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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: December 9, 1985
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Alice in Wonderland (1985 CBS miniseries)
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Some TV moments are memorable for being examples of the high quality that television can achieve. Some are memorable for being moments of shared remembrance that we can all look back on as milestones. Some are great. Some are so bad they’re good. Some are so bad they’re awful. Somehow, the 1985 CBS TV miniseries adaptation of Alice in Wonderland manages to hold a place all its own. So much so that even though it’s not currently available to stream, you need to know about it.
First of all, there’s the cast, an all-star line-up of mid-1980s TV talent and aged Hollywood stars! You’re quite simply not ready for this cavalcade of names: Red Buttons, Donald O’Connor, Sammy David Jr., Shelley Winters, Telly “Kojak” Savalas, Roddy McDowall, Sid Caesar, Harvey Korman, Ringo Starr, Merv Griffin, Sally Struthers, Karl Malden, Pat “Mr. Miyagi” Morita, Beau Brudges, Lloyd Bridges, Ernest Borgnine, and Jonathan Winters as Humpty Dumpty. And that’s not even everyone!
Credit Lewis Carroll for creating a universe in Wonderland that could accommodate so many stars with such small roles. But that’s not the reasons Alice in Wonderland (1985) is memorable. It’s memorable because of one scene, shorter than five minutes, when Carol Channing appears as the White Queen. Channing, a Broadway legend famous for originating the title role in Hello, Dolly and earning an Oscar nomination for Thoroughly Modern Millie, is a most peculiar personality even when she’s playing it straight. Her back-teeth-hissing delivery is as reliable a calling card as anyone has in film, TV, or theater, and she’s stayed a vital Broadway presence well into her ’90s. So Alice had her show up as a particularly frazzled White Queen.
And then. The “Jam” song.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are works of such pristine absurdism that they lend themselves to some inspired lunacy. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum (in this film played by Steve Lawrence and Edye Gormé, for the record) are but two examples. But even considering this Mad Hatter-inspired world, tasking Broadway legend Carol Channing with singing “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never ever jam today” takes things to another level. And that’s not even getting into the funky-monkey choreography that has Ms. Channing flailing about as if in the grips of some jazzy seizure.
It is perhaps the strangest thing that has ever appeared on television. And thanks to the magic of YouTube, it’s no longer just confined to the disbelieving memories of children who saw it in 1985 and then spent the subsequent decades thinking they’d imagined the sight of a large-mouthed chanteuse morphing into a sheep in front of their very eyes.
I love you, television.
