Alice's Wild West Show

After watching the first three episodes of the Alice Comedies, I have to admit I am getting a bit tired of the formulaic pattern of each episode. Not that formulaic franchises are bad. Disney's current television series "Phineas and Ferb" is an animated series that follows the exact same formula nearly every episode, and it's brilliant amounts of entertainment. Alice falls short though. She does something. Blacks out. Dreams. Comes back. And they tend to lack a lot of adventure to be honest. I've tried being objective and imagining if I were a child in the 1920's visiting a theater, how worthwhile would I find these cartoons? And to be honest, I dunno that I'd really like them that much. UNTIL NOW! Alice's fourth adventure "Alice's Wild West Show" breaks the mold, is wildly amusing, and develops a character who is dear to my heart: Porkins.

The year is 1924 and Alice and her band of friends are putting on a "Big Wild West Show" for a bunch of the other local kids. We're not exactly sure how her stint in jail actually ended, but rest assured that closure to the LARGER issue (that Porkins framed her) does take place here. In fact, were I to title this cartoon I would call it "Alice Strikes Back!" or "Alice's Revenge!" Anyway, the show: It's pretty grandiose. Although, her friend Asperger (The Asp!) must have painted all their signs during one of his... ahem... flapping episodes... because everything is spelled all wrong and with shaky backwards writing. Alice is charging admission and one scene shows her accepting some dentures as payment. I guess kids aren't exactly rolling in cold hard cash, so this barter system makes sense. We're treated to a few fun scenes of kids selling pretty questionable concessions, as well as a few antics from all the delinquents in the crowd. Some jerk kid keeps knocking the hat off of the doofy-looking kid in the front row. It's kinda funny I suppose.

Then the show begins! First there's an overture as Alice and her friends perform a musical number on a bunch of homemade instruments. It's pretty wild and crazy (I assume. Silent cartoons make it hard to hear exactly what's going on) and one kid wearing a native american headdress is going nuts on some drums made of pots and pans. And then the first act begins as "The Asp" makes a super shifty and creepy face towards the audience.

The stage opens up to a makeshift cowboy saloon. Asp is serving up mugs of "neer beer" to two other kids dressed as cowboys. And then Alice bursts in, playing the role of sheriff, and shoots them. The crowd enjoys this immensely and THIS is where things heat up.

As the show proceeds, Porkins and his gang show up. And in an epic plot twist (to me personally) we learn that his name is NOT Porkins!!! I must say, as disappointed as I am that Disney went ahead and named this character, his official name is far more awesome than the one I gave him. His true identity, as revealed by Alice herself, is Tubby O'Brien. Tubby and his gang come rolling on in uninvited and begin causing a commotion. Tubby himself slides across the entire front row knocking its occupants onto the ground.

Tubby is clearly a local bully. We could even go so far as to assume he's the kingpin of local gang activity. Anyways, Alice is beefed that he's showed up, but nowhere near as much as the rest of her friends seem to be. Upon seeing the brute in the audience, the other players in the Wild West Show quit and take off running. Man, The Asp needs to grow some backbone. All he does in these things is run away from danger. Anyway, Alice is left to man the show all on her own which is pretty intimidating. Nervously she heads out on stage to announce that the next act will just be herself and she is immediately antagonized and heckled by Tubby himself. Though it's a silent cartoon, I imagine him sounding similar to Jabba The Hutt in Return of the Jedi when he laughs

"Silly Jedi! Silly Jedi!" Starting to panic, Alice decides to tell a story to entertain everyone.

This is when we're taken into the cartoon world! It's sort of tragic that this toon breaks the formula of Alice actually slipping into a coma to visit her cartoon fantasy world, but the sheer insanity that follows from here on out makes up for it in a big way. Our story begins in what is described as "the wild n' woolly west." (don't get too excited. There are no woolly mammoths in this picture, to my chagrin). BUT we open on an intense high octane chase sequence.

