WONDERLAND WONDERBOOK

It was 1969 – most of my readers probably weren't born – and I was in a state of HUGE excitement: Disney's 1951 animated feature, Alice in Wonderland was being reissued in Britain and was coming to my local cinema.

I was (in addition to being a rabid Disney fan) a crazed Carrollian having fallen in love with the book long before I could even read from having it read to me by my parents.

In those prehistoric, pre-video days I had seen stills from the Disney version, and clips on TV, I had read comic- and picture-book versions and listened endlessly to the Disneyland Storyteller LP, but... I had never SEEN the FILM!

I loved it! As passionately as I felt about the book, I was not so much a purist as to worry about the departures from the original text (although I thought it was more than a bit unfortunate to have mis-spelled the author's name on the credits!) and I went back more than once to the cinema that week to see it again - and again!

The supporting feature was the live action film based on Sterling North's book, Rascal, about raising a baby raccoon which - like all the sentimental Disney animal-pix – I also enjoyed and each visit I managed to pick up the promotional giveaways for the release: the ingenious Alice's Magic Wonderbook, the four pages of which could be manipulated so as to reveal six or, if you were very clever, eight pages!

Here are all those pages...

And, finally, the secret 'hidden' pages 7 and 8...

Ah, those were the days! Still, now you can watch the film any time you want on DVD and, on Blu-ray, you can watch me and others on the bonus extras talking about the book, the movie and those twin geniuses, Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney...