Why A Young Hatter Madigan Animated Series Could Be The Next "Avatar: The Last Airbender"
I don’t know what has happened but in the past five to ten years the popularity of anime has exploded. While you could argue that anime was always massive, it was more of a subculture consisting of those kids who Naruto-ran in P.E. and those who watched anime but didn’t talk about it because they didn’t want to be grouped in with the Naruto-runners. What was once nerd culture is now popular culture. And I’m here for it.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, too; I was always here for it. No, I was not a Naruto runner, but when Cartoon Network switched to Toonami came on, I was locked in. (Specifically, I liked Bleach.) I knew I was about to watch something different from what I had ever seen before. Everything was new and exciting - the art style, world-building, action, and the themes that were being tackled. Before I had seen anime it never occurred to me that cartoon characters could bleed if the artist wanted them to. It was mind-blowing, it still is. When I’m in a creative rut I’ll find an anime series I’ve never seen before because the creativity is so different. It’s like a factory reset for me.
In America, the most popular anime genre is shōnen. Shōnen is manga/anime with a target audience of 12 to 18-year-old boys (girls obviously love it as well because it wouldn’t be as popular without them). Some of the most popular anime shows that have ever existed fall into this genre, Naruto, Dragonball Z, Bleach, Attack on Titan, Full Metal Alchemist, One Piece, and Hunter X Hunter. I want to keep going because I’m afraid I will miss your favorite show and you will leave an angry comment I won’t read but I’ve already mentioned enough shows.
A common trope in anime is taking a known thing, be it a historical event, fictional universe, and/or real or fictional characters, and tailoring them to the author's vision. Take the character Franken Stein from Soul Eater for example. In the show, he is an amalgamation of both Victor Frankenstein and his monster and uses electricity-centric attacks. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is obviously the inspiration yet, in the show, Franken Stein is wholly unique. Taking characters, IPs, or historical events and using them as a jumping-off point to create your own story isn’t uniquely Japanese. A perfect example of that is in Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars series and the Hatter M graphic novels. Frank took Lewis Carroll’s world and characters and created a unique realm. This is why I think The Looking Glass Wars would be perfect for a “Western anime” adaptation. Specifically, an animated series following his Mad Hatter character, the Master Milliner and Royal Bodyguard Hatter Madigan.
Frank Beddor’s Hatter Madigan is not your tea-sipping, seat-swapping Hatter of old. He is a badass blade-slinging, hat-throwing, supersoldier. His story is perfect for an animated adaptation. In Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars series, Hatter Madigan is introduced as the royal bodyguard for Princess Alyss and her family. The Hatter M graphic novel spinoff series follows Hatter on his wild and action-packed adventures around the world in search of the missing Princess Alyss. This alone is enough for a show but the world of Wonderland that Frank created is so much larger than this. We haven’t even gotten into the Suit families and their political battles, card soldiers, the mysterious and powerful skills of Dark and Light Imagination, creative tinkerers, looking-glass transportation, and the Crystal Continuum. The world that Frank Beddor built is massive, unique, and detailed. To have this world brought to life through animation would blow everyone away.
The show would follow the young Hatter who was orphaned at four after his parents’ disappearance during a Millinery mission, Hatter and his older brother Dalton lived at the Millinery academy for years before Hatter was allowed to attend the school himself. Burdened by the shadows cast by his talented older brother and his parent's reputation, Hatter strives to be the best. Did someone say training arc? The Millinery is the secretive military force of Wonderland, where the best Milliners are tasked with safeguarding the Queen and her family. Hatter is determined to succeed at the academy and make a name for himself in his own right.
What specifically would make this show a “Western anime?” Or for that matter, what even is a “Western anime?” The term itself doesn’t mean that much on its own because a “Western anime” is just a cartoon. But, there is one specific show that I and many others agree is specifically a “Western anime” and not just a cartoon. That show is Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Along with its Japanese-inspired art style, Avatar also did something that not many other Western cartoons aimed at young adults. The show’s themes and stakes were serious. Characters got injured, were in peril, and had to make truly difficult choices. The show had depth, which is much more common in anime compared to Western cartoons. So, while there is no such thing as a “Western anime,” an animated series about Hatter Madigan could sit beside Avatar: The Last Airbender and become a show that people call a “Western anime.”
There are things about the Hatter Madigan series as well as The Looking Glass Wars that are reminiscent of anime already. Starting on the surface, let’s look at the weapons. Specific weapons and tools are a common trope in anime. Gon from Hunter x Hunter has his fishing rod, Mitsuri Kanroji’s whip sword in Demon Slayer, and the Death Note in Death Note. The reason for these cool, unique, and unorthodox weapons in anime is that they allow the viewer to gain a sense of who a character is just by glancing at them. Milliners are known for their signature hats. While stylish, they are sentient, deadly, thrown weapons. Along with their hats, Milliners also utilize many other weapons, from belt buckles with a series of J-shaped sabers to backpacks that seem to provide an unending supply of different blades. A vast majority of these weapons are imbued with magical thread made of caterpillar silk to make them even more powerful.
There is something “weird” about anime. Now, when I say “weird” (and I’m going to say it a few times) I don’t mean that in a bad way. I would argue the “weirdness” is a drawing point for many of the viewers. The “weirdness” is originality. Even when a show is an adaptation, there is always some form of “weirdness” that takes something we all know and turns it on its head. When one takes a step back, it is easy to see that weirdness isn’t unique to anime. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is weird and Frank’s adaptations are weird as well. Again, weirdness is not a bad thing, it just means that it’s something that has not been seen before or is an original take on something familiar. The Hatter animated series would have the perfect amount of weirdness, attracting audiences and keeping them locked in. Weapons imbued with caterpillar thread are weird and awesome. If you want to zoom out more, turning Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland into this amazing sci-fi/fantasy world is weird…and awesome.
Finally, there are the stakes. As I mentioned before, Avatar: The Last Airbender is accepted as a “Western anime” not because of its art style but for its themes. The main character, Aang, is the last Airbender due to the Fire Nation’s genocide of the airbenders. In The Looking Glass Wars trilogy and the Hatter M graphic novel series people get hurt, people die, and characters have to make difficult moral choices. This, of course, would translate to the show. Hatter Madigan is an orphan who grew up in the Wonderland version of Westpoint before attending said school. While I’m sure he would have some happy memories of his childhood, that does not make it a happy childhood. The show, of course, will have its fair share of fun and lighthearted moments, but these will be balanced with the drama. It feels as though in animated shows, it is often forgotten that kids can handle a lot more than just the happy or silly moments.
A Hatter animated show needs to be made. There has been a massive vacuum left by The Last Airbender that has yet to be filled. Given the rise of anime, it’s obvious that people want more and they are going elsewhere to get it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most recognizable and successful IPs in history. People can’t get enough of Alice. So let’s give them what they want.
Meet the Author
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
All Things Alice: "Escaping Wonderland" Interview
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Escaping Wonderland producer Pelle Hallert and writer Mårten Gisby from Cortopia Studios join me as my guests! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Pelle Hallert and Mårten Gisby, welcome to All Things Alice. I’m excited to have you guys on the show. If you wouldn’t mind quickly introducing yourselves and what you do at your company, then we'll jump in.
Pelle Hallert Good to meet you, Frank; thanks for having us. I work in Sweden at a company called Cortopia Studios. We make virtual reality games and created an Alice in Wonderland fantasy called Escaping Wonderland. I have a background in films. I started out as a director of photography and directed a lot of commercials. Then, I moved over to computer games in 2016. I started making cinematics at Dice. I made all the cinematics for Battlefield. So I started doing that, and then I transitioned into producing and got into VR.
When I started at Cortopia, they had a former Alice game called Down the Rabbit Hole, which they created in this beautiful VR diorama setting with all of Wonderland coming to life. It was absolutely stunning. I was part of creating the sequel, Escaping Wonderland, together with Morton here, who is the lead writer. It was really one of those joyful experiences of taking our version of the IP and seeing how we could explore that further and have our own interpretation and meaning.
FB I'm excited to drill down on the way you approach that. Mårten, how did you get your start? You started a poetry society, right?
Mårten Gisby It was a long time ago. That was during my hipster days when I was living off noodles and falafels and just doing whatever I could. But yeah, I did start a poetry collective once, and I use it in my bio, I think, to sound cultured and pretentious, as Pelle would say. But I mostly worked in film, actually, for many years. I wrote a couple of books, and then two years ago, I got roped into Cortopia by Pelle to work on Escaping Wonderland. They had the foundation set, and I had the joy and privilege of writing scripts and directing the performers. This was one of the best projects I've ever worked on, so I'm really happy to be here to talk about it.
FB Thanks, guys, for joining me. It sounds like we have very similar backgrounds. I was a film producer, started writing novels, and was interested in gameplay. I'm interested in all creativity, but particularly with this one IP, Alice in Wonderland, in which you guys are doing games and writing in this space, and I've been writing in this space for 20 years.
Why don't we start from the beginning? I'll tell you a quick little story about how I came to Alice.My grandmother's name was Alice, and Alice in Wonderlandwas my mother's favorite book. So when I was 10 years old, I was really forced to read the book. They thought I would really enjoy it, but I hated it. Years later, I got my sweet revenge by writing The Looking Glass Wars. I wrote a book that I thought my 10-year-old self would enjoy. My favorite introduction to Alice in pop culture was Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Of course, The Matrix was another in terms of the movie side of it. Those were my influences and early introductions.
Pelle, do you have an early introduction? Why did you choose Wonderland instead of Oz, Neverland, or any other piece of pop culture?
