Article on Disney Commercials

Over the past several years I've posted about Disney Alice commercials in the 1950s, and shown some of the actual commercials and original art.  If you are interested in more information about these fairly bizarre commercials, I highly recommend reading this article by my friend Jim Korkis.

Hudson Car Commercial Original Drawings

Boy was I excited to get this. This a set of original drawings for one of the Hudson car commercials I blogged about here. While these drawings are not from that specific commercial, they are clearly of the same style, so there must be at least one other commercial out there somewhere.

I acquired these from Howard Lowery's auction site, I highly recommend it.

UPDATE:  I've recently discovered that the artist on these was Tom Oreb.

Jello Commercial Cels - Alice and Caterpillar

The last of my cels from the Jello ads, first up is the Alice that I got along with the Gryphon. The white headband seems to be a trademark feature of cels from the Jello ads. The effects cel of the water is interesting, and certainly not from the two video clips I have.

Next is another Art Corner setup, this time with Alice and the Caterpillar as a butterfly. This originally had another cel as well, Toughy from Lady and the Tramp (go figure). Again, the two clips I have do not feature the Caterpillar, so there must be more Jello ads out there somewhere.

I do not have a reliable date on the ads. The video collection I have says 1956, but I have no other evidence of that date. The campaign materials I have from the original release do not mention Jello anywhere, in fact one of the larger campaigns for the original release was with a competitor, Royal Desserts.

Gryphon and Mock Turtle - Jello Commercial Cels

This Gryphon cel I acquired a very very long time ago, before I even knew of the existence of the Jello commercials. It came with another Alice cel that had the same heavy black lines, so it seemed like it belonged. I'm very glad I bought it when I did!

This next cel setup of Alice and the Mock Turtle is a Disneyland Art Corner setup as it is on a Sleeping Beauty background print, something that they did a lot of at the Art Corner.

Gryphon and Mock Turtle - Jello Commercial

Ok, so when I said that the Gryphon and Mock Turtle were forgotten characters, that was only partially true. They never appeared on the big screen...but they did appear on the little one. This is a Jello commercial from the same video collection as this post. But unlike the previous one, this one is almost entirely new animation, including the Gryphon and Mock Turtle!



Alice sounds like Kathryn Beaumont, but still need to verify.

Jello Commercial with Cheshire Cat - 1956?

Here is one of two Jello commercials that I have featuring Alice in Wonderland animation. This first one is pretty standard stuff, it re-uses feature film animation exclusively (with some new live action of a little girl with Jello), but re-rendered for TV with thick black lines for the crappy TV pictures in the 1950s. This originally came from a collection of commercials entitled Cartoons Celing Commercials. The jacket of this collection lists the date of these commercials as 1956, but I have no other corroborating evidence to support that date.



Voice over is by Sterling Holloway, which is pretty cool, and Alice's voice sounds like Kathryn Beaumont, but have not confirmed that.

1955 Hudson Commercial

My new toy is finally installed, called VCR2PC it digitizes video tape directly to digital files on disk so you can edit and upload or burn to DVD. Woohoo! I can finally transfer some of my rare video to a more stable medium. First up is this bizarre Hudson commercial for the 1955 model year, so probably actually from 1954. Quality is not that great, but cool to see nonetheless.