Monday, June 15, 2009

Alice's Little Parade



We all know that the ultimate reference about Disney's pre-1928 (silent) creations is the book Walt in Wonderland by JB Kaufman and Russell Merritt (Edizioni Biblioteca dell' Imagine, 1992) and that the two greatest experts on the subject are JB himself and David Gerstein.

Having spoken to a new contact in Madrid on Saturday and having checked JB's and Russell's book, I believed that my contact had stumbled upon one of the lost Alice cartoons, Alice's Little Parade. But by talking to JB and David I realized that since the publication of Walt in Wonderland that cartoon had actually been found. This was news to me and I started wondering what other pre-1928 Disney cartoons had also been found since 1992. David and JB were extremely helpful. Here is the list of the cartoons that have officially been found. I am happy to say that some others might be on the verge of being rediscovered... but there will be more about this here and elsewhere when that actually happens.

- Alice's Little Parade preserved by Lobster Films - Shown here on YouTube
- Alice Gets Stung preserved by Lobster Films and Disney - Appears on the Oswald DVD
- Alice's Spanish Guitar preserved by the George Eastman House - Does not appear anywhere to date
- Ozzie of the Mounted (Oswald) - Close to complete cartoon (save for the last scene) - Appears on the Oswald DVD
- Tall Timber (Oswald) - Found by David Gerstein in a Norwegian film archive - Appears on the Oswald DVD
- Bright Lights (Oswald) - Complete print discovered in Spain - Appears on the Oswald DVD
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4 comments:

Mark Sonntag said...

Thanks Didier, This is a very exciting post for me. It would be great if Disney did a release of all the Alice shorts they have. Though I'm sure there wouldn't be a huge market for them outside of historians.

8:36 PM
Fernando Ventura said...

I'm wondering... How many shorts are still lost

6:58 AM
Didier Ghez said...

ok. I will try to post the lost of the lost shorts next week.

7:12 AM
ramapith said...

Hi Didier,

Two colleagues enabled the TALL TIMBER find as much as I did: Gunnar Strøm and Are Myklebust, who between the two of them extensively researched local documents indicating the Oswald films' original Norwegian titles.
I crosschecked those titles with production materials, matching titles to plotlines; then I passed the consolidated information on to a government film archive, which used it to find the short independently of its English title (which was not on record there).
I'm glad to have played my part, but I could not have accomplished anything without Are or Gunnar.

11:22 PM

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