missouri in his formative years. His novel idea—combining animation with live action (which would serve him well with many Oscars years later)—made him a household name and gave him the credibility to build something substantial on the West Coast.
His Alice was remarkable for its time and, seen from today’s vantage, a respectful and really good adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books. It was ahead of its time—trippy in the early ‘50s (before even the Beatniks had broken through). It was eventually rediscovered in the 1960s on college campuses, usually with student audiences on mind-bending hallucinogens.
This is all well and good in its own way—it’s a cult favorite masquerading now as a Disney Masterpiece. It has found its audience and transcended its time. One need not be a hippy to appreciate it. I could probably conjure the entire soundtrack in my head from repeated viewing as a youngster. But it wasn’t the first Alice I knew and it was not the one that had the most effect on me. The winner for that, hands down, was a lavish (for the time) CBS miniseries produced two years after my birth.
Today, the miniseries has lost a lot of its luster. I reckon the term now is “Limited Series,” but that doesn’t quite have the panache associated with “miniseries” in the ‘70s and ‘80s on American television. For some, they were overblown soap operas, but for others, major miniseries like Roots, Jesus of Nazareth, The Thorn Birds, North and South—these were all events. The event was making sure you tuned in at the right time and didn’t miss it and that you came back the next night. Some of that magic survived until the ‘90s. I remember tuning in for the second night of Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal only to miss it because there was a storm. It never re-aired as far as I knew, and I had to wait for some VHS of it. Good God, I’m showing my age.
Anyway, the two-part Alice in Wonderland from 1985 had an astonishing cast. The brainchild of the “Master of Disaster,” Irwin Allen, he managed to assemble a litany of talent to play the various roles including the likes of Ernest Borgnine, Beau and Lloyd Bridges, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Carol Channing, Imogene Coca, Sammy Davis Jr., Sherman Helmsley, Arte Johnson, Harvey Korman, Karl Malden, Roddy McDowall, Jayne Meadows, Robert Morley, Anthony Newley, Donald O’Connor, Martha Raye, Ringo Starr, Jack Warden, Jonathan Winters, and Shelley Winters. In addition, many of the familiar faces of TV at the time were there like Scott Baio, Patrick Duffy, Merv Griffin, Pat Morita, Telly Savalas, John Stamos, and Sally Struthers.
The miniseries is a musical and all the songs are credited to Steve Allen, the former host of The Tonight Show (and no relation to producer Irwin). Allen was a Renaissance Man. Most Renaissance Men and Women do many things well, but few things brilliantly. It would not surprise me if Allen tossed off the songs in one weekend (as a few of them still smack of fresh paint). But choreographed by Gillian Lynne and accompanied by a script by Paul Zindel fleshed out by visual effects from John Dykstra, it’s about as good as TV got in the ‘80s, Dallas excluded.
Of course, today’s kids would balk. I remember in my brief life as a public-school teacher I tried to show my middle schoolers a Muppet film and they simply could not take the technology onscreen. I think the word they used was “ancient.” It was The Muppet Christmas Carol. That was 1994, not my idea of ancient, but then again, I’m not an oversaturated, overcaffeinated, doped up child of the 21st century, so I can’t really tell what’s going on with that set anymore.
For its basicness, it is also a good adaptation of the source material. Some moments are truly bizarre and uncanny, from Carol Channing’s White Queen to a sequence involving cutting a purple cake without a knife. The best half is the second and of course it would be, being an adaptation of Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There, a more supple and challenging book than its predecessor.
And, in that second half, was the most terrifying thing I saw in my childhood. Perhaps that is why this Alice has stayed with me for so long. The depiction of the Jabberwocky, rather too lovingly riffed from John Tenniel’s sketches but given its own particular terror, would scare any child.
Looking at it now, one can tell the use of the flickering lights helps quite a bit, but I still find the basic image terrifying and, occasionally, the Jabberwocky poem appears in my life again and, behind it, there is a trace of fright, nonsense though it is.
Does the 1985 Alice in Wonderland over-moralize? Of course. Isn’t that just a lot of hams hamming it up? You bet. But, for better or ill, it is my Alice, the one I think of before even the Disney version.
We had many Alices before it and many since. For those of us born in the ‘80s, it’s this one. For those born in the ‘90s, there was another TV miniseries, though dripping in early digital dreck. I hesitate to say some poor soul may find the Tim Burton film watchable. Bully for them. But my Alice is Natalie Gregory, wandering among a bevy of Broadway, TV, and movie legends, trying to make sense of a world where nothing makes much sense.
The more I plunder into the world of social media, the more I find myself surrounded by a world that makes no sense—where everyone tells you they are not what they seem. Unfortunately, Alice eventually gets back to her home. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, but as I get older, somehow, I’m less curiouser and curiouser—at least about the Wonderland people have built for us now.
Like Alice, I don’t want to go among mad people.
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