One Hour in Wonderland

One Hour in Wonderland

Originally Broadcast: Monday, December 25, 1950 at 5 PM ET on ABC

Plot: Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd and the viewers at home are invited to a Christmas party at Walt Disney’s house to meet Alice and her friends from Wonderland.

Analysis: First off, before I get rolling, it is said you should always credit your sources, so I have to tip my hat to Bill Cotter’s book The Wonderful World of Disney Television, the source of just about every scrap of information I have on anything produced by Disney for television. I have to say that more television shows could have a book like this, since it covers everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) Disney did for television between 1950 and the book’s publication in 1997. Secondly, in the interests of full disclosure, once upon a time, in a former life, I worked for the Walt Disney Company for three years. So, if I tend to gush a bit about Disney, well… can you blame me? It is, after all, Disney.

But, we also have to call a spade a spade: this has little to do with Christmas and more for promotion of Disney’s upcoming products, especially Alice in Wonderland. But, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, right? Anyway, what we have here is the framing story of the Christmas party hosted by Walt with segments from various Disney movies and shorts shown throughout. Of special note is a segment from Song of the South, one of the rare times Disney has let anything from Song of the South see the light of day on DVD at all.

Guest Edgar Bergen is another piece of radio slowly migrating to television. He got his start on the vaudeville stage as a ventriloquist working with a homemade dummy named Charlie McCarthy. Much like with Charleton Heston with Wuthering Heights, he had a right time, right place moment when spotted at a party and recommended for the Rainbow Room in New York City. Producers caught him performing there, recommended him for a guest shot on radio which in turn lead to his own show, running from 1937 all the way until 1956. Bergen and Disney had worked together before in the movie Fun and Fancy Free in 1947 and since his radio show was still popular and Bergen well liked, it was only natural that he should serve as the guest star of the special, along with Charlie and Mortimer Snerd.

This thing is just loaded with cameos, both personal and objective. Kathryn Beaumont, who voiced Alice for Alice in Wonderland, would work for Disney multiple times over the years, most notably voicing Wendy for Peter Pan. Same with Bobby Driscoll, who worked for Disney before in So Dear to My Heart and Treasure Island. He would go on to voice Peter Pan in the movie of the same name. He’ll show up a few more times on various television shows as we go along, so I’ll talk more about him later. Also of note is a very quick cameo given by Diane and Sharon Disney, Walt’s daughters, in a very funny moment in the special. But, possibly the strangest cameo of them all is the train we see Walt sitting on at the opening of the special: that’s a train Walt would call the Lilly Belle, his own personal train he would run outside his home in Los Angeles and would serve as the inspiration for the Disney railroads that circle Disney theme parks all over the world, most notably at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. In fact, one of the trains at Disneyland, the C.K. Holiday, is a virtual match for the Lilly Belle. Anyone curious in seeing the original Lilly Belle, last I heard, it was in a glass case in the Main Street Station in Anaheim, California.

And I suppose that brings us to the man himself, Walt Disney. In the broadest of broad overviews, he got his start working with Ub Iwerks in Kansas City, Missouri turning out shorts called Laugh-o-Grams before experimenting with a mix of a live action actor interacting with animation that would eventually become the Alice comedy shorts. Walt actually went broke producing the first Alice short, but after moving to Los Angeles, he was able to screen it to interested parties and scored a contract to produce more. This led in turn to working on another creation: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character Walt would eventually lose control over in fights over pay. Walt swore up and down that it would never happen again and went from broke, almost literally, on another animated character, this time a mouse named Mickey. Long story short, Mickey was a monster success that led to other characters, other formats of cartoons and eventually animated features starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938.

To bring us back to television and the special, this was Walt taking a chance on another form of media trying to promote interest in upcoming projects, plus he was able to make some money off of sponsor Coca-Cola at the time, while Coke and ABC got Walt on television for Christmas which equals publicity. Nice to see how these things work out, isn’t it?

Bottom Line: Well, yes, it IS a promotion piece, but it is also the start of Disney’s involvement in television, which would lead to bigger things in the not-too-distant future. It is, as best I can tell, intact complete with original Coca-Cola commercials, but I’ve only seen it on the original release of Alice in Wonderland on DVD. In any case, the special is included as an extra on the Alice in Wonderland: Masterpiece Edition (http://www.amazon.com/Alice-Wonderland-Masterpiece-Kathryn-Beaumont/dp/B0000TG9E2/ref=sr_1_12?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1285884274&sr=1-12) and the Alice in Wonderland: Un-Anniversary Edition (http://www.amazon.com/Alice-Wonderland-2-Disc-Special-Un-Anniversary/dp/B00335EQ0E/ref=sr_1_4?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1285884274&sr=1-4). Alice is scheduled for a Blu-Ray release in 2011, so I will include a special note if One Hour in Wonderland is included in that release. Also of note: the animated sequences of the special are in color while the rest of the show is in black and white. Since color television was a rarity at the time, I would suggest turning the color down on your television before starting the special to get an idea how it may have looked when originally broadcast in 1950.

Next time, a look back at the year 1950 in television.