PH The original choice of Alice in Wonderland was prior to my days at Cortopia, but since we started exploring it, the team fell in love with the IP very much. So when I came here and started discussing it, they were so intrigued and had such a huge knowledge of the IP. I knew some of the IP because we read the book in school when I went to an English school in Tanzania, but it didn't make an impression on me. To me, it came to life through Tim Burton. It really tried to expand on what Wonderland could be and how they could speak and whatnot. So when I came aboard the project, I basically had that vision, Tim Burton’s Wonderland, in my mind. But then you explore it, like you've done, and it's like, “Wow, what is this space?” There are all of these interpretations and we really tried to dig down into what it could mean to us.
I think Mårten really did a wonderful job of interpreting the humor in the novel and moving that into the game, which is a huge part of the experience. But we also lean into the heavy topic of depression. We're touching on it but doing it on such a scale that you get to laugh at it without discarding the seriosity of the subject. To Mårten's credit, he did a wonderful job in the writing and brings so much to this game.
FB The theme of mental health and madness is not heavy-handed at all. You have all the levity of the comedic elements. Mårten, when you were first introduced to the work, did you interpret it as whimsical or nightmarish? You have sort of a mix in EscapingWonderland. The trailer has a very funny moment when the Dormouse is exercising with the little trap. So tell me a little bit about your introduction and your interpretation of Alice and how you took that into writing this game.
MG We've definitely done a mix because we had the legacy of the first game that was more aimed toward family and children and had the whimsy and magic of Wonderland. We wanted to keep that with us. That’s true to Alice in Wonderland, but we wanted to add more psychedelic, surreal, and psychological elements as well as dark and nightmarish themes. What I really love, and what I tried to keep a lot of in the game, is this nonsensical wordplay that turns into world-building. There are a lot of examples in Alice in Wonderland where they play with the language and make that true in this world in a way that becomes allegorical. For example, at the beginning of the game, she literally falls down and hits rock bottom. That’s a metaphor for her psyche hitting rock bottom, and she has to work herself up from where she's fallen, using that kind of humor and allegory.
FB You chose to create a new lead character for the game named Molly. That's funny because I have a character, Hatter Madigan, whose daughter is named Molly. How did you approach her character, and what is her evolution of her psychologically? What space is she in before she hits rock bottom? Is there a story behind her mental state before the game? Because in Alice in Wonderland, self-identity is a big question. Which is a question for all of us through different stages - “Who am I?” Is that part of the journey for her, or was that explored in the first game?
MG It’s one of the first questions she asks in this game. There is this gameplay mechanic where the player gets three choices in both games and in the first game, you get to choose the character's name. You can choose Alice, but you can also choose other names for the main characters. In this game, the idea I think Pele pitched to me was that we want our Wonderland to be a dream world where lots of people can end up. It's a collective dream many people might be dropping into while they sleep, whether they remember or not. It could be they're in a coma because of a car accident, or they're in a catatonic, depressed state, or it could be that it's just a story a grandfather is telling the granddaughter.
We wanted to have the second game be a completely new character in the same world with the same secondary characters, but everything gets reinterpreted. In the first one, everything is reinterpreted from a story the grandfather is telling the granddaughter. In this game, someone is telling her story, and eventually, we find out that she is lying unconscious in a catatonic, depressed state. One of the big challenges was how to work with that without it getting too grim because we can't show the world outside. We can only give hints about it through the little easter eggs you find throughout the story. So we let the player interpret a lot of what the truth is outside, and we give little hints. You can create your own story about what Molly has been going through in the real world that caused her to fall down here and what it is that she has to rebuild her mental health and psychology in order to wake up and go back to her family.
FB How do you guys manage the intersection of story versus puzzle solving and exploration in terms of volume? Why don't you describe what you do in the game? We have the story. There are puzzles. You explore the world, but what are the obstacles you're up against, and how do you manage those aspects when you're putting the game together?
PH It’s a good question. We had this discussion where we said, “Okay, what type of game are we creating here?” We started off saying it was a puzzle, but then we started to look at what kind of game we wanted to create and what the first game was about. Then, we started to identify that the game was more of a narrative experience. By doing that, we labeled it as a narrative puzzle, which meant basically that the puzzles can't be that tough. They can be challenging but not too tough. The story is the main engine for our experience in the world. Like Mårten said, landing at rock bottom, you should have no idea who this person is. You should have the same knowledge as your character and rediscover her through herself.
So we looked at the puzzle mechanics and tried to align those with the story. Is there something we can interpret? What can we potentially do in this biome that sheds light on the narrative beats we want to fulfill? That was probably the biggest challenge, to align those two parts. When you do a game, you have all of these puzzle mechanics you want to do, but when the narrative came into play, we saw that some of these puzzle mechanics weren't really making sense. We had to rediscover, so there was a lot of back and forth with Mårten in the writing. How can we convey this to the player better?
What are the features we want to tell the player about regarding mental health, as Mårten was talking about? We put a lot of research into the game. First of all, drawing on our own experiences in mental health. We had a lot of tragedies within the team that we could talk about, and we took that and then worked with psychiatrists and psychologists to see if we were on the right path. Then, we realized some puzzles weren't making sense, and we had to redo them. Sometimes, the narrative had to be redone in order to fit the cohesive experience. If we had a very strong mechanic in a room, for example, then we potentially needed to tweak the narrative to fit that.
FB Mårten, did you lean into the Mad Hatter to show this mental health aspect, or are all the characters part and parcel of the mental health theme? Obviously, with the Queen, you know how extreme she is with the whole “Off with your head!” stuff. But Hatter seems to also be a character you could utilize. So tell me about the characters from Wonderland, the ones you leaned into, and then the secondary characters you focused on.
MG To describe the game for the listener, you're standing in this void, and you have the entire game as a 2D platform spiraling around you. So you lead Molly upwards through the game, and you turn because it's VR, right? So you turn and you see her. And when you've gotten a bit far up, you can look down, and you see all the levels you've climbed up through. So it's basically like you're in the rabbit hole, looking at the whole rabbit hole. As you go through the different levels, you meet a lot of the characters from Alice in Wonderland, like the Cheshire Cats, for example. We interpret all the characters to make them fit the narrative, and some of them have their counterparts in Molly's life in different ways, and they symbolize different things.
FB So, it was the same way The Wizard of Oz did a little bit. Can you give a few examples of the different characters and how you've reinterpreted them? For instance, you mentioned the Cheshire Cat. How is the Cheshire Cat different in your game and your world?
MG The Cheshire Cat is actually one of the ones that are quite similar to the original. Molly comes to this place we named the Critter Glade, like the White Rabbit, and everyone used to live there, but the Cheshire Cat has chased everyone away because he wants to be alone. So he renamed it Bitter Glade. It's all cold and snowy and very beautiful and magical, but you can feel the isolation of this place. He just wants to be mean, so he belittles Molly. She gets angry and says, “Oh, shut up, you dumb cat!” Then she shrinks in size because she's literally being belittled. The Cheshire Cat says, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to belittle you.” Then he pops away, and he keeps showing up and saying mean things, and Molly gets angrier and angrier. The lesson she has to learn is that she can't push people away like the cat has done. So that's what we did with the Cheshire Cat.
Then the Caterpillar shows up, and he's in this big, dark cave where he's sitting on some mushrooms and smoking his hookah pipe. We've rebuilt him very much as a mentor and a guide for Molly. He's quite funny. He hints at what he's smoking in this pipe. Children won't understand, but the moms and dads can laugh at it.
The Caterpillar is basically guiding Molly to conquer her different fears in this dark cave, and later, the player can find a cassette tape that you collect through these different levels. When you listen to the cassette tapes, you hear little splices from the outside world, and one of those snippets, for example, is Molly talking with her therapist. Then, suddenly, you get it. “Oh, shit, this is real.” This isn't a dream. This is something from the real world that you get to listen to. And the therapist sounds quite a bit like the caterpillar. So you can understand that maybe the Caterpillar is a dream version of her therapist who is trying to help her through this.
FB That's quite clever. I like that a lot.
MG The Mad Hatter is not a big character, but he shows up towards the end and is quite mean. He makes a lot of jokes that she has created this whole world just to try to get through her trauma, and he makes fun of that. So we've made him into quite a vicious, self-deprecating voice in her head that is telling her basically, “You're mad. You're as mad as a hatter.” She says, “Are you completely mad?” And he replies, “Well, isn't that the pot calling the kettle whack?” Then he starts laughing like a maniac. So we try to have fun with him, for sure, but he's quite a mean character.
PH We also introduced the player to face cards as they play along. That way, we can showcase what the Cheshire Cat, for example, was like in the real world. During the writing, we talked about what he could represent in the real world. For example, he was a bully from school and can potentially evoke those emotions in Molly at a certain stage in herself. So we had this hidden narrative all around. We thought about how we could translate all of the characters in our Wonderland into real characters and in what way we should convey that to the players visually. We do that through these trading cards. So there is quite a back story. The more cards you get, get more of a holistic view of what actually has happened to Molly and who she is.
FB So you can find these cards, do a deeper dive into the backstory, and put those cards together in like a little bit of a deck. That's very clever as well.
Tell me about Down the Rabbit Hole and the demographic that you found really enjoyed the game. Now with Escaping Wonderland, which is a little bit darker, though it still seems like a family game. You mentioned the comedic elements, like with Pixar, where there are two levels. There's the adult level and the kids level. What have you found? Who's coming to this game? Who's playing this game? Who are you after?
PH It's quite fun because, in VR, it's predominantly male. I would say the majority of players are 30-plus males. However, that did not translate to our games. Down the Rabbit Hole, the first game had almost 50% plus female players, which was very interesting, and this is the group we tried to tailor to. That was obviously pretty hard since there are so many males in this industry, and as a studio, we have a lot of guys in the team. But we really tried to diversify our team and hire women. We brought in a lot of female focus groups to dig into it.
