The Alice Comedies are a series of 56 silent cartoons made between 1924 and 1927 that imagine the adventures that a live girl—Alice—has in a make-believe Cartoonland. Several young girls portrayed the role of Alice throughout the series’ run, including Virginia Davis, Dawn O’ Day, and Lois Hardwick, with child actress Margie Gay acting in the largest number of the shorts. In Alice’s Auto Race, Alice and Julius the Cat compete in an auto race. Despite a bad start and arch-rival Pete’s switching road signs, Julius wins the race by bouncing his car over the heads of the other contestants. According to animation expert David Gerstein, Alice’s Auto Race is a lost film, “which means we’re not really sure where a print might reside, though these things turn up all the time. In the last six months, another lost Alice and a lost Oswald have both turned up, so they’re out there.” Even if a print is never found, Gerstein thinks the concluding scene of the 1932 Mickey Mouse short Barnyard Olympics, which reuses some animation from an unidentified Alice Comedy, might use a sequence from Alice’s Auto Race. “The scene shows animals celebrating the victor at a sports event, which leads us to deduce it must be from either Alice’s Auto Race or Alice’s Channel Swim, the only lost Alices to feature sports events. So maybe we can see an element of the lost cartoon after all!”
