Toadette
9 years ago
Well, I'm through watching all the Alice Comedies available through the Netherlands Film Museum!

As a whole, judging from these, the series is more interesting than entertaining; there's also some neat animation on occasion, and most of the time even the rather primitive animation moves fluidly (for 18 fps, I must add). The early shorts are mostly entertaining because of the extensive live-action (especially "Alice and the Dog Catcher"), though the animated segments in them can be quite worthwhile at times.

In the coming days I should have reviews of "Alice Helps the Romance", "Alice's Brown Derby", and "Alice in the Big League", using notes I took throughout the cartoons; these (along with "Alice at the Rodeo", which I have talked about a bit above) are the ones in the Netherlands Film Museum batch that have not been reviewed in the IAD itself. I can state with certainty right now that I like "Alice Helps the Romance" the most out of those three...
Toadette
9 years ago
My review of "Alice Helps the Romance" is up! (It's not linked on the main page; is the comments feed broken?)
http://www.intanibase.com/shorts.aspx?shortID=46&studioID=1 
Mac
  • Mac
  • Advanced Member
9 years ago
Thanks Toadette. I'm looking forward to watching these myself. A few years later, Mickey would go through some similar routines in the comics in the classic 'Egg Robber' story. Like Julius and the tall cat in the strip, Mickey comes up against Mr Slicker, a tall mouse rival for Minnie's affections, and attempts suicide several times. The suicide stuff might have stopped, but similar ideas would pop up yet again with Mickey's later rival Mortimer.

I'm glad you liked 'Alice Helps the Romance'. With so many Alice shorts still lost, I can't help but wonder if there were other stand out shorts.
Toadette
nickramer
9 years ago
So how many of these shorts are still lost?
Toadette
9 years ago
See this  list; the only things wrong with it are that "Alice at the Rodeo" (as proven by what's been happening in this thread) is not missing and a fragment of "Alice's Auto Race" does survive (again, see earlier in this thread).

Unfortunately, a coding error on the page for "Alice in the Big League" is preventing me from submitting my comments on that page, so I'm going to post my review here:

It's safe to say that Walt Disney and his crew were tired of making the Alice Comedies, if this final short is any indication. Julius doesn't even show up in this cartoon; meanwhile, Alice as the umpire seems to show favoritism towards the home team while calling foul to anything the other team achieves, and by the end of the film she is for all practical purposes booed out of the stadium—a metaphor, perhaps, for how the audience felt about the Alice Comedies by this time. Most of the focus, rather, is on the antics of the baseball players; most interestingly, there are several characters throughout the cartoon who bear more than a passing resemblance to Oswald, a sign of what will come in less than a month (given the release dates listed are accurate).

Much like the already-reviewed Alice's Brown Derby, the cartoon begins with various gags related to the setting, irrelevant to the actual plot. At the start, as the baseball stadium's crowd cheers, a bunch of young animals (among them a pantsless, white-tailed Oswald!) run up to and look through a peephole through the stadium, only to be chased off by a cat cop; this happens two more times. Note that the cheering crowd freezes whenever the focus is supposed to be on the kids; it looks cheap, as the crowd is literally frozen in cheering positions, and it speaks volumes about how much the studio cared about these films at this point.

Cut to two mice at a mouse-size peephole; one mouse gets to look while another impatiently waits, finally moving the hole over to his side. (The two mice look like Oswald, but with stick legs and arms and mice tails!)

Back to the youngsters, they again try to peek through the peephole, the cop again chasing them. Then one cub tries to get under the stadium fence, only to get stuck; the cop comes by and (using his nightstick!) spanks the kid on the rear while a kitten climbs onto the cop's rear to look through the peephole. When the spanked cub manages to squeeze through to the other side of the fence, the cop turns his attention to the kitten, who squeezes himself through the hole before the cop is able to do anything, while another cub tries to get under the fence, resulting in more spanking!

Back to the Oswald-lookalike mice, it's the first mouse that's impatient now, pulling the hole back to his side; in turn, the second mouse pulls the hole back to his side, and the two mice argue. In the next shot (in which the mice, for some reason, no longer have their Oswald-style pants!), a flamingo seizes the opportunity to steal the hole for himself, putting the mice out of the way and sticking his head and upper neck through the hole.

The two mice solve the dilemma in a way that satisfies all the mice: one mouse, standing on the flamingo, moves the flamingo's butt feathers out of the way, while the other slingshots the butt, the reaction bouncing the first mouse over the fence; this is repeated for the rest of the mice, with one mouse helping the others onto the flamingo.