But I think the main focus of our game was not to make it dark. We always had the discussion, “What should the feeling be when you play?” It's very tough in VR because you have these short spans in which you play. You have these core sessions that are about 20 to 30 minutes. Then you want to leave the headset. So if you are too rough on the edges, if you are giving the player too tough of a time, they will have a hard time returning. So that was quite a challenge. From the baseline, when you start off, it's pretty whimsical down there in Wonderland. We sprinkle the narrative throughout, but in the beginning, you don't really see it come through. It comes to life the more you play, and that’s really when it grabs you. But we really try to address the female player. That's why we have a female protagonist. We have situations in the game that are tailored toward the female audience.
But our publisher, the head of publishing, is female, and she was obviously scared of us as a male studio. Which was very understandable, right? Can we really do this? Can we pull it off? But Mårten has written two or three books with a female protagonist, so he has experience in the matter. Then, for us, it was the story. A good story is a good story, and it's relatable to any type of person. But we really wanted to have the female players because when you get them, they’re such a devoted fan base. So the more we try to lean into that, the better it is.
FB What's the difference between extended reality, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality? Because those are all game descriptions in the bio. Can you give us a quick tutorial?
PH Augmented reality and mixed reality are very similar. You see the world you're in, like Pokemon Go, for example. You see the world through your camera, but there are graphic elements in it. You can project stuff on surfaces and walls or whatnot. It’s a mix. We were thinking if it was possible to put this game in mixed reality because Meta is always asking for those kinds of game experiences. But we really wanted to immerse the player in VR so they’d put on the headset and embrace this lovely world of Wonderland. But that's the baseline. Mixed reality and augmented reality are a mix of reality and fictional elements.
FB How is Meta to work with?
PH Meta been supporting us all the way. They always had our backs. They're a good partner, and their feedback has been valid throughout.
FB Mårten, why do you think Wonderland still resonates? Why are we still using Wonderland as a jumping-off spot in 2025, almost 160 years after it was introduced? What do you think is the fascination? Can you pinpoint for yourself what resonates with this story? The original story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is very episodic. Alice has agency, but not the kind of agency we’re used to in stories with the reluctant hero, the Chosen One. In Alice, it's arbitrary, and the chapters could be switched around, so it wouldn't matter. But yet, we keep coming back to it. But do you have a theory on that?
MG I think you were onto it before when you were talking about the whimsical versus the nightmarish. There is something really original with this world, where you mix the real and the dream. If you think about David Lynch, he’s one of the people who has captured dreams on film in a way that feels like a dream because it doesn't make sense. I think Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are for books in a way. They capture what it feels like to be in a dream, nothing makes sense. Everything's a little bit goofy and whimsical, but in a way that makes you think, “Is this creepy? I'm not sure. Is it just magical and wonderful, or is there something sinister under the surface?” That's my interpretation of it, at least. I think it’s this mix of whimsy and psychology. Everything feels like a very fundamental allegory for the human psyche and human dream state. In the Tim Burton films, they try to make her the Chosen One. They try to make it more like a high fantasy story, but I feel like that's not what draws you to it. You don't want Alice in Wonderland to be Narnia or to be The Lord of the Rings. It's its own thing.
FB Speak for yourself, my friend. You haven't read The Looking Glass Wars, apparently. Now, stepping into my territory, I might take issue.
MG Sorry, sorry. Well, I think it's a different thing to try to reinterpret Alice rather than do a traditional adaptation.
FB No, my point is there are so many ways to interpret Alice, but fundamentally, everybody is going to have their own ideas. Wonderland is a place to escape reality, where reality, fantasy, and fiction are all mixed up. If you look at politics in America, you'll see that facts are no longer facts. So, Alice in Wonderland was often referenced when talking in a political context. In gaming, I came across another game called Across the Wonderlands, which is a survival game. So you can take Wonderland and use that idea in any number of ways.
I was on the U.S. Ski Team for a number of years, and “Winter Wonderland” was thrown around all the time. So Wonderland was a magical, whimsical, beautiful place for us to go to. And “down the rabbit hole,” whether it's used in reference to the internet or politics, whatever “down the rabbit hole” is, gets used every single day. I'm sure you noticed that when you started writing in this space, you can't escape it. It's everywhere.
Has that been helpful in terms of having an IP to base the game on in terms of getting attention or in terms of Meta feeling like, “Oh, you have an IP already?” Look at what happened with Wicked, the musical based on The Wizard of Oz. We're doing the same thing with Alice in Wonderland in the game space. Has the connection to Wonderland helped?
PH Absolutely. It's a strong IP, and everybody knows about it. Everyone has their own impression of what Wonderland could be. Alice in Wonderland has massive appeal, and it helped greatly.
FB In which countries have you had the most success? I bring this up because Japan has the most editions of Alice in Wonderland of any country in the world. So, I'm wondering if you have a sweet spot in terms of countries around the world.
PH The U.S. is our main target. But I think it's also due to the platform. There are so many people who own a headset in the U.S., so I think that's why we haven't sort of dug any deeper when it comes to breaking out per user.
FB In terms of quantifying success, how does one do that with VR headsets? Is it based on how many people play or how long they play? How does one know if they're on the right track and if it’s making financial sense?
PH First of all, you see the amount of copies sold. Then there is the rating on the store, so you can see what kind of rating the game is getting. Escaping Wonderland is getting super, super awesome ratings. I think it's on a 4.8 out of 5. It’s really up there among the top sellers on the Meta store. The reviews have been through the roof, so it's absolutely perfect. We couldn't ask for more. However, the first game had a bit of a slow burn. Normally, in games, you used to see this; it’s sort of changing now, but you would have huge sales the first week or first days, but then it drops quite rapidly.
VR is somewhat different, especially in this game. So it's on a slow burn, but it's steadily growing, so people are discovering it. We get a lot of attention through podcasts like yours, Frank, and our voice cast. They are very well-known actors, and they committed so much to the story since the topic really spoke to them, as well as the mental health aspects. So they've been helping us promote the game a lot, just because they saw it and they loved it to that extent.
Plus, we are getting feedback from users, not just about the game and how it’s a fun experience but also about how it actually helped them in their real lives. Mårten and I were discussing a video the other day of a person who released this video himself, saying the game changed his perspective on life and really took to him. It was one of those emotional moments that you wouldn't wish for, but when you see it, it's really rewarding. It's really, really not just down to the sales at the end of the day. It's really down to emotions. If we can awaken those emotions, then we know we're on a good track and that the game will probably sell over time since it's a great experience.
FB I think what you're talking about is really, really important. As a creator, you’re not creating for the sales, you're creating to share something. I don't need to dig into what tragedies your team has had, but the fact that it’s fused with what you're doing, people feel that. When you have a response like you just described, people are reading between the lines and picking up on the feelings.
When that transfer of energy and creativity gets bounced back to you, it's a really profound, emotional moment where you think, “Okay, I've connected. What was in my mind has now gone out in this collective world and is coming back in terms of this feedback, and that feedback loop is why I do what I do.” Yes, it's great if you sell a lot of copies, but you are sharing something about yourself that's specific, and doing that is where the real work is, where the real joy is, and where the real satisfaction is. So I think that it's pretty profound that you're having that experience with your game, and kudos to you for sharing and for having that success. That's what artistry is really about, right?
PH I agree one hundred percent. But fingers crossed, sales will pick up.
But I think you're a hundred percent right when it comes to ingenuity and the take on the subject. But we're here fronting a team. Mårten obviously did a lot of the writing and did a nice job there, but there are so many stories being told through the art, the music, the puzzles, and then by everybody in the team. There's so much love in the space. It was really this passion project that you dream about being part of, where everybody has this holistic view of where we want to go with the project and the story we want to tell. So we're just two guys fronting what a team behind us has really been pulling through.
FB Games are a collective and it's a big team effort. Speaking of the art, how did you land on the art style? You wanted to stay close to the original game, but then you expanded. In Escaping Wonderland game, there's what looks like an engineering room, and you have the big clock. The Caterpillar design is really interesting and fresh, but the Cheshire Cat is a sort of familiar color palette. Was there an art director? How did you guys land on the art style?
PH Obviously, the art style had a legacy from the first game, Down the Rabbit Hole, and it was really fun because sometimes art-by-accident happens, right? When they started to create the first game, they had a bunch of 2D artists in the studio. They did not have 3D artists. So what that meant was figuring out how to facilitate those guys within the game creation. So they hand-painted each of these environments. That's why it very much looks like a theater set with props. It's very layered. There are not that many assets in it. There are some assets, here and there, that you can interact with, but it's mainly built as a stage with this very unique art style that is very appealing.
So, going from Down the Rabbit Hole to Escaping Wonderland, we wanted to keep that style. But then, like you said, “Okay, how do we expand on that? How do we expand on the characters and environments?” One thing that came into play, which we talked a lot about with the art team, was that when it came to environmental storytelling, we were always asking, Who has been living here? What does this room represent? What do we want the stories to say? How do we translate the story? If this is going to be an estate, what would happen? We have mice living here. How do the mice go about their everyday life? How can we translate that to the art on the wall? How can we spark some of that humor throughout the environment and, by doing that, still keep the whimsical stuff? That was also a big part of the storytelling when it comes to every artist having each room, how should we approach it? What is the status of the player coming into this? This is our low point. So it needs to be pretty dark. What do we showcase here? What kind of symbols could we potentially add here that add to that?
FB It certainly sounds like your background in movies and television would come in very handy when you're taking the environment and turning it into a character. It has to be a character because you're going to be hanging out there. You're going to be peeking around all the corners, so you're going to really have to think deeply and provocatively about how these environments are affecting the players.
Now that you've created Wonderland, do you have any aspirations to go to Neverland or Oz? Or, Mårten, the name of your book series is Alba and the Land Beyond. Is there any reason we can't go to Alba and the Land Beyond?
MG Every time we have an afterwork, I try to “inception” Pele so that they could make games out of my books.
FB So what's the holdup?
PH Nothing. He nagged me down, but my defenses are awesome.
FB Let's make a deal right here. Let me try and broker a deal.
