Cast _* Interesting Facts _* Production Details _* The real Alice

Directed by: Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson
Written by: Lewis Carroll
Music by: Bill Hilliard, Sammy Fain, Mack David, Al Hoffman & Jerry Livingston

Released on: July 28, 1951
Running Time: 74 minutes

Budget: $3 million
 

CAST

Alice... Kathryn Beaumont
Mad Hatter... Ed Wynn
Cheshire Cat... Sterling Holloway (listen Sterling talking about his role by clicking here!)
Queen of Hearts... Verna Felton
Walrus, Carpenter, Dee, Dum... Pat O'Malley
White Rabbit & Dodo... Bill Thompson
Caterpillar... Richard Haydn
King of Hearts... Dink Trout
 
 

INTERESTING FACTS

  At the beginning of the movie, Lewis Carroll's name is spelled incorrectly on the animated title page.

  The movie was Oscar-nominated for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

  Kathryn Beaumont, who was the voice of Alice, narrates the "Alice in Wonderland" ride at Disneyland.  She was also the voice of Wendy in Peter Pan.  Now Katherine Levine, she is a second-grade teacher in Toluca Lake, California.

  The talented Sterling Holloway (1905-1992, the Cheshire cat in Alice) is best known as the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh.  He also gave their souls to some of the most funniest Disney characters, including Mr. Stork in Dumbo (1941), Flower in Bambi (1942), Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book (1967) and Roquefort in The Aristocats (1770).  He was also the narrator of Peter and the Wolf (1946), and Lambert the Sheepish Lion (1952).

  Storyman Bill Peet recalled in the late '90s that he "worked on just about every part of that. The strange thing is that the person who worked on it last received credit for a lot of my things. I developed the Caterpillar stuff, the Mad Tea Party, the 'half a cup' gags and things like that. We wondered if it could have been a little better in many little ways. We all disagreed with the way it ended; with a montage. I didn't like it. I had developed a labyrinth, and I was fascinated with the idea of the guards chasing Alice through this thing. It could have been a hell of a thing with the music, like trying to escape from a bad dream. but they decided to have everyone jump into the tea pot in a montage. Montages don't do anything, and you don't want to end with a conglomeration. You want suspense, where she's beating on the door with just a minute left and just barely gets out of there."

  The Mello-Men from Pirates of the Caribbean were the voices of the three cards who were "painting the roses red" in Alice In Wonderland. Thurl Ravenscroft, the voice of Tony the Tiger, is easily recognized as the Ace of Clubs who says "in fact they'll soon be dead".  The Mello-Men also appeared in Lady and the Tramp.

  A toony version of the truly screwy Lewis Carroll poem "Jabberwocky" was originally supposed to have been featured in the film. The sequence featuring Alice's encounter with the creature which had flames in its eyes and a smoke-stack nose, was storyboarded but never actually went into production. Legendary writer/comedian Stan Freberg has however repeatedly stated in interviews that he's given over the years that he actually recorded a version of "Jabberwocky" for Disney--the only thing we know for sure is that this part of the picture eventually ended up getting cut out!
 
 

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Walt Disney had wrestled with the subject since 1933, when he contemplated a version with Mary Pickford as a live-action Alice -color screen tests were even made!

Years later, he planned to put Ginger Rogers in a cartoon Wonderland. Aldous Huxley at one time worked on a script. Walt abandoned again and again until finally he scheduled it to follow Cinderella.

He dropped the idea of a live-action Alice: "No matter how closely we approximate her with a living Alice, I feel the result would be a disappointment."

Back in 1939,  Alice in Wonderland was being actively considered as the film that Walt Disney Studios would put into production as soon as work was completed on Pinocchio. David Hall did hundreds of inspirational paintings for Disney's first attempt to turn Lewis Carroll's acclaimed novel into an animated feature. But then World War II intervened, and production of Disney's Alice got pushed back 'til the early 1950s. By then, this feature had a very different style and tone than the European storybook look that Hall had originally proposed for the production.

The animated feature got terrible reviews when it premiered in England, and Disney considered this project as one of the most difficult ones he ever worked on.  Disappointed with the film, he blamed its failure on the heroine's "lack of heart."
 
 
 

THE REAL ALICE
 

Alice Liddell was the original Alice of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  Alice Liddell was born May 4, 1852, the daughter of Dean Henry Liddell of Christ Church Oxford in England.

Also at Christ Church was a mathematics instructor, Charles Dodgson. Dodgson wrote logic and mathematics books and was fond of photography.

It was in his role as photographer that Dodgson met Alice and her sisters, Edith and Lorina. Dodgson would visit the Liddells and photograph the children.

When he visited, he would tell the children stories that he made up. He was especially fond of young Alice. In July 1862, when Alice was 10, Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the girls on a boating trip on the Thames River and passed the time telling a story about Alice's adventures underground -a delightful tale involving Alice and a White Rabbit.

One summer's day in July 1862, Lewis Carroll (Oxford Mathematics Lecturer, the Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) took three little girls, Alice and her two sisters, on a boating trip. To keep them amused he told a delightful tale involving Alice and a White Rabbit. That Christma, later published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), illustrated by Lewis Carroll.

Little Alice loved the story so much that she asked him to write it down for her to keep.  That Christmas it was presented to Alice as A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day.  It would be published in 1865, with illustrations by Lewis Carroll (Dodgson's nom de plume) under the title Alice's Adventures In Wonderland with illustrations by the author himself.

Alice was not the only real person to appear in Carroll's tales. The Duck was his friend Robinson Duckworth, who came along on many of the afternoon outings. Sisters Lorina and Edith Liddell were immortalized as the Lory and the Eaglet, and the Dodo was drawn from Dodgson himself (Dodo sometimes spoke with a st-st-stammer as in Do-do-Dodgson!).

As for Alice Liddell, she married Reginald Hargreaves in 1880. Alice was a distant relative of Queen Elisabeth II -her great-grandfather was brother of the ninth Earl of Strathmore, from whom Elisabeth II is directly descended.  She died in 1934.

In June 2001, books, pictures and personal items once owned by the Alice Liddell fetched more than $2.81 million.