The live-action "Alice in Wonderland" photographs on these pages are from a full-length Walt Disney version of the Lewis Carroll masterpiece that you, the public, will never see.
It was two years in preparation. Its stars and players include Ed Wynn, Jerry Colonna, Richard Haydn, Sterling Holloway and Heather Angel. It cost the studio close to a quarter of a million dollars. And when it was finished, it was destroyed.
A shocking example of Hollywood waste and extravagance? Not at all; Disney regards this ill-fated film as one of his most successful ventures – even if the total audience that viewed it, all for free, could not have comprised more than 200 people.
Not to prolong the mystery, the film in question is what is called in the industry a "mock-up" or working model. It is the picture behind the picture that will be shown on the screen this summer – Walt Disney’s long-awaited Technicolor animated cartoon version of Lewis Carroll's immortal "Alice in Wonderland."
This final version may well represent the peak of Walt Disney’s career. It was more than five years in the making, and is estimated to have cost $3,000,000.
It combines scenes from "Alice" and from "Through the Looking Glass," uses 32 major Carroll characters, and required more than 900,000 separate drawings for the animation cameras.
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