The Alice Comedies is a series of shorts created by Walt Disney during the 1920s featuring a live action girl named Alice (originally played by Virginia Davis), who has adventures with animated cat Julius in a cartoon world.
History[]
Characters[]
Alice - Title character, a young girl living in an animated world.
Julius - Alice's companion.
Rootleg Pete - An eye patch wearing bear like villian with a peg leg. He's a collector of rare crossword puzzles. Rootleg Pete first appears in Alice Solves the Puzzle (1925).
Shorts[]
Production[]
Content[]
Although seen as cute and funny in their time, the Alice Comedies contain content which might be considered surprising and somewhat harsh today by sensitive viewers. Alice is a little girl, yet she spends much of her time avoiding danger, and even getting kidnapped by the cartoon villains, threatened with such perils as being tied to a log in a sawmill. These scenes are parodies of similar scenes in movie serials, such as The Perils of Pauline (1914) starring actress Pearl White. One such Alice cartoon, Alice's Mysterious Mystery (1926) features two cartoon characters who allegedly resemble members of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the villains drags a dog character into a room marked "Death Chamber" and pulls out a long strand of sausage. In "Alice and the Dog Catcher" she is leader of a club called the Klix Klax Klub, in where the kids wear paper bags with their faces painted on them over their heads.