PH It's a beautiful book. It's absolutely fabulous. But to your point, this is something that we have talked about. We have this very beautiful diorama mechanic, which is very intriguing. What other IPs could we pinch this on? And what other IPs could we explore in this same setting? There are really no limits to it like you said. We could go anywhere with this, but obviously, we're not that rich of a company, so it still has to be in the public domain. But it's still a possibility, and we're really looking into it. We just hope, like you were talking about, that as long as the game's doing well enough, then it makes sense for another one.
FB So Escaping Wonderland has been released.
PH Yes. It's out on the Meta store, and it has gotten a lot of use. We'd be happy to send you a copy, Frank, so you can try it out. Since you're so invested in the IP, we would just be thrilled to have you looking into it.
FB That’d be great. And folks interested in seeing the trailer can go to your website or Google it. And if they're interested in the game, they go to Meta.
PH Meta store for buying the game. If you have a headset, it's very accessible. If you want to know what it's all about, Google “Escaping Wonderland VR,” then it will pop up, and you can see some videos. There are also a couple of playthrough videos, so you can see other people playing and see how much they are enjoying it.
MG Check out some reviews if you don't trust me and Pelle. It's gotten quite amazing reviews, fours and fives everywhere. And we got an award a few weeks ago.
PH Yeah, for best storytelling in games. We aspire to be nominated for multiple awards.
FB Well, before we leave, if you were a character from Wonderland, who would you be, and why?
MG You know, when you come to a certain age, you always land on the Caterpillar, right?
FB Yes, as you get older, you lose more hair.
MG Also, your main character days are over.
PH I still feel like Alice.
FB You're still on an adventure.
PH No, I feel like I snap between the White Rabbit and Dormouse like I'm just stressing around, and then I'm just lazing on the couch, sleeping,
FB Speaking of the Dormouse, just tell me the inspiration for the trap as an exercise device.
MG I don't remember who came up with that. One of the puzzles is about finding four little mouse kids because their mother has yelled at them and they’ve run away, so you have to bring this mouse family back together. All the kids are doing something really dangerous. So you go to the gym, and the mouse kid is working out with this mouse trap and doing some Fast and Furious references like a gym bro. Then another mouse is building a sand castle with rat poison and talking about how it's making him feel like he’s flying. We've got one sunbathing in front of an oven, and another is walking a tightrope.
FB There's a lot of black humor, and there's a lot of whimsical humor. I know my very twisted audience and the Wonderland fanatics will be really interested in checking out your game. Thank you both for taking the time and congratulations to you both and the whole team for your trip to Wonderland and for bringing us along with you. Kudos to all of you for your creativity and sharing your world with us.
The Deck is Stacked: Alice and Wonderland in Card Games
Welcome back beyond the Looking Glass, where the many mad reflections of Wonderland and its denizens can appear anywhere and in any shape! You will be delighted to see many familiar faces appear in various trading and competitive card games that are quite popular on Earth. Some of these “visions” of Wonderland build off the fantastical interpretations of Lewis Carroll, while others are as strange and dark as the madcap reality of the Crystal Continuum.
“Alice In Wonderland” – Lorcana (Disney)
Leading the pack is perhaps the most obvious use of Alice in Wonderland- the Disney card game Lorcana. Set in a magical realm of the same name, Players wield “magical inks” to call on familiar heroes and villains from the Disney universe. Some of these characters and moments are pulled straight from established Disney lore, while others are transformed by the fantastical realm of Lorcana.
Players compete to be the first to collect 20 Lore, using their various cards to quest their Lore and challenge their opponent's characters. Character, Item, and Action cards allow a variety of play options and, while there are a variety of Abilities shared between different Characters and Items to shake up the basic rules of Lorcana, there is a unique spice to those that hail from Wonderland.
It should be said that in Lorcana, the first turn a Character enters play they cannot take any actions unless they have a special ability to do so. Following the White Rabbit, a majority of the Lorcana cards based on Carroll's Wonderland are focused on their ability to Rush, therefore skipping over that rest period so you're not late collecting 20 Lore.
In its early years and already possessing flavorful and fun mechanics, Lorcana provides a magical vision of Wonderland's madness. For those not too familiar with trading card games or the mad story behind the Looking Glass, this vision of Wonderland is an easy entrance for Players at any level of experience.
However, if mad-as-a-hatter gameplay is what you are after, then you should read on…
From the Japanese media giant Bushiroad, Cardfight!! Vanguard is set on Planet Cray, a nexus where many worlds overlap and influence each other, particularly with your world of Earth. Colliding realities and players using powers beyond imagining? Sounds quite familiar to anyone in the know regarding the wars beyond the Looking Glass.
In Cardfight!! Vanguard, Players call upon a “Vanguard” to fight their opponent's champion in a battle to be the first to inflict six damage. Your Decks are formed from a Normal unit and Trigger card types, at the most basic level of play, with additional types introduced with each new iteration of the game. While it would be a most intriguing discussion, the deeper realms of play will await those who feel the urge to card fight.
Hailing from the lawless Dark Zone of Planet Cray, we see a dark mirrored version of Wonderland in the maniacal Nightmareland cards. When choosing the grim forces of Nightmareland, your Vanguard's “soul” matters quite a bit. In Cardfight!! Vanguard, when a Player calls upon a stronger grade Vanguard, that new Vanguard is stacked on top of the previous Vanguard(s) and that stack is the Vanguard's soul.
The more powerful Nightmareland units benefit from possessing multiple units with the Nightmareland name while the supporting Trigger units place themselves in your Vanguard's soul to continuously power them up for battle. The deeper the cards are stacked, the greater your favor in battle. Here in Nightmareland, the Queen and her minions serve as offense while Alice and her companions focus on recurring resources and recovering damage.
Should the complexities of Cardfight!! Vanguard and the Gothic fantasy realm of Nightmareland not appeal, then perhaps a modern interpretation is what you're seeking in the Looking Glass.
“M∀LICE” Archetype – Yu-Gi-Oh! (Konami)
One of the original “Big Three” card games, the long-running Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise has paid homage to many imaginative worlds beyond its own. Now Wonderland is ready to duel! In the latest deck-building pack, the brand new “M∀LICE” archetype is set to take Duelists on a trip through a digital rabbit hole.
Before diving deeper, a cursory explanation of Yu-Gi-Oh! is necessary to appreciate the little touches done to bring Wonderland into this card game's space. Players (or Duelists) make their Main Deck with 3 different card types: Monster, Spell, and the often parodied Traps. Unique monsters typically played by using Main Deck monsters are stored in the Extra Deck. On the field, Players use monsters to do battle and Spells & Traps to change the flow of play in their favor as they try to reduce their opponent's Life Points from 8000 to zero.
In an appropriate portmanteau, this series of cards gets its unifying name from “Alice” and “malware,” adding a sci-fi cyberspace aesthetic to the M∀LICE cards. The monsters are themed after chess pieces, with the Pawns in the Main Deck and the Queen in the Extra Deck, and each monster takes on familiar names with hacker motifs. The Cat, the Rabbit, & the Dormouse all appear as Pawns with their own Suits, benefiting your Queen with protection from card effects or specialized ways of removing your opponent's monsters while on the field.
Presently, the cyberspace of “M∀LICE In Underground” has several Queens; “Hearts of Crypter,” “Red Ransom,” and the “White Binder” Queens rule. Each Queen can remove your opponent's monsters by cycling your own and you can add a M∀LICE Spell or set a M∀LICE Trap to further your control of the field. Aside from the pleasant theme of Pawns protecting the more powerful Queen’s moves, all M∀LICE monsters can take a trip down the rabbit hole.
In Yu-Gi-Oh! there is a concept called Banishment, wherein a card is removed from the game and sent to a special limbo zone that can't normally be interacted with. However, the M∀LICE monsters can move themselves in and out of Banishment, often triggering their effects to further confound your opponent. Just be wary dear Duelists, this is a dense game that contains many ways to counter-play your opponent and the Red Queen would be displeased to see you give Wonderland a bad name.
With the draw of a card you can unlock victory or suffer defeat, but along the way with some clever play, you can show your personality and creativity. That is the beauty of a card game: there are set rules and designs to guide you through the basics and once you've mastered those, the existence of cards that bend or break some of the rules gives Players the opportunity to have fun and express their skills. Who knows where Wonderland will pop up next? If you have seen through the Looking Glass, then you can expect to see more things Alyss in the cards.
Marco Arizpe graduated from the University of Southern California and The American Film Institute with degrees in filmmaking and screenwriting. His brand of borderland gothic horror stems from his experiences growing up in a small town where Texas and Mexico meet. Culturally steeped in a rich history of all things terrifying, Marco never fails to bring forward indigenous folklore in contemporary and fresh settings.
All Things Alice: Interview with Ken Markman
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Ken Markman, managing partner and CEO of KKM Global Brand Strategies, join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Ken Markman, welcome to the All Things Alice podcast. I’m really appreciative and excited to have you on the show and to talk about your contribution to the vision that became The Looking Glass Wars franchise and brand. You’re the Manager Partner and CEO of KKM Global Brand Strategies and you've worked on some big movies. You worked on Empire Strikes Back and Scarface. You told me a couple of stories about Barbie when you worked at Mattel. You have all sorts of wonderful stories and you used these stories to help me see a vision for The Looking Glass Wars. But I cannot remember how we met or who introduced us.
Ken Markman I think I may be able to put a breadcrumb on the water for you. You were thinking that you needed to begin to put a corral around this omnibus piece that was sprawling outward and you wanted to be in the licensing business, as a lot of producers and IP owners did at the time. Around that period of time, I had been in very serious conversations with what was then the senior management of WMA. As a result of Edward Scissorhands and several filmmakers at the time who were turning pop culture storytelling into merchandise, the water cooler conversation became “Who's got your toy line? When is your t-shirt coming out?” It was no longer, “What Ferrari do you have?” Nobody cared about that. They wanted to know who had your toy line.
