garote: (viking)
[personal profile] garote
While cleaning out an extra drive, I found an archive of Disney media that I'd grabbed from some defunct torrent site years ago. It included "One Hour In Wonderland", a holiday special made in 1950 by Disney, which is basically an extended commercial for Alice In Wonderland, due to be released the following year in 1951. I browsed through it and found two interesting things.



First, the use of a ventriloquist and his dummy as one of the main characters.

Ventriloquism used to be a much bigger deal, and there was a lot more appreciation for it as a kind of portable ensemble acting. With a dummy, one person could be both halves of a comedy duo. People nowadays would find it weird to see someone doing this in any environment that's not clearly demarcated by a stage, separating performer from audience, and I think a lot of this weirdness comes from the way technology now physically displaces almost all our role-playing. Modern people are very used to role playing by controlling characters on a screen, inside a world that is described entirely in patterns of light, and therefore completely apart from our own. But a ventriloquist's dummy is a character with a physical presence right alongside ours. Instead of seeing it on a screen, you could be sitting right next to it on a couch. That's a very different dynamic.



And second, Kathryn Beaumont - Alice herself - plays a hostess role.

This is one of only two appearances she made as a live actor during this time, and even though the role in the special has a script and cues and so on, I was amazed to find that Kathryn, playing "herself", comes across exactly like Alice in the movie.

This is expected, to a degree, because when they made the movie, the animators put her through an intense live-action filming process where she acted out every scene for them to use as reference material. But seeing Kathryn as a live actor, it's truly weird how much of the timing, the expressions, the posture, and so on made it into the animation. I adored the film as a kid, and it took at least 40 years for me to run across this recording to actually see the person who made the role, and hearing a voice that I'm deeply familiar with coming out of the mouth of a real human who matches it even more obviously than the character I knew, is totally bizarre. Usually when you see a voice actor in person it feels strange, as though their voice doesn't fit their own face, but in this case, it was the opposite. My mind said, "Oh look, it's Alice, walking around in the real world. Obviously the movie was an animated approximation of this."

Anyway, I watched a few minutes of it, and that led me down an internet rabbit hole - a very appropriate metaphor here - to find the other live-action appearance of her from this time, and sure enough someone posted a transfer of The Fred Waring Show, aired on television in 1951, which showcased various songs from the upcoming film.

Some things I found interesting here:

Not only is Kathryn Beaumont here, but Sterling Holloway shows up to play his role as the Cheshire Cat, and it's clear that he and Kathryn are friends. (It's also clear that he's the only professional adult actor on the set who knows how to deliver a genuine performance. Sorry, Fred Waring. You have great singers, but they're not actors.) Sterling has a unique voice, and it's interesting to put that voice to a face, but unlike with Kathryn I still feel instinctively that the voice belongs more to the Cheshire Cat and Winnie The Pooh.

Okay, one exception with the actors: The one playing the Dormouse is so adorable she nearly steals the show!

Unfortunately it looks like poor Kathryn had a sore throat, because her voice is wrecked for the songs she needs to sing. But it's still fun to hear them done "in person". She also sings the song that makes the emotional core of the movie, and to my surprise, it has a different verse swapped into it.

Here's what appears in the movie:

Well I went along my merry way
And I never stopped to reason
I should've known there'd be a price to pay
Some day
Some day

And here's what she sings in the show:

I'm sure that I know right from wrong
And I have the best intentions
Life should be such a merry song
But no
Not so

This was recorded and broadcast in 1951, long after the performances for the movie were set down, so somewhere between the end of the film and this showing, they must have changed the lyrics. I wonder why?

There are additional verses in most of the songs, but this is the only case I found where they replaced something.

So from that rabbit hole I went to Peter Pan, to Bobby Driscoll, to an early Disney film called So Dear To My Heart, which was a hybrid of live action and animation, and which I'd never heard of until today.

The film has aged strangely. The animated sequences are cute, and the general theme is a bland sort of "stick with your ambitions" lesson pitched at kids. But the examples they chose to demonstrate "stick-to-it-iveness" (as they call it), are kind of nuts: Christopher Columbus, and Robert The Bruce.

So you get a cute close-harmony song where Christopher Columbus sings about sailing across the ocean into monsters and storms, and then another song where Robert The Bruce sings about rallying his army to lay siege to his own castle and kick out the invaders, fighting past waves of crossbow bolts and hot oil dumped down from the walls. What the heck?







By the end of it I fully understood why the movie was so obscure I never heard of it. It did give me one amusing image though:



Robert The Bruce taking inspiration from a spider wearing a kilt.

Profile

garote: (Default)
garote

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   12 345
6 789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Page generated Jul. 17th, 2025 05:32 pm