A band of Native Americans are chasing a wagon while vaulting an endless assault of arrows at it. On board the wagon is a mustached coach-master and Alice herself laying low in the roof. The driver doesn't last long though, after losing much of his outfit he takes an arrow to the rib cage and falls off to his demise. Meanwhile Alice is on the roof of the wagon as arrows whiz past her face. She begins grabbing some of the crates and other cargo on board and throwing it down at the attackers. While she manages to take out a minimal amount of her assailants, she ends up falling off of the wagon and having to take on the attackers herself with her bare fists. And it works. She beats up a horse AND an Indian Brave.

We're taken back to the reality of the Wild West Show and see that her story isn't going over very well. Now not only is Tubby accosting her, but the entire audience seems riled up and angry at her. Thinking quickly, she reboots the story to a new setting and we are thrust back into the cartoon world.

The new story begins in an old west saloon. A hive of villainy, most of the occupants seem to be outlaws or vagrants. In fact, a band is playing inside and a man who is CLEARLY a hobo is their accordion player. On the other side of the room Wild Bill "Hiccup" is eyeing a safe suspiciously. The safe is made by "The Unsafe Safe Co." So it doesn't take a genius to tell that he sees this as an easy target for robbery. And really, he should. I don't understand why in a saloon filled with untrustworthies you would ever think you should leave all your riches in an unguarded safe in the middle of the room.

Well, it seems that Hiccup is biding his time because also present in the saloon is Sheriff Alice. She's a tough customer herself, as she recently managed to beat up a horse and a Native American Warrior. Her toughness is further proven by the fact that she busts out a cigar and begins wildly puffing away at it. Again, I am sad that things like this never happened in the cartoons of MY childhood. You'd never see a six year old girl smoke a stogie on tv these days... it's quite a sight.

Also present in the saloon is that stupid Dog that's been in all these cartoons. He has a flea on his pelt which he plucks off and then shoots with a revolver. If we needed anymore proof that this version of the West is in fact wild AND woolly, we'd be fools. These are clearly not people to mess with.

In the meantime, the hobo band is serenading the patrons with the song Sweet Adeline (a song I am unfamiliar with, and since the cartoon is silent I was listening to Reckless by Crystal Castles during the scene anyway- a side note, this is traditionally what I listen to at least ONCE when watching silent films) and apparently not singing it very well. The patrons begin throwing bottles and shouting for the band to be thrown out. Sheriff Alice and the Dog also hate the music, so they don't do anything to stop the bar fight and allow the Hobos to take a beating. Alice also decides she no longer wants her stinky cigar and chucks it into the nearest spittoon. When the cigar plops in is causes a big wave of old saliva and tobacco to splash out all over the Dog. While a someone with a weaker constitution would vomit and then die from something so disgusting, this wild west gritty woolly Dog merely wipes it off. All I have to say is, Tough. Freaking. Costumer.

In the commotion Hiccup makes his move and begins trying to chisel the safe open. As any brain dead infant chimpanzee could probably tell you, that is a horrible way to break into a safe. Thinking quickly, Hiccup decides to take a far more reasonable rout and pulls out a bomb to blow the safe up. BUT Alice has spotted him by now and without even a warning she produces a few revolvers and a gun fight breaks out. Bullets fill the air of the saloon and one actually hits the lamp and knocks the light out. By the time Alice has re lit the candles, Hiccup is gone. It is also revealed that in the chaos Alice and Hiccup literally killed all of the patrons in the crossfire. Blood is splattered all over the walls and Alice merely snaps her fingers in disappointment and says "Darn!" In a major upset, the Dog survived the gunfight too by raking cover inside of the spittoon. The duo quickly begin to follow Hiccup's trail to recover the safe (even though the OWNER of the safe is presumably dead at this point).

Hiccup is riding away with the safe on the back of a mule while Alice closes the gap between them in an old timey automobile. The chase goes on for a long time while Alice shoots at him and misses every single time. In the end, Hiccup tries riding up a steep ninety degree incline to escape. While he almost succeeds, right at the top his mule slips out from under him falling to it's death at the bottom of the ravine. Hiccup himself is slipping too, holding onto the safe for dear life (which is stable on level ground at this point). However, he's not strong enough and ends up falling down to his own death as well. Alice and the Dog recover the safe and drive away with it, happy with their victory, and also probably happy that they can now keep the safe for themselves since it's owner was killed by her careless crime fighting.

