Freak of the Week: Alice in Wonderland (1949)

This Saturday, Cinefamily in Los Angeles is showing a rarely screened version of Alice Wonderland featuring stop motion animation by Lou Bunin. It looks fun:

Why “rarely screened,” you ask?  Well, it’s a classic case of Disney co-opting a public domain story to the point that they think they own it.  Somehow Disney lawyers managed to bury this 1949 version in enough legal crap to suppress it and avoid competition with their own animated adaptation in production at the time.  Of course, this is not to say anything of how Lewis Carroll’s trippy tale had already been adapted five times prior.  See kids, Hollywood remakes are nothing new.  And neither is poor regulation of big business and disrespect of the public domain.