Walt Disney had a long-standing affection for Alice in Wonderland. As soon as he began discussing making feature-length films, he returned repeatedly to the idea of making a feature-length version of Alice, but for various reasons, these attempts were never realized. Prior to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney planned on making Alice in Wonderland his first feature-length film instead. Like in Disney’s early Alice Comedies, he planned on using a combination of live-action and animation for the “wonderland” sequences, and in early 1933, a Technicolor screen test was shot with Mary Pickford as Alice. This first attempt by Disney at producing an Alice feature was eventually tabled when Paramount released their own 1933 live-action version, with a cast that included Gary Cooper as the White Knight, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, and W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.
This still is one of the only frames that still survives from the original test shot. It is believed that Technicolor may have held the negative, and either lost or discarded it.
