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.