Alice in Wonderland - the 1985 Miniseries

I'm almost done with the Alice in Wonderland Challenge. After today's post, I'll just have one more task to complete.

Today, I'm talking about the 1985 miniseries version of Alice in Wonderland.

You get 3 hours of story here, and it covers both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. There aren't an abundance of special effects, which is a good thing since the special effects we got were very poor. You can tell they didn't spend must of their budget on them. And you can tell the movie is now 25 years old.

The sets were rather good and the costumes were fairly nice. At times, they looking like elaborate Halloween costumes, but I was willing to let that pass.

The book followed the stories fairly faithfully, although it did connect the two, with Alice waking from the first story to find herself in the second story.

But there were lots of problems with this movie. First, the acting was poor. Considering it had big name stars, I expected more. And the pacing was slow the entire way through.

Furthermore, they cut out some of the best bits from the book, possibly in an attempt met the time requirements of TV.

This was a musical, but all the songs sounded the same to me. While I wanted to turn the movie off multiple times, I did fastforward through the songs.

They attempted to give us a moral about facing fears and growing up. I'm sorry, but Alice doesn't need morals. It's just supposed to be fun.

And the fear she faces? A rather silly looking Jaberwacky that shows up in the second half every so often. While it was stupid, I could see it frightening kids, or at least me when I was a kid.

If it wasn't for the challenge, I would have turned it off after a few minutes. But I did grit my teeth and make it through.