The Disney version was on cable the other night. It has been years since I really sat down and watched it, and although the fact that the animators were on drugs when they made it is one of those engrained in our culture things you just know, until the other night I hadn't really sat back and objectively taken in how completely tanked they must have been.

For a time there I knew that entire movie by heart, music cues and all. Perhaps I still do. I didn't have any trouble reciting all the dialogue from the Tea Party scene (probably because to this day, people in my family can't pass the mustard to each other without screeching, "Mustard??? Don't let's be silly.")

It was the early 80s, before Blockbuster, back when you had to go all the way to an electronics store at the mall to rent movies. The few tapes available--VHS and Beta--were kept in locked glass cases with sliding doors. The store we went to owned the entire released-on-tape Disney collection (all the classics, like The Apple Dumpling Gang and Condor Man). All those movies to choose from, lined neatly up in their puffy white boxes, and yet all we did was rent Alice in Wonderland...over and over and over.

My middle sister was obsessed with it. She watched it every morning while sitting on the living-room carpet in her feetie pajamas with her breakfast bowl of cereal clasped in her tiny hands. Eventually my mother just broke down and bought the store's copy, figuring that even though it was pricey (this being before the days of priced-to-sell tapes) and hella used (mostly by us; pity any other fool trying to get it away from us long enough to rent it themselves), we would still save money in the long run on rental fees and gas.

Before that moment, however, there was a time when my mother made an audio tape of the movie to play in the car, figuring that that was the next best thing. Perhaps she also thought that so much exposure to it would finally make my sister get tired of the movie. It didn't pan out quite that way. All that happened was that our entire carpool ended up mouthing the dialogue (and sound effects) to and from school for weeks.

Meanwhile my mother was convinced that at some point the cops would pull her over and take her to jail for possessing this bootlegged Alice tape. So she labeled the tape only with an "A", thus hiding its actual contents from any cop diligent enough to go rooting through our tape bin. Even after we bought the movie fair and square, she continued to make sure that the audio tape's box was buried out of sight in the bin, and that none of us opened the van windows while we were passing police vehicles.

And to this day, my sister still has that old used VHS cassette in her collection.