Studio: Walt Disney Studio, for Winkler Pictures
Distributor: Winkler Pictures (M. J. Winkler); Film Booking Offices of America
Short Synopsis
A western. Alice and Julius the cat are travelling by stagecoach through a cartoon frontier when the outlaw Pete and his gang hold up the coach. Pete carries Alice off, and Julius sets out to rescue her, on horseback and on foot, through canyons and a desert of comic cacti, with the chase and the fight at Pete's hideout as the film's business and Julius's resourcefulness, his detachable tail used as a lasso and a weapon, as its running gag. The rescue succeeds, and Pete is beaten once more, as he would be in every series Disney made for the next sixty years. The film survives and was released on the Walt Disney Treasures Oswald set; the outline follows the print.
Why It Matters
- The western setting suited the animators, who had drawn galloping horses since the Laugh-O-Grams, and Pete as a cattle-rustling heavy is one of his best early appearances; the stagecoach hold-up and the ride to the rescue are staged with a sense of landscape the earlier films lacked.
- Wooly West comes from the autumn of 1926, when the series had moved to distribution by FBO and the live-action portion had shrunk to Alice alone. Within six months Disney would be making Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for Universal and the Alice films would end; this is one of the last in which the formula still has energy.
Notes and Trivia
- The spelling "Wooly" is the film's own.
- Several Oswald cartoons of 1927-28 reused western gags first drawn for this film.
- See also: Alice's Wild West Show (1924), Alice the Fire Fighter (1926).