The 1970s were a magical time for many reasons, but especially for porn.
The free love movement had already swept through the Western world, and the movie industry was going through an upheaval that allowed for weirder, more experimental films.
The Golden Age of Porn
Riding on the heels of the free love movement was an era known as The Golden Age of Porn.
This was a time when porn became somewhat mainstream – in vogue, even. A truly free thinker wasn’t constrained by the taboo that surrounded pornography. A truly free thinker embraced all sides of life, including the parts that modest society liked to hide.
When Andy Warhol released his Blue Movie, it was given a full theatrical release. This was a first for porn of the time and several others followed suit. It was a hit! The suburban masses now got their kicks from watching sex films – a sign of an evolved mentality. No longer were they prudish and easily offended. This was the bleeding edge of cultural evolution, and they were hungry for it.
The next major porn film to garner this type of reception was Mona: The Virgin Nymph.
This film was released one year after Warhol’s Blue Movie, and it was a huge success.
Mona was very popular, and was the film that really launched Bill Osco’s career in pornographic films. He would later go on to produce the legendary Flesh Gordon before ultimately giving the world perhaps one of the most charmingly strange pornographic films ever created.
From Mona to Alice
After he worked on Mona, Osco moved on to produce the legendary Flesh Gordon (a satirical porn parody of the classic 1930s film, Flash Gordon).
Flesh Gordon was a pretty big budget film for the porn industry, and featured some fun special effects. It was very camp, and at the time, camp was in. Bill Osco’s career was taking off, and he was riding that wave.
It was actually the star of Flesh Gordon who pitched the idea of what would become a legendary classic in the Golden Age of Porn – Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy. Together with Bucky Searles, who also wrote Mona, they created a gem that has truly stood the test of time.
Both films revolve around an innocent main character who explores her sexuality and learns to open up to new experiences. Yes, there are some problematic elements, but overall, they both really pushed the envelope of what was allowed in cinema. But in many ways, Alice in Wonderland was a step above what came before and paved the way for other x-rated musical comedies to enter into the mainstream.
Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy
I’m going to go right out and say it: this is a masterpiece. While it is full of weird costume choices, the production quality is actually pretty high. The script is very self-aware and silly. It’s similar to The Princess Bride in tone and the acting isn’t half bad.
Roger Ebert even reviewed it, raving about the actress who plays Alice.
This film has all the aesthetics of the great 1970s musical comedies, like Jesus Christ Superstar or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but with full-frontal nudity and sex acts. The story follows Alice, a prudish librarian who decides to grow up all over again and follows the white rabbit, played by a strange little man, into Wonderland.
Alice goes from being quite judgmental about sexuality to trusting herself and her body enough to explore it, both on her own and with others. Along the way, she learns many lessons and meets many people.
The songs are unique to this film and are mostly really catchy. There’s even some choreographed dancing at some points.
This is definitely a must-see film!
Body positivity and realistic beauty standards
Like many movies of that golden era, this film manages to show sexuality in a pretty naturalistic way for something set in a fantasy world. It may even be the fantasy setting itself that gives permission to allow for how sexuality is depicted.
Yes, Alice is genetically gifted. Blonde and thin, she looks good with minimal makeup and doesn’t seem to have been surgically ‘enhanced’. But this film was made before cosmetic surgery was really popularised, so there’s a lot of very natural looking body parts. It was also made before body hair became such a no-no, so there’s a fair bit of pubic hair, as was typical at the time.
Compared to the porn of the 2000s up until today, where pornstars are pumped with silicone and made up to look like identical blow-up dolls, it’s refreshingly realistic. Furthermore, the film explicitly sends positive messages about self-acceptance. Early in the film, Alice is told, “there is no part of you that is bad”, and I just think that’s a point that’s often missing from mainstream porn.
The word-play jokes are top-notch
Let’s not forget that this is a comedy.
Amid the boobs and butts, the characters are spitting tons of great lines. The script is one of the better porn scripts I’ve encountered, which I suppose isn’t saying much, but you get the sense that Bucky really had fun with it.
