Few Disney images spin — literally — quite like the Mad Tea Party. Whitman’s 1972 “Mad Tea Party Game,” published under the Walt Disney Productions banner, bottles that giddy whirl into a children’s board game, and in doing so it links two different chapters of Disney history at once.
From Lewis Carroll to the screen
The theme traces back to Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, which premiered July 26, 1951. Adapted from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the film distilled the books’ most quotable set pieces — the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts, and of course the Mad Hatter and March Hare’s never-ending “Unbirthday” tea party. Though it puzzled some 1951 audiences, the film became a perennial, buoyed for decades by its color, its songs, and its sheer quotability.
The attraction that gave the game its name
What makes the 1972 game especially fun is that “Mad Tea Party” isn’t only a scene — it’s a ride. The spinning teacups opened with Disneyland on July 17, 1955 as an opening-day Fantasyland attraction, letting guests crank their own cup into a dizzy spin. By 1972 it was a beloved fixture (and had been joined by a Walt Disney World version), so a board game built around it tapped a theme that children knew from both the movie and the park. That dual identity — film and attraction — is exactly the kind of crossover that defined Disneyland’s place in 1955, a story told in the E-Ticket’s account of Disneyland’s opening day.
Whitman’s Disney machine
Whitman Publishing (part of Western Publishing) was one of the most prolific Disney licensees of the era, turning out everything from Big Little Books to a deep shelf of children’s games. Its early-1970s Disney output included the Mickey Mouse Rickety Bridge action game and the TV-tie-in Wonderful World of Color game, and reached back to the same character pool as its Disney Dominoes. For collectors who love the look of original Fantasyland-era art, the E-Ticket’s survey of Disney silver-age animation cels traces the same Alice aesthetic into the art world.
