Why we just can’t get enough of ‘Alice’

Almost 150 years after its creation, Lewis Carroll’s delightfully weird Wonderland world continues to fascinate — and to spawn merchandise. Jewelry, trinkets, clothing, cosmetics: We want it all.

March 07, 2010|By Adam Tschorn, Los Angeles Times

When Lewis Carroll popped Alice down the rabbit hole in 1865, he had no way of knowing that the girl in the pinafore dress — along with the creatures that populate "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its 1872 sequel "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" — would become a permanent fixture on our pop culture landscape.

 

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) joins the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) in director Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. (Walt Disney Pictures)

The phenomenon encompasses more than the 100-plus versions of the book – the most recent of which, published last month, pairs Carroll's text with illustrations by Camille Rose Garcia and recently hit the Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestseller lists. It's something beyond the more than two dozen feature film incarnations, ranging from a star-studded 1933 version — in which Cary Grant played the Mock Turtle, W.C. Fields was Humpty Dumpty and Gary Cooper, the White Knight — to the Tim Burton take that opened Friday. And it's greater than the nearly dozen TV versions (the most recent a Syfy miniseries that included Kathy Bates as the evil Queen of Hearts who happens to run an emotion-emptying casino and Harry Dean Stanton as a shadowy operative code-named "the Caterpillar").

Alice in Wonderland (1903)

The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll's tale has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive from severely damaged materials. Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations. In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later, Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. Even the Cheshire cat is played by a family pet.