Charley says: Don’t do drugs like Alice in Wonderland did

22 January 2014 Rob Buckley Charley Says Post a comment

While the UK was largely content with scaring the crap out of everyone through public information films in the 1970s, the US was then following a policy of education: tell people the risks and they’ll make the right choice.

This might have been a mistake in the case of its 1971 film, Curious Alice, an animated fantasy basedon the characters in Alice in Wonderland. It shows Alice as she tours a strange land where everyone had chosen to use drugs, forcing her to ponder whether drugs are the right choice for her.

Just to make sure she chooses the right one, rather than picking one at random, each character represented a different drug: the Mad Hatter represented LSD, the Dormouse represented sleeping pills and the King of Hearts represented heroin. I won’t spoil it by telling you which one she opted for (or didn’t).

PS I’ve no idea if the title is a reference to the slightly porny famous 1967 Swedish film, I Am Curious (Yellow).

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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