Alice's story ends and we're again at the Wild West Show. While I was thoroughly entertained watching the over the top grit-fest unfold, apparently the others in the audience were NOT. They are all booing her and Tubby begins leading them to pelt her with old rotten vegetables and fruits and so forth. She takes a heavy beating and the boys in the audience end up running away. For a moment I thought once again Tubby had bested our heroine, but THIS Alice-Adventure has one final twist in its plot.

As it turns out, Sheriff Alice's gritty thuggish attitude WAS actually based in reality. Alice takes off after Tubby, brandishing what appears to be a hockey stick. His legs are too stubby and his body is too tubby to get away (this leads me to wonder if his parents naming him Tubby actually might have caused him to become so fat later in life...). Alice pounces on him, throws her weapon to the side, and begins literally beating him to a bloody pulp. And we get to SEE all of the blows being dealt. Now, I really prefer my protagonists to be generally good and likable people. Revenge isn't something I can always get behind and support... but there's just something endearing about this. Our hero has nothing left to lose, she's been pushed to the limits, she was framed by this oaf earlier, and now she's out for blood. It's awesome. It's absurdism at its finest. It's epic.

In the end Tubby gets up and is bleeding and bruised (and seems to have even lost some teeth?), his face ripped to shreds, and he his positively balling in agony. But Alice doesn't even let up then. She strikes forward, threatening further abuse if he doesn't get moving NOW. Finally he turns and runs away, and Alice looks pretty pleased with herself. And that's how it ends.

Again... I don't know... I like this cartoon. I don't approve of teaching children to beat up other children and take up vigilantism or anything. But this one is just wildly (and woolly-ly?) entertaining. It's different from the past adventures, and for once the live action element is actually on par with the cartoon one. And it's just off the wall crazy which is what I love the most about the Alice Comedies. In contemporary days Disney goes through great strains to make sure they provide wholesome entertainment. I remember when Princess and the Frog came out I read a few articles about everything they did to make sure it wouldn't offend the African American community and all the committees they hired and money they spent. I remember when Curse of the Black Pearl came out hearing all the flack from parents who were upset to see the company producing PG-13 action films. I remember all the upset over Lilo and Stitch's darker view on life (and I actually agree with that one but we'll talk about that when/if I get there). There's something pretty amusing and fun about these days of Disney BEFORE censors objected to anything and everything.

Alice's Spooky Adventure

After having just finished watching "Alice's Spooky Adventure" I really am not sure what to say about it. I don't know if I'm extremely disappointed or if this actually soared above and beyond my expectations for weird-dark-Alice-mayhem...

Unlike Alice's last adventure, this one has no lengthy setup, Dog's driving cars, or creepy sailors. Instead, it dives straight into the action. We open on Alice and her band of hobo-looking childhood playmates in a game of what I assume is baseball. An extremely portly child hits the ball really hard, and the opening shot is of a kid in the outfield going after the ball and missing. This child is actually riding a bike in the outfield and when he(she?) misses the catch he(she!?) crashes into a bunch of old crates and barrels. The ball crashes through a window in a nearby abandoned house and the children begin to argue over who will go and get the ball back.

There are two sequences in this whole cartoon that really were entertaining to me and this was one of them. Alice DEMANDS that the fat kid who hit the ball originally (I will hereby affectionately refer to this character as "Porkins") go retrieve the ball. But Porkins refuses because "that house is full o' SPOOKS!" He then begins mimicking what I guess he interprets a spook to be by flapping his arms and making goofy looking goggles with his hands and making all sorts of faces. This was enough to at least get a smirk on my face and the odd scene continues as Porkins then tries to get another boy in the group to go get the ball. The kid he chooses is an african american boy who just goes "SPOOKS!!!" and flaps his arms a bunch in fear (which leads me to believe he has Asperger's Syndrome) and runs away. I think I'll refer to him from now on as Asperger. Anyways, I find this scene pretty amusing. Firstly I assume Porkins is probably a bit of a racist (and hey, it's the roaring twenties. It's not a long shot to say that he is). He's also a bit of a git in general since he won't go get the ball HE knocked through a window. It's also a bit amusing because "spook" is a word with (as far as I know) three meanings. Least common of all, it can refer to a spy. But the two most common usages for the word are when you are referring to a ghost or spectral being of sorts, and the second when you are using it as a racial slur for black people. I'm not actually sure if they were TRYING to be a tad racist on purpose but I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say... yeah, probably. Again, it IS the 1920's. But it's almost so subtle I'm not sure... oh well. REGARDLESS, it was mildly amusing. And I love my new nicknames for these guys! I hope they show up more often.

