Carol Marsh insisted on doing some of the most difficult sequences herself, when a double would have been permissible. Falling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland entailed a hair-raising thirty-foot drop into a net. A famous French trapeze artist, Mile Roselie, showed her how to make the fall, but Carol completed the scene with bruised knees, scratched legs and six ruined pairs of stockings. Carol found the most difficult scene was the one where she slides down an enormous table leg. It was an almost perpendicular drop, and Carol admits she was very frightened while doing it.
The adaptation is faithful to Lewis Carroll's novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," a thinly-veiled satire of 19th-century England. The Queen of Hearts is really Queen Victoria, the King is Prince Albert, the White Rabbit is the chancellor of Oxford, the Cheshire Cat is the Dean of Oxford University's Christ College... and the Valet is Lewis Carroll himself.
The film was not released in the United Kingdom until 1985 due to the possibly offensive caricature of Queen Victoria.
Two versions of Alice in Wonderland (1949), one in English and one in French, were produced simultaneously. It was not until 1951 that this film was released in the United States, where it received a few showings. It was overshadowed by Alice in Wonderland (1951), released only a month earlier.
Carol Marsh is the only live actor in the main story. Marsh acted most of the Wonderland scenes all alone on an empty set, with the puppets added later.