"Remember what the Dormouse said: Feed your
head…"
Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit
Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit
Needless to say, that classic
rock song from 1967 is not an anti-drug song. But whereas songstress Grace
Slick took Alice in Wonderland, that
classic fantasy by the girl-loving Lewis Carroll aka Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson (27 Jan 1832
– 14 Jan 1898), to extol the experiences to be had with pills, smoke and
mushrooms, some four years later, in 1971, the National Institute of Mental Health
turned to the tale to produce what was ostentatiously an anti-drug short film
for kids. One assumes that they must have been stoned when they greenlighted
the project, for it could well be that there is no other anti-drug film in the
world that makes drugs look as much fun as the resultant short film, Curious
Alice (1971). Thus, it is hardly surprising that not long after the short
came out, "the National Coordinating Council on Drug Education slammed the
movie, calling it confusing and counterproductive" [Open
Culture].
Over at the National Archives' Unwritten Record
blog, film preservationist Audrey
Amidon insightfully explains what goes wrong with the short: "In Curious
Alice (1971), a film intended for eight to ten year olds, our
young Alice falls asleep while reading a book. She encounters cigarettes,
liquor, and medicines, and realizes that they are all types of drugs. When she
sees the 'Drink Me' bottle, she understands that it contains something like a
drug, yet after a half-second's consideration, she drinks the entire bottle and
enters a fantasy world. In Drug Wonderland, Alice learns about the hard
stuff from her new friends the Mad Hatter (LSD), the March Hare (amphetamines),
the Dormouse (barbiturates), and the King of Hearts (heroin). The events of Curious
Alice play out as an expression of Alice's drug trip. Unfortunately, the
trip is kind of fun and effectively cancels out the film's anti-drug message.
"The psychedelic Monty
Python-style animation in Wonderland is one of the best things about Curious
Alice. It's also one of the biggest reasons that the film is an
overall misfire. If one listens closely, Alice is saying plenty about why drugs
are bad, but the imagery is so mesmerizing that it's hard to pay attention to
the film's message. Further, the drug users are cartoon characters with no
connection to real people or real drug problems. Why take the March Hare's drug
problem seriously when you know that Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff and is
always back for the next gag?"*
* At Open Culture,
a comment by a former child who saw the film at school ("CEH
in NJ") indicates that the short may have been more
effective than is credited: "Images and how we view images have changed
significantly over time, as exposure to images has changed. Remember this film
was produced prior to the video games and internet. To a child of the 1970s
(e.g. myself), the disjoint presentation and cartoon overlay techniques were
disorienting and vaguely disturbing, leaving my class silent and uneasy when
reel ended. We were very happy to be excused for recess."
Little is actually known about
the production of the short, as not only do all surviving copies lack credits
but there currently seems to be no known existing documentation of the
production. Over at the often unreliable imdb,
they offer some credits that are at best neither fish nor fowl — where's the
documentation? — but which nevertheless are spread without question. They supposedly
know the real names of both Alice (Elizabeth Jones) and her cat (Sparky), and
even offer the mildly plausible claim that the great educational film propagandist
Sid Davis (1 April 1916 –
16 Oct 2006) — see a wasted life's short film(s)
of the month for Sept 2017, Seduction of the Innocent (1961), and Sept 2013, Boys
Beware (1961) — was Curious Alice's executive producer. Odder is
the writing credit given to DJ Dave Dixon, whom
the imdb also inexplicitly claims as
an uncredited co-writer of Mickey
Mouse in Vietnam (1968), our short film for August 2018.
All things considered, when it
comes to Curious Alice, we think all
production credits are unknown, and currently circulating ones (thanks to the
imdb) are bogus. (Sorry, Sparky.)
But the film is not. Enjoy this truly wild
animation for what it is: a fun trip.
Now, should you need more Alice-inspired craziness, take a gander
of our short film for March 2009, the truly disturbing animated acid trip that
is Malice
in Wonderland (1982), by Vince Collins.
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