"Alice In Wonderland" Soundtrack LP Question


I got two questions about the "Alice in Wonderland" Soundtrack LP on Disneyland. One is the shorter version of the soundtrack with the songs "The Caucus Race", "How D'ye Do and Shake Hands", "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and "March of the Cards" are butchered due to the shorter length of the album with 8 songs. The second soundtrack had the same songs and added 4 songs to the LP with 11 songs instead of 8. The music on that entire LP featuring Darlene Gillespie along with Tutti Camarata and his Orchestra & Chorus. Do you know what was wrong on these soundtracks?
 
>>I got two questions about the "Alice in Wonderland" Soundtrack LP on Disneyland. One is the shorter version of the soundtrack with the songs "The Caucus Race", "How D'ye Do and Shake Hands", "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and "March of the Cards" are butchered due to the shorter length of the album with 8 songs. The second soundtrack had the same songs and added 4 songs to the LP with 11 songs instead of 8. The music on that entire LP featuring Darlene Gillespie along with Tutti Camarata and his Orchestra & Chorus. Do you know what was wrong on these soundtracks?
 
The full-length, full-price WDL series Camarata/Darlene LP of 1958 may have been cut down for the initial DQ discount-price version of the early 60's and may have been reissued again later at full-length (I'm not sure about that). Is that what you mean? A lot of the initial DQ albums were much shorter than the original WDLs.

Thanks! I have the second copy with the 1968 LP cover had the same songs on the entire revissue LP of the WDL series. Did they used the same thing in stereo in the STER series?
 

X-S Tech

Active Member
I bought the Magic Mirror Version at a record store a few years ago, just for the March of the Cards track which the cover listed as being on there, and when I finally got it and listened to it, it missing, though I believe everything else was there. Reading the above info, I now wonder if someone had just put the wrong record in that cover, but wouldn't there have been other stuff missing too? Or was it simply a typo on the Album Cover? I don't remember much about the rest of the record, but I'm pretty sure it was the Darlene Gillespie version.
 

brilligowen

New Member
THE wdl-4015 ALICE album is only different as there are no pauses between songs
ie. grooves separating the music on the disc.,,
I own all versions-there was never any song editing ever...on the st-3909 ALICE -the first editions had narration by darlene
and it was underscored by the camarata music..on the ginny tyler late sixties storyteller -march of the cards is omitted because it is not
under the narration of ginny tyler on this later st-3909 version.... i remember before 1983 the alice ride exterior had the title song playing on a loo- in the first version of the ride---there is also a cassette read along i heard from the 1980s that has ony camarata under the narration...............I have a huge disney ALICE collection including 1951 78 rpm discs from ALICE.....golden records-
les paul,lombardo,doris day singing very good advice..danny kaye singing im late...........................camaratas version has remained the same since 1957 and was sold on record under the 1980s-there is a japanese cd with bambi==and a cd alice only with the blue 1968 dq album cover.....japanese as well
 

brilligowen

New Member
hey bill when did you become an expert--its spelled ritalin-did you go to school at all??? why are you making personal digs on this web site when im trying to educate about my knowledge of disneymusic and you cant spell ritalin............
 
Just to add some FYI's -- the DQ-1208 version (with the songs separated) is available on iTunes, but the art is from the WDL version. The nice thing about iTunes is that you can set your preferences so the songs connect and simulate the sound of the original unseparated album.

The original album was never in stereo, even thought the mono sound is outstanding and brilliant. However, Camarata re-recorded the title track, note-for-note with the identical arrangement, in stereo and it appeared in stereo on "The Parent Trap" BV album (also on itunes), and a compilation called "Walt Disney's Cavalcade of Music" and, oddly, in mono on "The Music of Walt Disney." You can tell the slight differences between the two versions; in the stereo version, towards the end when the chorus sings. "I wonder where," the orchestra comes in sooner with the "I'm Late" melody.

Some labels on various DO-1208 vinyl records incorrectly say "original motion picture soundtrack,' even though, as stated above, there was no soundtrack on vinyl, only on CD (thanks, Randy).

Also -- and this is only a guess -- I suspect that the Goofy-like sololist on Camarata's "How D'ye Do & Shake Hands" might be Darlene herself. I recall her using this kind of voice occasionally on the Mickey Mouse Club. Just a guess.
 

Horizons

Playlist Author
You say potato...I say potahto

You say tomato...I say tomahto

You say Ritalin...I say Ridilin

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)
 
>>The original album was never in stereo, even thought the mono sound is outstanding and brilliant. However, Camarata re-recorded the title track, note-for-note with the identical arrangement, in stereo and it appeared in stereo on "The Parent Trap" BV album (also on itunes), and a compilation called "Walt Disney's Cavalcade of Music" and, oddly, in mono on "The Music of Walt Disney." You can tell the slight differences between the two versions; in the stereo version, towards the end when the chorus sings. "I wonder where," the orchestra comes in sooner with the "I'm Late" melody
 

The Trout

Member
Thanks for the info, Greg! I agree that the mono Alice sounds fantastic. Mono sound gets a little too much disrespect if you ask me - for any material from the mid-60s on back, it's really the way to go. Until that point, stereo mixes were a niche market and just an afterthought on the part of the producers and artists - the mono mixes were almost always superior sounding to the stereo versions. Stereo didn't really come into its own until the late-60s.
 

narkspud

Member
Thanks for the info, Greg! I agree that the mono Alice sounds fantastic. Mono sound gets a little too much disrespect if you ask me - for any material from the mid-60s on back, it's really the way to go. Until that point, stereo mixes were a niche market and just an afterthought on the part of the producers and artists - the mono mixes were almost always superior sounding to the stereo versions. Stereo didn't really come into its own until the late-60s.

That's overgeneralized a bit, but I agree with the sentiment. Orchestral pop, jazz, classical, and other "grown up" music caught in one pass was usually recorded in lovely stereo starting in the late 50s. However, "produced" music, such as rock and roll, was rarely recorded in true stereo until the late 60s, since the recording devices of the time didn't have enough tracks to accomodate stereo and the common overdub techniques used by pop producers. You usually ended up with most of the band over THERE, a few overdubbed strings or something over THERE, and the vocals in the MIDDLE, with a dollop of reverb to try to cover up the distance (a "fix" that, we now understand, had the opposite effect). "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" is a particularly lopsided example of this.

Add to that the superior sound quality of the full-track mono tape format, and stereo mixers' tendency to "lose" overdubs (The Look of Love), edit points (Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye), and the opening guitar strums that they accidentally erased from the session tape (Yellow Submarine), and the mono mix is frequently the way to go, albeit often hard to find in this CD age.

Disney didn't mess with STER unless they had true stereo to put on it, and I've found that nearly all Disney stereo is lovely. At least until the early 70s. That's when simulated stereo reared its ugly head . . . taking mono tapes and messing with them to create an alleged stereo effect, always with dire consequences to the integrity of the original sound. The Disney version of fake stereo used a combo of a small dab of reverb, quick and constant balance adjustments (making one speaker or the other louder every second or so) and a slight phase differential between channels. The result sounded more like an edge-damaged tape than anything else, and unfortunately could not be mixed back to mono without further damaging the high frequencies.
 

The Trout

Member
Yeah, I should've been more specific, 'cause you're right - stereo recordings from the 50's and early 60's of classical music (Living Stereo, I'm looking in your direction) were awesome. But those stereo rock recordings... oy. Having a singer's voice in one ear and his guitar in the other is one of the most annoying headphone listening experiences EVER.
 

almandot

Member
Some beatles songs just bug me on headphones for that reason. But I love the mixing of the songs on the Yellow Submarine album.
 

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