Studio: Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, for Winkler Pictures
Distributor: Winkler Pictures (M. J. Winkler)
Short Synopsis
Alice and her friends put on a Wild West show in a barn for the neighbourhood kids, with Alice as the star performer. When a gang of older boys heckles and breaks up the show, Alice holds the audience by telling tall tales of her adventures out west, and the stories are played as cartoons: Alice the cowgirl against outlaws and Indians in a drawn frontier, riding, shooting and outsmarting the villains in the elastic manner of the series' animated world. The live-action frame returns at the end, where the bullies get their comeuppance. The film survives and was issued on the Walt Disney Treasures DVD of the studio's rarities, so the outline above can be checked against the print, which runs a little longer than most Alice films.
Why It Matters
- Davis is a genuine performer here, telling her stories with the exaggerated gestures of a silent-film child star, and the switches between the barn and the cartoon West are handled with more wit than in the first films. The western parody also lets the animators try crowds, horses and landscapes they had not drawn before.
- The Alice Comedies' first year was a struggle: Winkler paid late, the studio was two rooms behind a real-estate office, and Disney and Iwerks did most of the drawing themselves. Wild West Show is one of the surviving films from that year, and its survival on an official Disney release makes it one of the easiest early Alice films to see.
Notes and Trivia
- Tommy Hicks appeared in several of the first Alice films as one of the gang.
- Disney reused the "tall tales" framing device in later series entries to justify longer cartoon sections.
- See also: Alice's Spooky Adventure (1924), Alice in the Wooly West (1926).