Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972)

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General		Extras
Category	Childrens	Menu Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	1972
Running Time	91:42 (Case: 96)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	William Sterling
Studio Distributor	Josef Shaftel Beyond Home Entertainment	Starring	Fiona Fullerton Michael Crawford Ralph Richardson Peter Sellers Flora Robson Robert Helpmann Dudley Moore Spike Milligan Michael Jayston
Case	Alpha-Transparent
RPI	?	Music	John Barry

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.30:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	None	Smoking	Yes, water opium pipe
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

   Michael Crawford, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan, Fiona Fullerton and many, many other great names are all wasted in this very dreary rendition of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. I had high hopes for this film when I saw the incredible cast that had been assembled and unfortunately I was very disappointed. To make matters worse, the disc itself is not very good either - the source material has been carried over a composite link at some stage and there are more compression artefacts than you can poke a stick at.

    I normally like children's films and to be fair I seem to be a little out on my own with my dislike of this film, although my son didn't really like it either. Looking at its score on the IMDB, 64 people have voted to give it a rating of 6.4, which is not bad as IMDB ratings tend to be fairly tough.

    This is a musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll's work and the music is quite good, as are most of the songs. Fiona Fullerton (later a Bond girl) plays Alice and is one of the better parts of this film. She is very pretty and has a good singing voice that matches the part well. Other characters are sprinkled through the film. Michael Crawford is almost unrecognisable beneath his white rabbit make-up - until he speaks that is. In 1972, when the film was made, he is still very much the person we associate with Some Mother Do Have Them and not the later person we see as the Phantom Of The Opera. Spike Milligan uses a voice for his character that is very similar to Eccles, and I kept waiting for the queen to order his head removed and for the cry of "You deaded me" to ring out.

    The story does follow the book and as we move through the film we see the Mad Hatter's tea party and the various potions and mushroom parts that vary Alice's size. The sets are interesting if a little sparse for my liking and the costumes are pretty good. I wonder what would happen today if you wrote a book about a little girl that runs around drinking strange potions from unmarked bottles and munching on wild mushrooms and taking strange trips. With the loss of innocence that the world seems to have been subjected to I am sure it would never be published.

Video

    The transfer is presented at 2.35:1 and NOT 16x9 enhanced, so at least we seem to have the original aspect ratio, even if we miss out on 16x9 enhancement.

    The underlying sharpness is quite good but this is almost completely lost in the pixelization that is present. So bad is the overcompression that in some places fine detail just simply disappears. Shadow detail is good but there is a fair amount of low level noise.

    The colours are good, though affected in places by posterization, such as at 23:53. The saturation again is good with some quite nice colourful sections. Skin tones seem to vary a little from hot to cold but I think this is the result of the lighting used for the various sets that have a colour tint to them.

    It is in the MPEG section that we come to the major problems. Just about every scene is pixelated. Some very clear examples where there is pixelization, loss of fine detail and posterization are: 23:53, a long shot of Alice approaching the camera; 24:19, the brickwork on the left of the building; and 25:05 and on for about 10 seconds - all the detail in the background of the room, the fireplace, the trim around the roof and so forth. Setting pause and single stepping these scenes is an education in itself. Further problems arise from false colouration as a result of this transfer being processed in the composite domain at some stage. The windows at 25:05 appear to shimmer, but single stepping this scene shows alternating blue and yellow patches over the entire window surface. Another very distracting example is the long shot of the queen during the trial at 79:40. There is also a fair amount of aliasing present on any horizontal edge and an example is clearly seen at 10:42. Another very major problem is a constant telecine wobble present throughout the entire film. If the MPEG encoder did not have enough to deal with trying to fit this entire film onto one layer of the disc, having the entire frame moving has made the entire process impossible. I found that this wobble came close to making me seasick at some points. The film source itself is not in bad condition, with remarkably little grain and only a few scratches present.

    There are no subtitles present on this DVD.

    This is a single layered disc.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is a single English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack on this disc. It appears to me to be a mono soundtrack.

    Dialogue quality was not too bad, with the characters easy to understand. Overall, there was something not quite right about this soundtrack that I could not put my finger on. It may have been a lack of fidelity or a subtle level of distortion.

    The audio was in sync with the on-screen action.

    The music was very appropriate for the film on most occasions, though little ditties like 'Off With His Head' as sung by the Queen seemed out of place to me, even in a musical. The longer, self-contained songs were good.

     There was no surround nor subwoofer activity.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    I have been unable to find any solid information on the Region 1 version of this disc. Some reviews seem to indicate that the transfer quality is about the same as we have received.

    While doing my research for the R4vsR1 section of this review, I saw a number of reviews where the reviewer really liked this film. This makes it doubly disappointing that these fans have not been given a quality transfer.

    The video is shocking.

    The audio is acceptable, but only in comparison to the video.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall