Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

This reworking of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, an hour-long (with commercial breaks) TV special by the Hanna-Barbera animation studio, known for their limited animation in TV series such as "The Flintstones," is amusingly clever in parts. The Alice here is told she must finish reading the Alice books for school before she's allowed to watch TV. While interacting with her dog, Fluff, however, she becomes concussed--entering a dream state whereby she follows Fluff through the family TV screen, down the hole of the boob tube, to Wonderland where she meets the game-playing rabbit and other creatures based on Carroll's narratives. A sign informs Alice, "Welcome to Wonderland" and, humorously, "This place is all right in my book -Lewis Carroll."

Fred and Barney from "The Flintstones" appear as actors in the role of the Caterpillar, which almost seems like a joke on the frequency of motion-picture stars appearing in odd roles in Alice movies ever since Paramount's star-studded production in 1933, which disguised, among others, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty and Gary Cooper as the White Knight. If that weren't cheeky enough, the program ends with Alice breaking the fourth wall to wink through the real TV screen at us, the viewers. Unfortunately, the show also replaces most of Carroll's witty nonsense with songs that, with one exception, are tedious. It imitates the 1951 Disney theatrically-released cartoon, too, by concluding with Alice being homesick. On the other hand, I enjoyed the "Humphrey" (as in Bogart) Dumpty, who's a "hardboiled" "bad egg" locked in jail. Best of all, however, is Sammy Davis Jr. lending his voice to a cool (Cheshire) cat and singing the one catchy tune here, "What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?"