Now the cartoon focuses on what goes on inside the stadium, and stays there for the rest of the cartoon. In the establishing shot of the ball game, there's a neat visual effect as batted balls (depicted as black circles) go towards the screen; cue a close-up of the pitcher, who is a rodent with Oswald's head. He and the batter (a weiner dog on his hind legs) ready themselves; signalling OK with his ears (they literally form an O, then a K), the pitcher pitches (initially coiling then de-coiling, then throwing the ball).

The batter does not even swing (the catcher behind him is thrown back by the force of the ball, only to be sprung back into position by a wooden platform with springs); it is here that Alice enters the cartoon, here as the umpire calling ball.

The Oswald-headed pitcher angrily objects to the call. As the catcher throws the ball back, the pitcher jumps up to catch it, only to be left in mid-air; he simply steps back down to his platform.

The pitcher throws the ball again; this time, the batter makes a hit (accompanied by a crudely-animated cheering crowd; it's practically just every other animal in the crowd raising their arms and putting them down while opening and closing their mouths, followed by all the other animals doing the same, repeated several times in a cycle)! He proceeds to run past first base, now down on all fours with his long body.

The ball lands on the running catcher (a dog), sending him underground; the catcher burrows (to reuse of the crude cheering crowd animation, except mirrored and on a different background so as to give the idea that they're the crowd on the other side of the stadium!) directly to the batter (who's now running on his hind legs) just before he reaches home plate! And evidently the original crudely-animated crowd has no confidence in their own team...they're the ones shown crudely cheering, not the mirrored version!

Alice calls foul, resulting in beratement from the other team (especially the Oswald-headed pitcher); a heated argument ensues between her and them (with the pitcher even stepping off of his platform towards Alice to rant at her!). The next batter (a hippo) then enters the field...

The pitcher proceeds to throw a ball (having spat on it to the point that saliva drips from it) that curves in the air and bounces around on the ground, and even flies into the distance for a time; the batter cannot hit it no matter how hard he tries (at one point, it even freezes, only to move again once the batter tries to hit it)! Finally, the batter manages to grab it and keep it still in the air; stroking it, he sneaks away (throwing away his bat)...and bats it high up into the sky using what seems to be a broken telephone pole!

The other team is by this time bent on winning; the Oswald-head pitcher drives a long, thin truck with a long ladder, alerting the running catcher (by ringing a built-in bell) to climb on; a bearded cat (or some other animal) cranks the ladder up, allowing the catcher to climb up and get the ball high in the air; the sheer force causes the ladder to bend back and recoil, sending the catcher flying!

Meanwhile, the batter is still running (much to the reused crudely animated crowd's delight; I swear, even the crowd at the beginning that kept freezing looked better animated and closer to reality); as he approaches the home plate, now so determined that he gets on a sled, the catcher (who has been flying with his ears) dives in with the ball, destroying the batter's chance at a home run!

Alice again objects; this time, she earns the ire of the whole crowd, who throw a buttload of bottles and apples and various other objects at her! As she runs away into the distance, diving over the fence, she very conspicuously turns animated...thus ends the final Alice Comedy.

Frankly, it's telling that Disney chose to end the Alice Comedies like this. The opening gags take up a quite a bit of time; a deliberate choice, perhaps, since they're the best gags in the whole cartoon. Julius never appears even once, and instead we have various one-shot animals; most of the gags that take up the actual plot (save the hippo using a broken telephone pole as a bat) aren't anything too special, even if some of them are rather neat and quirky. The freezing cheering crowd is just sloppy, especially given how good it looks when it actually moves; the constantly-repeated cheering crowd as seen from inside the stadium gets really annoying to look at over and over again. On the bright side, the cartoon gives a preview of the improvement to come, what with several characters that resemble Oswald in their heads, at least. And there is the spectacle of the last Alice Comedy ending with Alice running away from a rioting crowd sick of her antics (and really, in this cartoon she doesn't do much other than be a faulty umpire). Overall, not a great end to a rather hit-and-miss series, though it does have its few moments.

Toadette
9 years ago
UPDATE: It turns out that the review was just too long for publication, so on eutychus's advice, I've shortened it slightly...it's now up on the IAD page for "Alice and the Big League":
http://www.intanibase.com/shorts.aspx?shortID=67&studioID=1 
Mac
  • Mac
  • Advanced Member
9 years ago
Thanks for the reviews, Toadette. I'd want to see more of the late Alice cartoons to say that Walt and the team didn't care about them any more though. I think 'Alice the Whaler' is a nice late entry in the series and all the all the other really late entries in the series are still lost. It does seem though that the animators may have used this final entry to experiment for Oswald.

