Exploitation

For the first time, televiewers had a look this week at Mickey Mouse, Pluto, Donald Duck, Goofy and other characters in the enchanted animal kingdom created during the past twelve years by Walt Disney. The Christmas Day offering was put together by sponsor Coca-Cola in a $150,000 package called One Hour in Wonderland. Filmed in ten days at the Disney Studio in Burbank, Calif., the show had a plot line (a Christmas party on a sound stage), supporting actors (Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd, Bobby Driscoll), a jazz band and a parcel of applauding teen-agers (including Disney's two daughters, aged 14 and 17).

Most televiewers would have preferred fewer human actors and more Disney cartoons. What they saw was some polished foolery in bits from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Song of the South, The Clock Cleaners and a chase sequence featuring Pluto and a vindictive bulldog. The bonus offering was a "thumbnail" preview of the Mad Tea Party scene from the new Disney movie, Alice in Wonderland, scheduled for release late in 1951. Alice boasts the usual high level of Disney invention: Ed Wynn's voice is dubbed in for the Hatter, Jerry Colonna's strident accents for the March Hare.

Though the show looked like entertainment to NBC, its sponsors and its audience, Walt Disney stoutly insisted that it was only "exploitation" for his forthcoming Alice in Wonderland movie. Perhaps to soothe his TV-frightened movie distributors, Disney professed to see no television future for his great backlog of cartoon films. Said he: "I think the movies are still my natural habitat. The detail we put in our pictures, you just can't get out on TV. I propose to use the medium only to enhance theatrical revenues."

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