So anyways, Porkins tries to get some other doofy kid to go for him after Asperger runs away but the other kid (I'm running out of nicknames!) refuses and a minor brawl breaks out. Porkins has a killer hook! His fist hits the other kid hard! It's cool. Anyways, Alice ends up yelling at them both and calling them fraidy cats and decides to go herself.

Once inside she searches for the ball, gets scared by a cat, and then ends up blundering around in the dark bumping into a million things all at once and slipping all over the place. In all the clutter and scrambling essentially a good portion of the house ends up falling apart and crashing down onto her heard, knocking her out cold. Alice can really take a pummeling! Anyways, she slips out of reality and hallucinates that she is once again in the cartoon land. This time she is in a town called "Spooksville." And we are NOT left to wonder why it's called that for long. This place is crazy. There are things flying all over the place, a car has wings, there are ghosts popping up all over the place. It's nuts.

Alice runs away and eventually finds one of the spooks crying out for help. Now, these spooks aren't too scary. They're your standard "sheet ghost" that looks like a white floating bed sheet with holes for eyes you know? Well this one is crying out for help and then moans (or shrieks? It's hard to tell in a silent cartoon... I imagine the ghost has a raspy voice though) the phrase "take it off." Personally, if a ghost whispered/screamed/moaned/or even politely said that to me, I would be afraid that he was some sort of pervert ghost (one of the top three most dangerous sorts, or so I am told). But Alice figures it out and grabs it by it's sheet-like-skin and tears it off! Unfortunately Disney did not take advantage of this to show us a creepy skinless hell-spook with a skeleton face and exposed extoplasmic organs. Instead, under the ghostly exterior shell is... that cat from all the previous cartoons! I hate that cat!

Cat is relieved and begins worshiping (this is literal) Alice and tells her in an annoyingly over dramatic fashion "Fair one, you have saved me from the life of a spook." I hate that car. Fair one? Alice is a sassy calloused adventurer! A gritty pulp sort of character. I'm also a bit confused as to how ghosts work in this world. When you die do you grow this "ghost sheet skin" that can be removed to resurrect you? If so, is this incarnation of the cat the one from Red Riding Hood who died from doughnut poisoning?

My questions only wax more confusing as the rest of the cartoon unfolds. After realizing she can actually SAVE the spooks, Alice and the Cat decide they should torment them. The ghosts of Spooksville are having a jambory! They're playing music and dancing and playing games, and Alice and Cat go enrage them and provoke them to attack. THEN- again, keep in mind that Alice has the power to rip them back into mortality -Alice and the Cat use blunt objects to hit the ghosts in the head and kill them. So rather than save them from being spooks, she kills them... again... in the words of Oogie Boogie from a far superior spooky adventure "You must be double-dead!" The bodies are actually piled by the cat and counted. They take inventory of their slaughter and presumably rid spooksville of all the spooks- which means it doesn't exist anymore because earlier in the cartoon it was revealed that all the houses and signs in the town were ghosts as well. Then Alice wakes up.