As a result of that, you reached out to a colleague of mine at what was then called LIMA, the Licensing Industries Merchandiser’s Association. You had spoken to a gentleman, I believe his name was Marty Brochstein and you were describing how you needed an entertainment guy, a merchandising guy, a marketing guy, all of that. Marty was very, very kind to have volunteered my name. I was thrilled that he did and I was even more thrilled that you picked up the phone and called. I remember sitting in your tobacco leather chairs in your office.
FB I love those chairs.
KM I love those chairs too and I have been wanting to get a set. My brother-in-law has a beautiful pair but he won't release them to me. But we sat there and I was completely mesmerized by the visual stimulus. That's a word that came out of Mattel. The visual stimulus is very often what we as the acquiring company would have to look at and how potentially toy-etic it could be, something you can play with. When I was over at Universal looking at Casper the Ghost, I turned to Mark Taylor, who was the Head of Development at Boy’s Toys at Mattel, and I said, “We got to pick this up. This is great. It's omnipresent. It's in culture. Every kid has a ghost story.” He goes, “Ken, how do you play ‘Ghost’?” I couldn't answer the question.
That was a telling tale of learning for me while at Mattel. Then when you and I talked, we saw all your card soldiers and Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter and the magic mushrooms. It was a cornucopia of visual stimuli. You had spent an inordinate amount of time with the extraordinary artist Doug Chiang. I immediately fell into this immersive embrace of Alice in Wonderland, and in so doing, I think what percolated immediately into our conversation was not, “How do we play Alice?” but, “How could you claim this as your own?” Or was this just going to be another derivative story in a long merchandising tale? It became incumbent upon me to want to reinvent your story so that you, Frank Beddor, the author, could take control of what had been a classic story owned by somebody else and perhaps even other filmmakers.
That story then became the backstory or the real story, that was so compelling. I know when you told it at meetings at William Morris and CAA and others, invariably, somebody would lean over to me and say, “Ken, is that true?” I always responded, “If Frank said so, it has to be true.” So you became the legend, the mouthpiece, and the face of a new brand of a classic tale that had been mythologized and storied through folklore, which are the underpinnings of Joseph Campbell and the arc of the hero, and everything else from which you've learned and have excelled at.
FB I tried to answer all of the questions you had posed. It's funny for me to think back to 2002 when I met you because my book wasn't published until 2004 in the U.K. and 2006 in the U.S.
KM I knew her because I had been working on The Future is Wild with a documentarian from the U.K.
FB She wasn't a traditional agent. She was a book packager so she she knew all of the publishers. We went in and met all the different publishers and we took the approach that you do in the movie business. You go to the highest possible person and then trickle down. Turns out that in publishing, editors don't like that. Editors want to find the writers and then bring the writers to the publisher, so there was a bias against my book. It wasn't until I went to Egmont, where the publisher had just been given that job and she was previously the lead editor. She said, “You're going to be the last book I edit before I become the publisher.” The combination made it okay for her. Everybody else passed until I worked with Cally Poplak at Egmont and the book became successful.
But I want to go back to the point of our meeting in my office in Hollywood. One of the things I learned from working as a producer was the power of visuals, the visualization of the world. But I couldn't figure out in my mind how the card soldiers could unfold and march and be compact. I just didn't see it. So I asked Doug Chang, who had worked on Star Wars, to do that sketch. (Doug’s Card Soldiers Sketch) That was the first sketch I put on the wall. I loved it so much that I asked him about who he worked with on his movies that did environments. Then I hired Brian Flora, who did the Valley of Mushrooms and the Chessboard Desert. It became a little bit of an obsession for me to visualize the world while I was writing it, as a kind of collaborative effort between artist and author. Then you came into the office, one of the first people who came in who had a business perspective. It was sort of audacious to think, “I need some kind of branding or I want to build a franchise.” I knew I wanted to do that but I didn't have anything ready yet. Your reaction to the world and to what was already created was really inspiring. I thought, “Okay, I might have something here.”
Then you wrote your proposal, which started off with the perspective of branding mythology and pop culture. Then you wrote, “Cultural myth, storytelling, and reoccurring themes bond culture.” I was like, “Okay, what is he talking about?”
KM My wife is still asking me that same question.
FB Then you said, “The multi-generational social condition is called the Cultural Evolution Theory.” I would like you to explain to our listeners what your job is when it comes to branding stories in culture and trying to catch the zeitgeist and make it your own because basically, that's what you were telling me to do. Give me some examples.
KM You’re quoting some phraseology, which are the cornerstones of a book I have long tried to write, which I've shared in bits and pieces with you over these many, many, many years. It's called BrandCulture, and it comes from the multiple disciplines of my career, which are marketing, media, communication, corporate identity, design, and licensing. I just happen to be on the cusp of this epoch of culture right now, which we are living in thanks to the movie industry and other media that preceded it, where we're kind of losing words. Once they were the poetic juice of a culture and right now we're living in an experiential culture which is experienced visually. It's no wonder that social media has captured the next generation.
I was often asked by my students at UCLA, “How'd you get into the business?” And I said, “I love design. I love the expression of storytelling. If I could be in a business painting on the largest canvas in the world, putting words and pictures together, and make a living doing it, I would be very grateful, and that's what I did.” So as an English major on one side and a graphic design wannabe on the other, it was natural that logos, iconography, type, faces, messaging, hidden or overt, would become part of what I wanted to express in a brand.
Then along comes a gentleman from Sarah Lawrence College named Joseph Campbell. Many people who may be listening to this have read his books, such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If they haven't, they ought to pick it up or Google it and drill through some of his things. There's a wonderful book, The Power of Myth, authored by Bill Moyers of PBS, where he interviews Joseph Campbell and he gets right into the arc of the storytelling and arc of the hero.
These stories that are hardwired into our culture are expressed and handed down, interestingly enough, as memes. Not the memes we think of in the 21st century today, but memes that are passed on from one person to the next, as they were religiously. The Catholic Church was the biggest organization of theater 1,500-2,000 years ago. The equivalent of that theater today is no longer the Orpheum in Manhattan, nor is it Radio City, where it once was maybe in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Now it's the fandom that happens at a football stadium, where the collective catharsis of that experience is handed down. “Do you remember last year? It was fourth and three…” They remember it religiously and it gets passed down and it goes from father to son to grandson, all the way through.
We rode that wave through Hot Wheels, interestingly enough. I was at Mattel during the twenty-fifth anniversary and it was just at that time when dads were beginning to have sons. Just like my son-in-law had two sons and my two young grandsons, who are five and three, have now inherited my set of fifty Hot Wheels that I collected. What I'm saying is that memes are stories. Some of them are wildly exaggerated, and some of them are very explicit. Folklore becomes a mythology that gets passed on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Then if it's connected to iconography, whether it's a signature or a voice, a dance, a sound, or a musicianship that then gets placed against twenty-four frames a second, and turns into a motion picture or a theatrical play, this is what we're dealing with today
The experience economy is the expression of story. One of the things we learned through the study of human psychology is that people don't remember facts. If I gibberish to your audience today and say, “Well, you know, seventy-three percent of albinos never reach the age of fifty, it’s going to go right over their head.” If I said to them, “Have you ever seen an albino cat land on their feet after falling off a thirty-foot-high roof?” They'll remember the story. They're not going to remember the fact. So the very beginning of mythology and meme storytelling, which becomes legend and then expressed and changed over time and modernized through technology and media, is the art of storytelling. That's where you began with one of the great stories of all time, Alice in Wonderland.
One of the things I want to amplify about branding is that you begin with the story, and we wanted you to own your story. We wanted to carve it out as unique and separate. This happens whether it's BMW or Nike or Coca-Cola. If you and I were in Atlanta sipping a Coca-Cola in their corporate headquarters, and I said, “Wow, that was a great meeting with the management at Coca-Cola, wasn't it Frank? They got it right away.” If we went back and did a post-mortem and we asked Coca-Cola, they'd say, “Well, was it the meeting that was so good? Was it Frank's presentation? Or was it the Coke that we shared because we enjoy Coke and Coke is life?” That's how ingrained it has become over the last 120 years.
Advertising helps that to a great degree with BMW. “BMW, the ultimate driving machine.” It doesn't get any better than that. There's another axiom that falls into branding, and we talked about this early on, in order to own a brand, you want to be able to own a slice of the consumer's mind. You want to own a word. You want to own a phrase. You want to own a color in their mind. Red, indelibly, boom, Coca-Cola. Nike with the swish. It's simple. It's straightforward. It gets right to you. So when you think about BMW, “the ultimate driving machine,” it couldn't be any better than that. The axiom here is, you want to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. That's what BMW did. It's an automobile. Starbucks, it's coffee, man. But the reality is, they've taken the ordinary and turned it into the extraordinary, and that's what branding is all about. You can take that experience and own it.
FB You tasked me with that when you simply said I should come up with a different spelling for the name Alyss, so I can own Alice. That was the moment I started thinking about broadening out from the names that Lewis Carroll had created and Disney had made familiar. So I changed the spelling of Alyss and the Mad Hatter became Hatter Madigan. Another thing you did that was also very, very helpful is you were posing this question of, “How do we suspend disbelief in this world, in this reality of a fantasy world?” Because The Looking Glass Wars is set both in Wonderland and Victorian England, that gave me a little bit of balance. I also was mindful of creating a Wonderland where people could suspend their disbelief. That was something you kept saying, “We need to be able to suspend disbelief so we can land and live.” As if Jurassic Park is actually in Hawaii, or Wonderland is just up the Five. If you drive long enough, you'll find yourself in Wonderland,
KM Exactly. How could you refute the simplicity of the idea that in a grain of amber, there was a mosquito that contained the DNA of a dinosaur? Only Michael Crichton, with his scientific background, could create it. He created the myth and he turned it into a story that became irrefutable. It's so believable that how could you not want to believe it? That's where metaphors and storytelling become this immersive fabric in the consumer's mind. That's how we started our story. There’s enough believability in the past to shape-shift, to use one of your words, shape-shift some of this so that you can take ownership of it and it becomes irrefutable.
