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

***The New Alice in Wonderland*** (or What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?) is a forty-eight-and-a-half-minute animated TV-movie, written by Bill Dana (who also appears in its cast), produced by Hanna-Barbera, and broadcast on the ABC network on March 30, 1966, in an hour slot (including commercials). The songs were by the then-hot Broadway team of composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee Adams, who were most famous for Bye Bye Birdie. The songs were orchestrated by Marty Paich, who also provided musical direction; plus devised and arranged that part of the underscoring that was drawn from the musical numbers. The rest of the underscoring was drawn from the vast library of cues that Hanna-Barbera's most significant (and at that time sole) in-house composer Hoyt Curtin had written for various animated series. (One example: When the Caterpillar makes its entrance, the underscoring is the familiar bassoon rendition of the Flintstones theme song—a cue employed for reasons that will be made clear below.)

This adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is essentially, and very intentionally, a modern riff on the classic tale: While trying to read the original Lewis Carroll book for a book report, Alice tries to fend off her little white dog Fluff, who's in a very playful mood, and tosses a ball for him to chase. It bounces toward and magically through the living room TV screen—and Fluff, in hot pursuit, disappears right after it. Alice goes after Fluff and of course winds up falling through herself, and entering Wonderland.

With this being Wonderland through the "looking glass"—and more meaningfully, the tacit "prism"—of a TV screen, the creative team had all the excuse they needed to reinterpret all the iconic Wonderland characters as TV celebrities. In some cases, this merely involved a celebrity voice and persona: Howard Morris lent the shy, sweet, impish persona he'd often employed in sketch comedy (most famously in Your Show of Shows) to the White Rabbit. Harvey Korman brought his take on effete eccentricity to the Mad Hatter. Perhaps most transparently, Zsa Zsa Gabor played a glamorous Queen of Hearts replete with Hungarian accent and a penchant for calling people "darling." And perhaps most famously, Sammy Davis, Jr. assayed the Cheshire Cat as a groovy, rockin', swingin' feline beatnik.

There were some celebrity cameos too: Fred Flintstone (voiced by Alan Reed speaking, Henry Corden singing) and Barney Rubble (voiced by Mel Blanc) literally play themselves as the Caterpillar, which is re-interpreted as two veteran vaudevillians in a caterpillar costume with heads on either end (the neckline of each respective head opening mimics their costumes from The Flintstones: Fred's has a necktie and Barney's features the signature cross-stitching of his tunic). Bill Dana's portrayal of the White Knight is a manifestation of Jose Jimenez, the Hispanic immigrant character he perfected in standup routines and on sitcoms (very likely this interpretation of the White Knight was also a comic nod to the most unlikely and famous fictional knight-errant of all, the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote). Character actor Allan Melvin provided a voice inspired by Humphrey Bogart for the "hard-boiled" criminal egg, Humphrey Dumpty. And Hedda Hatter (a new character who pops into the mad tea party at the behest of the Mad Hatter) is voiced by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. It would be her last "public appearance"; she died two months prior to the film's initial broadcast.