Just to put the info in one place, I think 17 Alice Comedies are still missing (though I really hope there are researchers may know more than me).

Alice Charms the Fish
Alice's Monkey Business
Alice Cuts the Ice
Alice the Lumberjack
Alice the Golf Bug
Alice Foils the Pirates
Alice at the Carnival
Alice the Collegiate
Alice in the Alps
Alice's Auto Race (fragment survives)
Alice's Knaughty Knight
Alice's Three Bad Eggs
Alice's Picnic
Alice's Channel Swim
Alice in the Klondike
Alice's Medicine Show
Alice the Beach Nut

In addition to this I'm not sure if a complete version of 'Alice Hunting in Africa' survives. This very early entry in the series originally had a live action prologue and was produced entirely by Walt and Roy Disney. I believe that before it was accepted for release it was edited and some scenes were reanimated.

As far as I'm aware, the pilot for the series "Alice's Wonderland" is not known to survive complete with it's original ending. Note that the version on the Disney Rarities DVD has a reconstructed ending – reusing scenes from earlier in the film so that we see Alice awaken from her dream.

I believe that a non-edited version of "Alice Solves the Puzzle" does exist, but I don't know for sure (certainly the edited reissue is more common).

Alice's Spanish Guitar survives, as we've talked about here, but it seems a hard one of view!
cwguy
6 years ago
Has anyone had any success getting access to copies of Alice Comedies from Lobster Films (from the US)? Unless I'm mistaken, it looks like they may have the only potentially accessible copy of Alice Plays Cupid...


https://www.lobsterfilms.com/en/catalogue/simple?search%5B0%5D=Alice&search%5B1%5D=Cupid#resultats 

Lobster Films 
JP Gordon
3 years ago
I'm not spamming... I am just trying to be helpful...
Has anybody considered the archive.org database... I've been able to find a lot of things there...

The most relevant to this topic are:

Walt Disney - 1926 - Alice on the Farm


Alice's Wonderland
by Laugh-O-Gram Films
https://archive.org/details/AlicesWonderland 

and:

https://archive.org/details/AliceInWonderland1915_503/AliceInWonderland-WithAudio.mkv 

Many More:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22alice+in+wonderland%22&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22movies%22&page=2 

Alice Comedies:
Alice in Cartoonland (1923-1927)
by Walt Disney
https://archive.org/details/alices-wonderland-1923 

which has about 27 of these clips...

and:

Bill Sprague's excellent collection:

Alice’s Auto Race,Only Surviving Footage - 1927
https://archive.org/details/img-1909 

https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollection-AlicesDayAtSea-1924-waltDisney-PUBLICDOMAIN 
[ titles in Dutch - or Swedish ]

Alice Gets Stage Struck
https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollection-AliceIsStageStruck1925-waltDisney-PUBLICDOMAIN 

https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollection-ALICECANSTHECANNIBALS-1925WaltDisneyPublicDomain 

https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollection-AliceLosesOut-1925-waltDisney-PUBLICDOMAIN 

https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollection-AliceRattledByRats-1925WaltDisney-PublicDomain 
[ actual sound and dialogue in this one ]

https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollection-AliceGetsInDutch-1924EarlyWaltDisney 
[ sound in this one... AND. definitely some Hal Roach actors ]

https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollection-ALICEANDTHETHREEBEARS-1924-WaltDisney 

https://archive.org/details/billspraguefilm 

https://archive.org/details/BillSpragueCollectionTheGOLEM1920 

Happy Hunting!
Van

S. C. MacPeter
a year ago
A very, very old thread. Apologies for such an update, but ALICE SOLVES THE PUZZLE is available online from a stock footage house, from an original nitrate print . The drinking action is indeed in it. I should note this stock footage owner charges insane rates for their prints by the second, no exceptions, so nobody is gonna see this being remastered, least from this print, for a long while (the nitrates are now at LOC and become free use, I think, in 20 years)
S. C. MacPeter
a year ago
ALICE THE GOLF BUG  

ALICE'S THREE BAD EGGS  

I believe only as long as the images suggest

Mac
  • Mac
  • Advanced Member
a year ago
I saw a couple of those images from Alice the Golf Bug and Alice's Three Bad Eggs pop up on pinterest pages and it's fascinating to see them here. But for me it only raises more questions. It's not clear if the whole reels survive or just a few frames and I wonder where the prints (or frames) are held. There doesn't seem to be a way to contact the blog's creator (as far as I can see).

The posts are from 2014 and 2015 which is a while ago and it would appear the blog is still going. ...Does anyone here know any more about these two films and if they've been found?

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