FB You wrote, “A new reality for a new generation, borrowing from the past and making them their own, a form of branded history with its own images indelibly marked in the minds of a new global audience.” So I tried to convey that in a less Professor-ish way
KM I can't get away from myself.
FB That whole idea of creating a new reality, telling a story in a different way but taking ownership of it, I found when I started to go out into the marketplace with The Looking Glass Wars, that was happening. People felt grounded in the world and the story because, the premise of Lewis Carroll getting it wrong was easy enough to go, “Let me just turn my perspective on history and what I think I know.” The other thing that was really important was, that you said, “You have to change their perception of what they think Wonderland is right off the bat. You have to have the meta-story, the story behind the story.” So suddenly I had more work to do.
KM I remember that. It's really true. There are a couple of axioms that have always found their way into my thought process when working on a movie or any branding objective. You do want to suspend disbelief, which is what entertainment and storytelling do. You want to find the universal truth in a message that is not so far out of reach that you can not believe it, it's just beyond my grasp of reality as I know it. By penetrating your world, you're going to show me how I can conclude that reach.
To get back to Coca-Cola for a moment, If you ask Coca-Cola, they want to be, the refreshing drink at the end of your reach. They want their product, their brand, to be at the end of your reach, no matter whether you're at home, the movie theater, or a baseball stadium. A great storyteller and filmmaker does just that. You suspend disbelief. You can almost break through the fourth wall, but by sliding into that world, you will take me magically to a place heretofore I've never been permitted to go. So you become my guide, my sherpa, and through your storytelling, you're telling me how to survive, how to succeed.
That leads me to the universality of it. I was making a presentation to a number of licensees in Los Angeles and California. I was working on a show when I was at MTM called The Blanket Show. There was this Rastafarian sheep who would sit down and unfold a blanket that looked like a book and he would invite all the animals in the woods to sit around while he told a story. It was basically a practice and a runway for parents to help their little ones get off to sleep. At that time in the industry, you had to have 22 or 28 half-hours to be able to syndicate something so that the repetitive nature of viewership would incline a purchase decision for merchandise. I decided I couldn't do that because Bill Melendez, who famously did the Peanuts animated specials, was our animator. We couldn't afford to do 22 or 28 half-hours with Bill, so we decided to do one, but the one was going to be the reprise and the kickoff every night for The Blanket Show at home. So we started off with the Rastafarian sheep. We're jamming and the kids would be dancing the putting their jammies on. “What are we doing now, boys?” “We're going to go brush our teeth and comb our hair. Then we're going to put the music on and then Mom's going to come in and read the book and then Dad's going to shut off the light.” So my pitch to the licensees was, “Here's the universal truth, would you like to be in a business that happens in every household in the world, every night? That's a big business. Or you could take a risk and hope that Batman 47 is going to be as successful as the first two or three?” No, I'd like to be in the bedtime business.
So the book was born and the night-lights and music were created. We had everyone from Rosemary Clooney up and down the ladder singing nighttime songs and the universal truth was irrefutable. You don't want to be in a business that happens in every household around the world at least once a day? We had 35 licensees signed by the end of our first six months based on one half-hour. It was unheard of in the business, an absolute breakthrough.
The first question I invariably asked you was, “Why do you want to tell this story?” Whether you're talking to Alan J. Pakula or Steven Spielberg, both of whom I had the highest regard for when I worked with them, “What's the story you want to tell?” Then I get into that conversation with them, and I say, “What's the promise and what's the takeaway?” It becomes really simple. The promise may be a little abstract. If you ask Christopher Nolan what his promise was on his many movies, it would probably be a very esoteric and dense response, but nonetheless very curated. I then say, “What's the takeaway?”
I put it down to this, your audience just saw your movie in a theater. As they're leaving the theater, the lights and the smell of popcorn are going to hit them in the head. What is the thing they're going to say to their significant other or the person they just shared that experience with? What is that football fan going to tell his son? What's that boy going to tell his dad he just saw in the Viking game? What's the fandom response? That's the takeaway. That's your job as a filmmaker. What do I want them to say, and how does that correlate with the promise I'm going to give to them, so they can enter the sphere of my chapel, my theater of communication, and over the next hour and a half I can take them on the ride of their life? Whether it's at a theme park, in a church, in a synagogue, in a baseball stadium. Your job becomes, what's the takeaway?
FB I remember you posing that question and it was very challenging to reduce it to something personal. That was another aspect of our working together, I started thinking about the power of imagination and the power of getting back to your inner child, where you have wonder and curiosity and anything is possible. I thought, “I'm writing this book because of that. Then you asked, “How do you play imagination?” Then it became about good and evil and Joseph Campbell stuff and you're pivoting to, “What kind of mythology am I creating? What myth do I want people to walk away with that's different than good and evil?”
Now in this culture, as I think about what I'm working on, I think about what's real. Is this real or is it not real? That's powerful with Alyss, because people tell her that her backstory is not real, and she loses her belief in her history. The world is so divisive right now. Facts are no longer facts. With respect to Alyss, I thought it was a really powerful idea that people want to understand that this is real and they can hold on to this. It's not going to be pulled away.
KM That reinforces the etymology of “looking through the looking glass.” At what end of that am I seeing reality? Is it closer to me or further away? Is it giving me the right optics? There's subliminal messaging in that statement that you could run and almost code the brain to be able to say, “I'm looking through this lens. Which media am I experiencing today? What's truth, what's not truth?” If I'm sitting in a football stadium, I'm sitting with 100,000 people who believe in the same thing I do - the “Fandom of the Exalted Play.” We're going to be warriors and win this year's season. This cathartic experience economy is not new. It has lived for over 3,000 years. It's tribal. It's part of our DNA. We're hardwired to it. It's just that it has evolved as technology has evolved and as we have evolved ourselves as we need stories to survive.
FB When you were asking me, “How do you play imagination?” you went to Barbie and the playability of Barbie and how Barbie evolved. You were talking about the different ways you could manipulate the clothing and then the kinds of Barbies. I remember that it was about the playability and how successful Barbie had been and then it tapered off and they had to reimagine it. Now, with the movie having come out, it must have come full circle.
KM Barbie is a portal. She's like a magic wand. They can cut her hair. They can dress her, and once they take off her clothes, they’re impossible to get back on so you have the use-up rate, as we used to call it, in the cosmetics business. Barbie has a usability rate and it wasn’t about how long a girl plays with Barbie. It used to be from the ages of two to eleven, but that has diminished greatly. Eleven-year-old girls are gamers now. They don't play with dolls anymore. The compression of age and the acceleration of adulthood for young kids has grown exponentially. But what has also grown is the number of Barbies. There’s a Barbie astronaut, Barbie policeman, Barbie fireman, Barbie whatever. She's the portal for play. She has costumes, just like the characters in any one of your stories. That all enhances it. Then you have Barbie's house, Barbie's car, and Barbie's friends.
I wanted to give an homage to Hot Wheels for a bit, knowing that you have little babes in your family now. Have you ever noticed a Hot Wheels car just about perfectly fits the width of a little boy's hand?
FB I did not.
KM Do you know that General Motors and all the car manufacturers give Mattel a royalty-free agreement? If you want to do Jeep, if you want to do Corvette, royalty-free. Why? Because that's the next generation. “I'm playing with the Ferrari, Dad! Look at me! Look at me!” When your big sister or big brother is telling you what you can play with and what you can't play with, and your mom and dad are telling you what to do. I have no control over anything but I do have control over these big machines that make loud noises. I can control this. It’s the sense of empowerment and wonderment of imagination. That's how toys work.
FB I wanted to go back to the Jurassic Park story because Michael Crichton came up with that amazing universal premise and then with Steven Spielberg, they took ownership of dinosaurs to the point that nobody is ever going to take dinosaurs back. Do you agree with that?
KM One hundred percent they own dinosaurs. When I was at Mattel, we were looking at this secret property from Steven. We wanted to encourage Steven to do some color configuration so the dinosaurs could be branded. What that means is, that when Mattel did Mermaid Barbie other companies would go out and do a slightly smaller version of a mermaid and dump it into the Targets of the world and whatever. Meanwhile, we would be selling Barbie for $12 or whatever and they were selling theirs in a bin near the checkout line for four bucks. We were being cannibalized.
So mermaids, dinosaurs, puppies, all generic. But you can own it. And Steven looked like he was by the popularity and the size and the sound of his dinosaurs and the maturation of his technology, which he fused into his filmmaking brilliantly. We wanted a color distinction. I remember being in the meeting, going around with all the engineers, must have been in a boardroom of 25 people, and they convinced me we would not be able to go beyond a generic dinosaur and therefore we were afraid we would be cannibalized and our investment in the toy line would never pay off. Hasbro, smartly so, picked it up and made gazillions of dollars. That all down to the power of Steven Spielberg, the storytelling, the sound, the sensation. The rapture of that story was incredible.
But to your point, you want to own a character. You want to own everything about that and close it off so nobody can cannibalize you up and down the toy line by size, material, or channel of distribution.
FB As this podcast is called All Things Alice, what do you think the reasons are that Alice in Wonderland has lasted for so long in culture but hasn't been centralized in the way that Jurassic Park centralized dinosaurs?
KM You can't deny the story is ever present in culture. It's a little like Madeline. She kind of weaves in and out of culture. I think you have made it more accessible across media, which is what's necessary, as opposed to being a classic novel from an English writer steeped in a bygone era. But Alice has captured the imagination of adults and young children. If we can remember going back and saying, “What's real? Is it under my bed? Is it in my closet?” So I think Alice has the potential of wonder, fulfillment, of tripping the light fantastic. Of what is real and what is not? What is make-believe or not? Where does our imagination begin or end? It’s very tribal, watching the flicker of a fire in a cave and acting out the hunt of the day. These are truth serums that flow through our bloodstream. I think that is what has made Alice in Wonderland last for so long. It is a classic tale.
