Musical Mondays Week 34 Alice in WonderlandThrough the Looking Glass (1985)

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

Also you put a Beatle in your movie and you don't make him the walrus? That's straight up goo goo g'joob!

It occurs to me that they also missed the chance to have Merv Griffin play the Gryphon.

 

But they had Imogene Coca as the "Cook" so that's ... that's pretty close?

[SlidePocket 707]

I finally get to make my first pick for next week peeps!

[Cinco DeNio 5290]

It occurs to me that they also missed the chance to have Merv Griffin play the Gryphon.

 

But they had Imogene Coca as the "Cook" so that's ... that's pretty close?

In that case Sid Caesar should have played the King of Hearts.

[Cinco DeNio 5290]

No apologies, Cinco ... this movie is baffling. Although to clarify one thing: The White Rabbit is the one who needs the gloves. The March Hare is at the Mad Tea Party. So if you bailed after Alice turns giant in the house, you never got the part with the March Hare ... which is a shame because aside from the very unfunny "Laugh" song, that's probably the best scene of Part One.

Apologies as you are correct. I should have learned to follow the white rabbit by now. (Side note: I watched Johnny Mnemonic instead and have a LOT of Matrix notes.)

[Cinco DeNio 5290]

I finally get to make my first pick for next week peeps!

We'll be ready. GIFs at 10 paces!

 

[PollyDarton 1807]

 

What I found is that I had no memory of the first part except the ending and lots of memories about the second part. When I first started watching the movie I was thinking that we had something else taped, but then the moment she got back to her house it started coming back to me. Then the more of the second part I watched I was like "Oh yes this, and that" Maybe I only liked part 2 and that's what I watched as a kid. I don't know. Either way, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

 

The only thing I remembered about this from when I was a kid was the jaberwocky at the end of Part 1 and it scared the shit out of me. Now it just looks like a sweaty godzilla suit with some kite strings and vaseline, but what's crazy is that my memory is so visceral that coupled with the dread of Alice being "through the looking glass", the unease of her not being able to communicate with her parents, the lightning, and the doom music I can completely remember why I was scared... it made my cold, black, adult heart race a little.

 

There's something so unsettling about this story that I don't find in its most similar YA fiction cousin: The Wizard of Oz... or at least in the Alice film adaptations. I've read them both but its been so long that I could not talk about the actual books with any confidence. Alice's journey is so menacing... possibly because she doesn't really pick up friends along the way that Dorothy does. In this adaptation the Duchess seems to like Alice... and to some extent Kojack cat is friendly, but otherwise everyone is so hostile to her all the time. Everyone is like "jesus kid... Gah!" at every turn.

 

Even the Disney version is fairly dark. Disney's Alice has not really had the relevance that most of the classic movie's have enjoyed, I guess it's because Alice is technically not a princess? She is still pretty spoiled regardless.

 

Fun story - I bought Disney's Alice for my Niece's birthday last year (With a tea set to go along) but I'm not sure they ever watched it and I'm pretty sure it was deemed too dark... and/or it isn't filled with mind-gouging 3D effects. Aka: eye crack.

[Cinco DeNio 5290]

Side note: I never realized the "6 impossible things" from Hitchhiker's Guide was a reference to Alice in Wonderland until I saw a motivational fridge magnet with the original quote. Now off to breakfast at Milliways, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe!

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

What's always puzzled me about the Alice story is how we're managed to graft our own cultural perspective on to the events and the symbolism for the story. Looking at it now, and especially since the 1960s at least, the growing larger/shrinking because of pills or potions Alice take seems like a drug reference, but it's obviously not something 18th Century British writers were interested in. It's all about consuming and things going through "doors" in Alice the way she is traveling through other portals.

 

Or the fact that the painting the White Roses red bit, or even the existence of the Red court and the White, are references to the War of the Roses between the Houses of York (symbolized by the white rose) and Lancaster (symbolized by the red rose). So these symbols are so far beyond our horizon of perspective now, they seem so scattershot and random and meaningless, no wonder they are disturbing. This is even more disturbing because Carroll was also obsessed with math, so part of the story is motivated by cold logic, so the cognitive dissonance created by juxtaposing semantic or mathematical philosophy (ex. "you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'") against stuff that makes no sense to us anymore is all the more severe. Like, this is a book for... children?