Turning Chicken
Early Disney. Prehistoric Disney. Today’s Birdbrain Week installment is a 1925 episode in Uncle Walt’s pre-Mickey series, the Alice Comedies. These silent films combined the antics of a live action little girl with cartoon characters who never seemed to do anything once. The economies of the era forced pioneer animators to recycle their drawings over and over and over — if somebody does one bit of business, rest assured they’ll do the same thing three or four times before the shot is over.
“Alice’s Egg Plant” doesn’t have many big laughs, but its chicken coop set-up is cute, and the plot resolution is rather clever. At simple face value, this one would normally be, at the very least, pretty entertaining. But considering (A.) the story concerns a communist agitator urging the hens at Alice’s egg mill to go on strike, and (B.) Disney’s future labor union dealings, the whole affair becomes positively fascinating. Note that our sympathy is squarely on the side of management, even though Alice’s straw boss buddy, Julius the Cat … uhhh… whips the employees!
Completely useless trivia factoid! Disney went through several little ‘Alices’ in the course of the series, but this is the one and only entry to feature a six year old actress performing under the delightful stage name Dawn O’Day. One more name change and Miss O’Day would grow up to be a fairly famous leading lady, and Oscar nominee, Anne Shirley.
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On July 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Loved the comment you put on the end of this one.
On July 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
Weren’t these cartoons called “Alice in Cartoonland”?
On July 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
Thank you so much for putting on an Alice cartoon. I have read about them, but thought they were either lost forever or locked away in a Disney vault.
On July 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Disney has officially released a bunch of the Alice Comedies on their DVD set “Disney Rarities” in the “Walt Disney Treasures” series, and they also turn up on public domain tapes — I’ve seen this cartoon in one called “Johnny Legend Presents Weird Cartoons”.
On July 22nd, 2006 at 12:00 am
I love these old silent toons too! As to the name of the series, I believe people have called them “Alice in Cartoonland” for years, but I don’t think that was ever the official on-screen title. The pilot film (part of Disney’s ‘Laugh-O- Grams’) was called “Alice’s Wonderland” and the actual series was sold as “Alice Comedies” There’s a good book on the subject called “Walt in Wonderland — the Silent Films of Walt Disney” by Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman
On July 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
The “I. W. W.” on the communist agitator rooster’s suitcase indicates he’s suppsed to be from the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union that was a frequent target during the Red Scare; it was quite common for attacks to associate them with the Soviet Union. (This cartoon isn’t even the weirdest example of this: Edgar Rice Burroughs re-wrote an unsold novel about a Communist invasion of the United States called “Under the Red Flag” into the science fiction novel “The Moon Maid”, changing the invaders to be Communist/IWW-like aliens from the Moon!) In fact, a clip from this exact cartoon is featured in Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer’s 1979 documentary about the IWW “The Wobblies”, which coincidentally was released on DVD last month.
On July 28th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I found a strange artifact at 0:08:32.
Looks like the corner of a ration stamp.
Anyone know what it is?