FB What was your first introduction to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Did you read the book? Did you see the movie?
KM It was reading the book, not watching the movie. I had, and have always had, a literary bent, whether it was Charles Dickens or Edgar Allan Poe. I was drawn to that period of dark things and things. I was always drawn to that sort of Nether World. With Alice, I identified with this unknown of possibilities.
FB What's under the bed?
KM What's under the bed? There were several toy lines I reviewed that were everything from dust bunnies to “What's under the bed?” You know, this mythology of “Who's in the shadows?” It plays to our deepest fears and grandest imaginations. We're hardwired to it.
FB This is a part of entertainment and culture that people don't really understand and you've done a really beautiful job of articulating it and the two aspects of your interest in life, literature and art. I can only encourage you, for all of us listening and out in the world, to finish that damn book of yours. Where are you on this book?
KM I have been talking about it relentlessly and just when I don't think I have anything to say about something that supercharges my jets, a conversation with somebody such as you ignites that fuse. I know there's something. I know storytelling and myth are part of our culture and have made what we have come to know as modern life for the last 3,000 to 5,000 years. I'd like to comment on it, to develop a rationale as to why people react a certain way. I've seen it and I know it to be the truth. That's why Alice is a perennial. She's not going away. It's beautiful and you will own imagination however you wish, to define it by color, by shape, by sound, by musical note, soon to be. Through your literary prowess, you will be able to turn these cards over, like your tarot cards, for the public to be able to penetrate the World of Imagination, as you want people to see it, because they may not recognize it by themselves. You are our Sherpa. You are our wise man at the fire telling us the story of Alyss, and that's the takeaway.
FB Well, we need your book. We need your book so all the storytellers can have their roadmap and we can leave the breadcrumbs behind for our audience. What was really enlightening about the conversation was the way you contextualized your experiences and contextualize how other artists have taken their ideas and brought them into pop culture, going all the way back to your story about being in a cave and telling the story of the day’s hunt. All of that is really a powerful road map for creators to own in their own stories. It doesn't have to be a franchise. It just needs to be you expressing your truth and that comes through the writing and the process. That's what you helped me to clarify. You asked strong questions, which helped me make strong choices.
KM Tell me, Frank, if you can give us a pre-teaser. Fragrance is one of the most powerful branding tools in the quiver, because of where the brain senses smell. It's in the center of the brain. It’s very, very powerful. So is music, and you seem to be on the cusp of something rather extraordinary because you could own a sound, just like Mission Impossible. It doesn't have to be an entire orchestra. It could be three notes, whatever.
Are you hoping that your musical will be able to bring a new audience to your franchise and the storytelling of Imagination? I wish I could have front-row seats. I can't wait. I want to be humming the song. Sammy Cahn has one of my favorite quotes. He was once asked, “What is one of the happiest things as a songwriter?” He said, “When I'm walking down Fifth Avenue and somebody is whistling one of my tunes.” I share that with you because you're not too far away, my friend.
FB That’s a great quote. My fantasy was that somebody would dress up as one of my characters for Halloween. When I was first writing my book, I didn't realize what a broad and beautiful world cosplay is and when I went to Comic-Con and people showed up in costumes based on my book, not a movie or a TV show, that was a highlight. But to answer your question, it’s timely because today I received a video from my composer, lyricist, and book writer, and they sang a little song to me, saying, “We're starting!” So, the process of The Looking Glass Wars musical has officially begun today.
KM Bravo. Congratulations.
FB Fingers crossed. I've been thinking about this for a long time because I was friends with Gregory Maguire and I went to see Wickedin San Francisco in 2003 and thought, “I wonder if I could do that with my book.” So I've been thinking about it for 25 years and here we are.
KM I was working on Curious George with Universal for a couple of years and the next up on their hit list they wanted me to undertake was Wicked. Then there was a management change and NBC spun off so the rest is history, as is often the case in Hollywood. But I would have loved to have gotten my hands around that.
FB My understanding is that Wicked was not even on their books. It was a miscellaneous item because originally it was developed as a movie. They couldn't make it as a movie and then they made it as this musical. Now, many, many years later, it’s one of the most successful musicals of all time and apparently, the movie is quite good from reports that I have heard. I'm excited to see it and maybe it'll rub off on folks thinking that The Looking Glass Wars and Alice in Wonderland could be the next.
KM We don't have to own the genre. We just want to participate.
FB Thank you so much for hanging out with us on the show today and sharing your wonderful stories and, most importantly, thank you for your contribution to my work that you initiated and so kindly imparted in 2002 and continued on through all these years. It has really helped me to create what I've created to date. So thank you, Ken.
KM That warms my heart. That has the most meaning. H.L. Mencken, the journalist, was once asked, “Why do you write?” And he said, “I write first, to make a living, and secondly, and more importantly, to win the respect of those I respect.” So your comments are very dear and important to me. Thank you so much.
All Things Alice: Interview with Mary Pat Matheson of the Atlanta Botanical Garden
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have the President and CEO of the Atlanta Botanical Garden Mary Pat Matheson join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor I’d like to welcome Mary Pat Matheson to the All Things Alice podcast. She is the President and CEO of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Mary Pat, so nice to meet you.
Mary Pat Matheson Nice to meet you too, Frank
FB I understand we both spent some time in Utah.
MPM Yeah, I lived there for 30 years. What took you to Utah?
FB I was on the U.S. Ski Team and I lived there for about five years. I had a condo in Salt Lake City and I drove up to Park City and Snowbird.
MPM You can't live in Utah and not ski. It’s a long winter. We were in Park City for about 11 years before we moved to Atlanta.
FB Wow. I bet that was a big adjustment.
MPM It was changing climate, culture, geography, flora, fauna, you name it. It was a big change, but I was I was ready. I'd been at Red Butte Garden and Arboretum in Salt Lake for 20 years and my husband and I talked about it and decided it would be a good thing for my career. Atlanta has turned out to be such a great city. We really love the city and the diversity. My husband is retired now and we have a farm in Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia is, so he gets to stay there all the time and I go back and forth. We need that outdoors. We don't get the mountains and the snow in Atlanta.
FB That's a nice combination. I sort of stopped skiing when I moved to Los Angeles but then I had kids and I had to teach the kids to ski so I fell back in love with it. I drive up to Mammoth a lot. I really miss the mountain life. Sun Valley was one of my favorite places. Park City has exploded.
MPM It's nuts. We kept our house for three years after we moved here and then we decided it was too hard to deal with the rental and we sold it. Now we look back and go, “Well, that was a dumb idea.” But I don't know if I would be happy there anymore. Most of our friends who stayed in Park City have left. It's just exploded. Park City Mountain Resort was owned by a family for all those years and then somebody forgot to renew their lease with the U.S. Forest Service and Vail Resorts and signed up for the lease immediately. So the family lost the resort and it's now owned by a huge conglomerate. It’s just not the same as it once was. And I do think after 11 years, eight or nine months of winter gets old.
FB My friends who lived there all had to move down to Salt Lake City because they couldn't afford to live there anymore. It’s like with a lot of the ski resorts where all the big money from out of town comes in and then all the locals don't have anywhere to live and have to commute 45 minutes or an hour. It's nothing like it was when I was there, which was in the 80s and 90s.
MPM You were there in the heyday. Even better snow then, too.
FB It was amazing back then. I also was there at the start of the Sundance Film Festival, before it became such a big market. It was very, very charming.
MPM Before it was Sundance it was the U.S. Film Festival and they sold it to Robert Redford five years after it began. But a friend of ours, Lori Smith, ran the independent part, which is what took off, of course. It's not even a shadow of its former self. We loved it when it was like it was when you were there.
FB I'm always interested in folks who are exploring Alice in Wonderland in all the different mediums. When I first started writing my book, The Looking Glass Wars and I started looking into how deep Alice runs in pop culture, I was amazed. When I came to Alice in Wonderland gardens it surprised me. It seemed like an outlier. Yet, here I am talking with you about this big exhibit you have in Atlanta and the New York Botanical Garden is doing its own Alice exhibit.
Your exhibit at the Atlanta Botanical Garden is called Alice’s Wonderland Returns. When was the first incarnation?
MPM That is a very good question. This is the second iteration of it with some new work, the Singing Flowers. I believe it was on display in 2019 and into 2020. We've done work with Mosaiculture, out of Canada, going back to 2013 when we did another imaginary world show with giant cobras and then we did one with a big dragon. Alice is the newer one.
What we found when we did it in 2019 and 2020 is Alice has a cult following. Whether you're a little tiny kid or an 80-year-old woman, you have a story about Alice in Wonderland. You have a special place in your heart for Alice. It touches almost all dimensions of life. I was out in the garden during the first show and I saw this woman. She was about 50 years old and had a little dress on, and she was holding the map. I said, “Can I help you?” And she said, “Well, I think I've seen the entire show, but I'm looking at the map because I flew here from Denver to see the Alice in Wonderland show and I don't want to leave in case I miss anything.” Then she said, “See, I wore my Alice dress, and she twirled around, and her dress had Alice in Wonderland all over.” It was hilarious. She hadn't missed anything. I walked her through the whole show but that's the way this show touches people in a way no other show we've ever done has touched people.
FB People like dressing up and doing cosplay with Alice. Do you encourage and invite that?
MPM Every Thursday night from May to the end of September is “Cocktails in Wonderland”. We encourage people on Thursday night to dress up so that's really worked with the cosplay people. Even people who don't know much about cosplay still dress their kids in Alice in Wonderland stuff.
FB Is there a signature drink?