Each scene is segued through with title screens reminiscent of a storybook. These tie the story together, explain scene changes, and feature some very tongue-in-cheek jokes. To really push these title screens into high comedy, they’ve chosen fantastic background music that sounds like it belongs on The Dating Show.
The plot itself takes full advantage of the comedic opportunities. Humpty Dumpty moves through erectile dysfunction (he’s fallen and can’t get it up!), unidentifiable furries pursue sensual play (licking Alice’s body dry) and the Queen is of course, a femdom (“I want her HEAD!”).
Even the knight gets written into a double-entendre musical number as Alice sings to the woman riding him, “What’s a nice girl like you doing on a knight like this?”
Feel-good messages straight out of the sexual revolution
Despite the comedic tone, Alice in Wonderland manages to stay rooted in pretty sophisticated attitudes towards sex.
At the core of Alice’s adventure are self-trust, self-discovery, and self-acceptance. The zany characters support her in her sexual awakening, modeling an approach to sexuality that is free from shame and rooted in pleasure and love.
Interestingly, they really do focus on love. There certainly is a fair amount of shameless promiscuity, and they never say that sex without love is bad, but they do have a scene with Tweedledee and Tweedledum that puts love front and center. Alice watches them adoringly and realises that she wants to share that kind of intimacy with someone someday.
They even end the film with a storybook happily-ever-after where Alice gets her white picket fence family. The film doesn’t try to tear down that ideal, nor does it present it as the only option.
The film does a good job of sending the message that “if it feels good, it is good”.
Are there other X-rated musical comedy films?
Yes! Another producer by the name of Will Ryder started his own production company and really specialised in creating parody films, which included a few musicals. These were made in the late 2000s and 2010s, and included musical parodies of The Wizard of Oz, Grease, and Jersey Boys.
The Will Ryder parodies are genuinely entertaining and Not the Wizard of Oz XXX features some pretty classic moments: the cowardly lion’s song about being gay (which was nominated for best original song at the AVN awards), the tin man asking Dorothy for more lube and Glinda urging Dorothy to follow the “yellow prick road”.
Not Grease XXX and Not Jersey Boys XXX are also pretty fantastic, though they are all products of their time and definitely have some problematic elements.
In terms of porn cinema, Blonde Ambition is a notable porno made to emulate the aesthetic of a musical without actually being one. Romeo & Julian, which has been hailed by one IMDB reviewer as the Plan 9 of porn, was actually a musical porno of the 90s. It’s not intended to be a comedy, though some people may think otherwise.
There are a couple original songs, but it doesn’t really rival Alice in Wonderland.
Pornographic musical theatre
In the early 2000s, Avenue Q took the world by storm, popularising x-rated musical theatre. Inspired by New York’s children’s series, Sesame Street, its big controversy was that it featured puppet sex.
Perhaps this was the motivation Bill Osco needed to write a stage adaptation of his classic Alice in Wonderland.
An off-Broadway stage show, written by Osco, of Alice in Wonderland was created and performed in the 2000s. It veered away from the original film and took place in a trailer park in New Jersey, but little evidence of this show can be found today.
As of 2019, an industry reading of Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy was a scheduled to take place. One of the main collaborators also worked on Avenue Q, though there wasn’t any information on whether or not the show actually went on.
The future of Wonderland
Over the years since Alice in Wonderland was first released, many rumours of other productions surfaced. Bill Osco started work on a Wizard of Oz pornographic musical, but it was never produced. A sequel has also been talked about, and even the late Ken Russell was supposedly working on a new version with some big names at the time of his death.
It seems that for now, nothing is in the works, but perhaps an updated version will be created before Bill Osco passes away. Lady Gaga was rumoured to have been a top pick for the Queen of Hearts, and I, for one, would ABSOLUTELY watch the hell out of that!
While the world seems to be sliding back towards a more conservative, right-wing status quo, perhaps this style of free love, shameless, pornographic performance is exactly what we need!