Disneyfied Jabberwock, Times Two

In posting that little nothing about that one nightmare-inducing movie version of Alice in Wonderland, I prompted a someone else to write a post on the Jabberwock, that nonsensical but nonetheless terrifying Lewis Carroll boogeymonster. It seems that that most familiar of Alice adaptations — the 1951 cartoon version — at one point was going to include the Jabberwock. It didn’t make the final cute, so we are left to wonder how this beast might have been rendered by Disney.

Two pieces of concept art survive. The first comes from the “Disney archives” and shows how the battle between the Carroll poem’s young hero and the Jabberwock might have looked, while the second shows the Jabberwock as he appeared in a “Little Golden Book” titled Alice in Wonderland Meets the White Rabbit.


Neither is especially scary, but should we have expected a true monster from Disney? I say yes, actually — the Disney Alice came out before its take on Sleeping Beauty, and the Maleficent dragon in that latter movie is pretty damn intimidating. Of course, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is a bit more mature of a film than Alice so maybe the eight years between the two films allowed the studio to summon the guts to create a truly evil villain — or at least to remember those guts, as Disney had in 1940 put out Fantasia, which pitted young viewers against the demonic Chernobog in that last segment, “A Night on Bald Mountain.”