So I personally am a big Halloween person, if you know what I mean. I LIKE spooky or gothic or darker things. I particularly LOVE it in kids entertainment. I hate slashers and bloody horror films, but you give me sheet ghosts and dancing skeletons and witches brew and mummies and so on, and I LOVE it. So I enjoy the works of Tim Burton, Universal's Classic Horror movies like Frankenstein and Dracula, and Halloween cartoons. THIS adventure, which promised to be spooky, falls extra short. The ghosts are lame, the town isn't spooky at all. Even the haunted house that scared poor Asperger into an episode (it's nothing to be embarrassed about though! It's a condition he can't help so apologize for laughing at him!) is really bare, well lit, and lame. So I was a bit disappointed. And I was even MORE disappointed at the lack of fun in this cartoon. Disney would later produce some awesome spooky cartoons (which I will cover in due time) such as the Silly Symphonies Dancing Skeleton Sequence, or Fantasia's Night on Bald Mountain. Heck, even Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is a whole lot of grim fun! Dancing ghouls and whatnot. This has almost none of that. In fact, I would say it has NONE. It falls extra short and the poster for this feature made it looks like a legit ghostly picnic. Which I guess brings me to my final issue... I don't get why Alice committed ghost-genocide when she COULD have saved them and gained a bunch of worshipers. Perhaps if you are a spook long enough you are doomed to be one forever and she saved the stupid cat in time but... I dunno. It's just a lame plot and unimaginative. So aside from Porkins and Asperger, this cartoon left me wildly disappointed up to this point... but it's not over!

Alice wakes up from her coma, retrieves the ball, and heads out of the "Haunted House" to her friends. THIS is the other of the two moments in this cartoon that I found amusing. But only because it's so bizarre. While Alice was knocked out a police officer arrived on scene and begins investigating. Alice emerges from the house and calls to her friends, who look over and see the officer. They run, knowing full well that they're in trouble for breaking the window, leaving Alice to take full blame for Porkins' reckless hit. So she was essentially framed for breaking the window. The officer apprehends her and puts her in jail. The end.

I kid you not! This cartoons plot in short is- Alice's friend knocks a ball into a haunted house. She goes and gets it. She comes out and is framed for breaking the window. She goes to jail. The end. I'm not sure what the heck was wrong with kids in the 1920's. Apparently they liked seeing their protagonists fail. Don't get me wrong, a hollow ending can be a powerful statement about the endless struggle of life but this is not the place for that sort of thing. The final line delivered by Alice (who is behind bars and wearing a striped prisoner's uniform) is "Isn't it the troof (truth?) --- a woman always pays!" Is that the moral of this spooky adventure? I want to re-title this cartoon and call it "Porkins The Womanizing Chauvinist" or "Porkins the Liar" or "Alice Becomes A Convict" or "Asperger tries to flap his wings, but actually has arms." It would be far less misleading. WHY is that cat in all of these cartoons?! So again... I can't really speak as to whether or not I liked this because part of me loved it for the sheer "strange" factor. It's true what I said earlier in another post. These cartoons are trademarked with bedlam and dark chaos that follows this girl. It's your standard kiddie flick you'd get nowadays. I am gaining a greater appreciation for the nihilistic and gritty attitudes that a lot of my elders seem to have adopted.

Alice's Day At Sea

Like I mentioned in my last post, while "Alice's Wonderland" spelled the end for Laugh-O-Gram Studios, Walt ended up taking the film to California and getting investors for an entire series of adventures to come. This series would come to be known as the "Alice Comedies" and would largely follow the same formula set up in their pilot run. Live action elements would be melded with cartoon chaos, and fun would ensue. And I DO use the word "chaos" intentionally. While they are intended for kids and are pretty fun cute little bits of animation, many of them are dark in tone and feature some perilous scenarios that you (perhaps unfortunately) don't see in today's children's entertainment.

I don't intend to go over every single Alice Comedy like I did for the Laugh-O-Grams, but I will hit up a few key episodes, as they do deserve their place in Disney History. While they may be generally considered obscure, they do interestingly enough feature a character that is Disney's longest running character still around today- Pete. But we'll get to that later. FOR NOW we set sail with "Alice's Day At Sea."

The film opens in the "real world" in Alice's yard. Her dog- who looks suspiciously like the Tasmanian Tiger seen in in the final footage ever taken of one in 1933 and NOTHING like the stupid dog that seems to appear in all of these cartoons -is snoozing away when he is rudely awoken by his alarm clock. The dog seems to ignore the alarm at first, so the frustrated clock- who has an animated face to show his distress -jumps off the shelf and onto the Dog's head. This gimmick works to get our Tasmanian Canine out of bed but he vindictively takes the clock and drops it off in the trash can. He then puts on his own harness, calls up to Alice's window to wake her up, and then goes and gets a small car to drive her around town. Apparently he is Alice's driver.

