Wonderland Burlesque: Wonderland Burlesque's Down The Rabbit Hole: The Alice Comedies

Sunday, March 16, 2025

Wonderland Burlesque's Down The Rabbit Hole: The Alice Comedies - Part One

Wonderland Burlesque's

Down The Rabbit Hole:

The Alice Comedies

Part One

Down The Rabbit Hole merely places a spotlight on something slightly unusual that's caught my interest. With the help of Wikipedia, YouTube, and other sites, I gather information and learn something new.

Today, we take a first look at Walt Disney's The Alice Comedies!

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The Alice Comedies are a series of live-action animated shorts created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a live-action little girl named Alice (originally played by Virginia Davis) and an animated cat named Julius have adventures in an animated landscape. The shorts were the first work by what ultimately became The Walt Disney Company.

Disney, Ub Iwerks, and their staff at the failing Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri, made the first Alice Comedy, a one-reel 1923 short subject titled Alice's Wonderland. After completing the film, the studio went bankrupt and was forced to shut down. After raising money by working as a freelance photographer, Disney bought a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles, California to live with his uncle Robert and his brother Roy.

In California, Disney continued to send out proposals for the Alice series, in hopes of obtaining a distribution agreement. A deal was finally arranged through Winkler Pictures, run by Margaret Winkler and her fiancé, Charles Mintz. Due to a recent falling out with Pat Sullivan, the studio needed a quick replacement for their centerpiece Felix the Cat animated series. Disney convinced Virginia Davis's family to bring her from Missouri to Los Angeles to star in the series.

Disney both directed and produced all 57 films in this series. Over the course of the series, four actresses played Alice: Virginia Davis (15), Margie Gay (31), Dawn O'Day (1) and Lois Hardwick (10). The film Alice in the Jungle contains only archival footage of Virginia Davis.

The shorts in this series are now all in the public domain in the United States.

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I'd never heard of these before. And, I must say, they strike me as a little strange. Some of the humor certainly suffers in these more empathetic days. But it is interesting to see where it all began...