A Curious Alice Coloring Book

I still remember the coloring book I received after a man from the power company came to my school and showed us a cartoon about a cat that is repeatedly “zapped” when it makes bad decisions around electricity. Like visits from the fire department and McGruff the Crime Dog, coloring books are a staple of public safety education for children.

Much to my delight, I recently learned that the early anti-drug education film Curious Alice was no exception. In its 1971 publication “A Guide to Drug Abuse Education and Information Materials,” the National Institute of Mental Health (the government agency that made the psychedelic cartoon) laid out its plans for elementary schoolers. An activity book was part of a planned educational package that included the film, posters, and pamphlets.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that the activity book made it into the permanent records of the National Archives. We were, however, able to obtain a copy via interlibrary loan. I scanned the booklet and am featuring some of the best pages in this post. You can download a PDF of the complete booklet here. The booklet contains a range of activities, from class activities like a drug abuse “science experiment” that utilizes a stalk of celery and a pantomime game where a suggested action is the caterpillar smoking his hookah, to individual activities like coloring pages and fill-in-the-blank worksheets.

The Best of the Curious Alice Activity Book

In this exercise, school children are presented with a set of drawings of cartoon characters using drugs. The child is expected to circle the drug and write its name on the line below the picture.

 

Here’s the White Rabbit in connect-the-dot form:

 

…and here are some of the best coloring pages. If you would like to color of one of these yourself, click on the image. It will open in a separate tab and you can print from there. If you want to share, take a picture and tweet it to @NARAMediaLabs.

 

 

 

Since the Curious Alice booklet is not technically in the holdings of the National Archives, I’m rounding out this post with a public service announcement from the Everly Brothers (Local Identifier: 235.53). The same year that the National Institute for Mental Health released Curious Alice and the accompanying activity book, Don and Phil Everly filmed an advertisement warning the public about the dangers of amphetamines.

For more on early government anti-drug education, see my post on A Day in the Death of Donny B.