I really don't get why all the dogs in Disney's films so far seem to double as chauffeurs and butlers. But I must say, it's a lot more amusing to see in live action than it is in animation. It's also a lot more amusing when the dog looks like The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is does.

The duo end up going to the beach where Alice meets a salty old sailor (presumably) who is whittling a piece of wood near the pier. Lacking any inhibitions she approaches the man who proceeds to tell her stories of giant cephalopods sinking ships. A little fun fact for all of you, I actually have a phobia of octopi. They are the snakes to my Indiana Jones. They terrify me. It seems that Alice actually has a similar problem as the story, while captivating her, does actually induce some crazy dreams. Similar to her last "adventure" Alice ends up finding a boat and curling up in it, taking a ciesta, and slipping into a crazy dream.

In her dream she is again in the world of Cartoons, this time a passenger of a wayward ship at sea during a wild storm. After a couple eternities of her ship being tossed around, it sinks like a rock to the bottom of the sea. While initially tragic, it turns out this isn't a big deal as Alice swims on out and finds the sea to be a pretty rockin' place. There are fish playing songs, some crazy dancing (on both Alice's and the fish's parts), a zoo belonging to "King Nep" himself, and even a family of catfish! And oh, how clever! Walt has animated them to look just like the cats from all previous cartoons. That cat just won't die... well, except for in his/her debut where he/she ate those doughnuts Red's mom made... and actually, the cat isn't the only returning character. The lion who provided Alice's last adventure with a main antagonistic force makes a cameo appearance here as a "sea lion" in King Nep's Zoo. However, Sea Lion seems a lot less dangerous than Normal Lion because he doesn't eat his way out of the bars and cause mass panic. Oh, there's also a sea cow that gets milked.

Okay so then things heat up. We see a cave off in the distance and two creepy eyes peeking out of the darkness. Gradually, dark inky tentacles slip out of the cave and drag a beast of an octopus out into the light. He looks around rather nefariously and takes off to go murder some fish. One fish is distracted by a bottle of "xxx" alcohol when the octopus sneaks up on it, grabs it, and smacks it against the rocky bottom killing it. Then it slinks up over the fish's corpse, chops it in half, and begins feasting. I am positive that were I a young child, this scene would have left me pretty shaken. I envy the boys who grew up in the roaring twenties and were made tough men by watching tough cartoons!

Anyways, Alice ends up meeting a huge fish that chases her around trying to eat her. She hops in some sort of sea car and tries to escape but still ends up being devoured. The huge fish then takes off after what appears to be a narwhal. As he enjoys feeling full, Alice and the Narwhal have some sort of altercation in which the Narwhal's tusk gets thrust through the huge fish's stomach and pokes up out through the skin. Huge fish dies, and an injured Narwhal on crutches hobbles out of it's mouth (followed by Alice's sea car also on crutches). THANKFULLY, Alice emerges uninjured. But UNTHANKFULLY, the giant fish carcass behind her stirs. It seems being impaled from the inside is not enough to kill this Chordate (science joke)! Alice takes off and hides from the behemoth behind a big rock- which turns out to not be a rock at all but ACTUALLY be the evil octopus. He lunges out before Alice can get away and entangles her in his squiggly amorphous tentacles, ripping her hat off her head! Alice can't escape and dies.

Okay, she doesn't REALLY die. It was all a dream. We're snapped back into the real world where two sailors see Alice having a night terror while being tangled up in a fishing net. They rush to her aid, wake her up, free her from the net, and then it pretty much ends. But not before we're treated to a closeup of one of the sailors who seems to have some sort of horrible skin condition on his face... gross. But Alice is unshaken and the cartoon ends.

I can't say I'm really a big fan of the Alice Comedies so far. Wonderland was pretty disconnected and this one suffered similar problems. But what I CAN say I like is the mayhem atmosphere that permeates these cartoons. Like I said, if I were a young child I might not be such a fan. But then again, maybe I would. I'm not sure. But I sure do get a kick out of the action and find THAT at least pretty entertaining.