Mary Pat Matheson
It’s the “Queen's Gambit,” a spiced apple Margarita.
FB That sounds lovely and delicious. Might have to try that.
I saw the photograph of the singing flowers, and I'm a big fan. I've used the singing flowers in a number of story elements in my work. So tell me about coming up with which kind of flowers you're using in this installation.
MPM We work with a creative partner in Montreal. The art form you’ve seen images of is called Mosaiculture. Horticulture and mosaic together. Some of the older instances include manor houses in 19th century Europe would have a clock on a hill all planted with plants. That’s where this concept of mosaic and plants came together. In the late 1990s, the City of Montreal wanted to do something really special that was very green for the millennium, for two the year, 2000 and they came up with the idea of creating a nonprofit.
Lise Cormier became the head of this new nonprofit, Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, which worked with the province and the City of Montreal to create a major international competition. Cities around the world picked symbols of their cities or heritage or mythology from their countries and created big, beautiful images out of this topiary work. Most of them were made in Montreal but the concepts were created in different parts of the world. The show started in the summer of 2000 and I think they had 3 million guests. It was huge. Now they do shows in Canada every couple of years. I had already told them I wanted to be the first garden to showcase their work when they were ready to do something in the United States.
Lise is the creative, inspirational person behind it all. She has a phenomenal team but she is the artist who takes the Alice story and turns it into these figures. When we told her we wanted to do Alice in Wonderland, Lise dove into the movie. She dove into the book. She studied, studied, studied, and she came up with the Singing Flowers, which flowers to use, and even what music to play based on what she got out of the book. I talked to her three days ago and we are going to do the show again next year, because it is so popular, and the Singing Flowers have some references in the book to an understory of blue flowers. So she's encouraging us to look at a blue tapestry under the Singing Flowers next year. That's the kind of detail Lise gets into. She's just so talented. Then we turn her concepts and the frames over to our horticulturists, and she has horticulturists who give us a plant list. What will grow in Montreal versus Atlanta is very different, of course, so we evaluate the plants beforehand so we know what will work here. Our horticulturalists have done this enough that they know what varieties of wet plants will do better here than they will in Montreal and vice versa. So we pick plants that will be as close to what they recommend so that the pieces look the way they're sketched out when we’re designing the show.
FB I really encourage listeners to check out the website and take a look at some of the photographs because these oversized books are so gorgeous. The Cheshire Cat installation is one of my favorites. The chessboard and the card soldiers are another spectacular exhibit. But tell me how a visitor would experience the Alice in Wonderland story walking through the exhibit. What story elements do you emphasize?
MPM We have interpretive signs that talk about some of the pieces and a lot of people want to know what the plants are. But then we have a cell tour, so you can hear from horticulturalists talk about the pieces. But we do a very light interpretation because we don't feel like it's our job to interpret the book because everyone has different perspectives on what it means and what it meant to you as a child. We want you to bring your imagination. Often people go home and reread the book after they've seen the show.
FB That’s pretty inspiring. I bet a lot of English teachers are happy with you. You have the original text but you brought up the Disney movie. Are you talking about the Tim Burton version or the animated version? What parts of either of those are in the exhibit?
MPM The book is really the inspiration for most of the show. But we all have been touched by those two movies. Everyone's seen them. The good news is a lot of guests are still reading the book to their children. It's timeless and that's really great. Not everything in this world we live in, especially with books, is timeless.
It's a trio. It's the two movies you mentioned, Tim Burton and Disney, as well as the book itself, and then just all the iterations of it. We've got a really creative visitor center manager and he and his team have done this really beautiful fan of playing cards over the Alice in Wonderlandtable in our gift shop. It's just filled with all this stuff like the Red Queen and the White Rabbit and, of course, the Cheshire Cat. There's so much you can buy that's Alice-driven too. It's a real opportunity for retail. But I just think it's the trio that really has made this so inspiring to other people. But it's the book that inspired the creation of our show.
FB Why do you think Alice keeps reemerging as an important cultural touchstone for people after all these years? What are the ingredients that make this story last?
MPM That's a really hard question. I think there is a part of the book that touched people as children without a doubt. The book is pretty idiosyncratic.
FB Extremely. A lot of interpretations. You can think of it as a whimsical story or you can think of it as a horror story.
MPM It’s like we're terrified and infatuated with snakes because they're interesting, but they are scary. Alice is not a snake, but Alice is interesting because it is beautiful, mystical, and charming. Who doesn't want to shrink and meet the White Rabbit, right? But do you ever get out and do you ever return to your life? Then there's the whole layer of, “Was Alice really about drugs?”
FB That came out of the 60s and 70s, for sure.
MPM I do not doubt that some people come here because they're interested in that.
FB Are there magic mushrooms in this garden?
MPM All your listeners should not come here looking for mushrooms. People do eat a few before they arrive, I wouldn't be surprised. That part of it comes back when you're in your 20s or 30s. It's a generational thing. When you're a child, it's all beautiful imagery and you don't understand it, but you're enthralled. Then when you're older you’re thinking about it and you're not really sure what the meaning is. It's got a lot of depth to it, and that's part of the interest.
FB It always surprises me how much Alice is in culture. People forget when they say something like, “We've stepped into a looking glass, or we're down a rabbit hole now and there's no logic, and facts are not facts.” Alice keeps coming up in every conversation and people just don't realize this has all come from this original story.
MPM Wasn't it Jefferson Airplane, “Go ask Alice, When she's 10 feet tall”?
FB I love that song.
MPM You can't help but love that song. It’d be hard to figure out another book that has had that kind of an impact on us as humans. What about Wizard of Oz?
FB Have you ever thought about doing The Wizard of Oz? That seems like a possibility.
MPM I'll tell you the dream of ours. This is not a promise to your listeners, because we have a lot of work to do, but we would love to partner and do Where the Wild Things Are. The Maurice Sendak book is so important, so fanciful, so uplifting. He cared about literacy and children, which we care a lot about, we do a lot of reading programs in the garden. But also because Where the Wild Things Are would be such a good way to interpret the work that we do in Plant Conservation and Biodiversity. We have 35 scientists working in our Center for Plant Conservation doing work all over the southeastern United States, in the Caribbean, and worldwide to try to save magnolias in parts of the world like Asia and South America. But telling that story to guests is hard. Biodiversity and why we should care about plants is a hard concept for people to understand, because plants are everywhere, right? They're not going to be everywhere. They're disappearing and, as they go, so go the insects and the birds and the animals. If we could do Where the Wild Things Are, you'd have another story that has multiple stories to go with it, but that one hits squarely in the mission zone. That's our fantasy right now. We'd like to do that one day.
FB That's a really strong choice. We'll put our collective energy towards that happening because people don't realize how many plants we're losing every year just as they don't realize the number of animal species we're losing. Obviously, those things go hand in hand.
MPM When we were little our parents would drive to Florida or California for vacation, every three or four hours we'd stop for gas, and my dad would get out and clean the windshield because of the bugs. When was the last time anybody had to clean bugs off a windshield? Where did the bugs go? If the bugs are gone, what are the birds eating? Well, let's see, 9 billion birds have disappeared. A lot all those things are pollinators for plants. So there go the plants. That's the simplest way to understand that web of life and the importance of biodiversity.
FB It’s really important and it's great that you're doing this for children because it's their generation that's going to suffer. They're the young folks who need to really stand up for climate change and the difficulties we're facing. We just had a heat wave here and all these plants shriveled up so quickly. I hadn't seen that before in a matter of a couple of days. There are so many places on the planet where we're losing all of this diversity.
MPM Your sequoias are totally endangered. All those little plants, like little orchids in the rainforest that we're losing, it’s a big loss. And you're right, the kids are going to have to inherit the mess we leave behind.
FB The important thing is, people can't take all that on, so you need to entertain and show them the beauty of what’s at stake. That's why I want to encourage people to go to the exhibit. If it's not this year, then go next year. There's so much creativity infused in this thing, the fairy tale aspect within the context of looking at these iconic characters and seeing the plants that make up the stylistic choices. It’s mind-blowing you can do this combination of the mosaic and the plants and create so much beauty. Then when you're looking at that beauty, someone's listening and you're talking about where these plants are disappearing. People can hear that because they're having it coming in. When I do school events and talk about my books, I spend so much time getting the kids on my side and I do not talk about writing and the difficulties of writing until the very end. So the teachers are happy with me but they're already on my side. So they can hear you, and that sounds like what you're doing.
MPM That's so true. Years ago, we did some branding work and, as a part of that, we wanted to analyze whether we could lead with the environmental message. What we learned is that people care about that message but they don't come for that. They come for social experiences with family, friends, and loved ones. But once they're here, they want to understand more. They don't want to have it drilled into their head but they would like to learn more. That's what we can do with the magic of this show.
We have the largest orchid center in the United States. There are orchids from a quarter of an inch big to eight feet big that are just spectacular with these incredible flowers and unique mechanisms for pollination. They're just as wonderful as the Mosaiculture Alice show. So we get you here for the bigger exhibit but then the experience is much deeper than that.
When we talked a minute ago about what to do about all these challenges and biodiversity, I always like to lead people with this idea. I know you probably don't have a lot of lawns in California, right? But we certainly do here. But for people who have lawns, planting pollinator gardens and not spraying herbicides and pesticides, you can still have a lawn with a little bit of messy weeds in it if you mow it often and really encourage wildlife to come back and insects to thrive. That's something anybody who rents or owns a home can do that can make a big difference in the world we live in today. I want people to think about what they can do without feeling like we're just beating our heads against the wall and can't make a difference. We can in our own small way.
FB It's really true. Last year, I got married in my backyard so I ended up planting and I put in a little water feature. To your point, I'm shocked by the number of butterflies and dragonflies showing up. Insects are all over the place and now the neighborhood raccoons, skunks, and deer are coming. I can really feel what you're talking about. It happened within a very short time, 12 months, but it has a lot to do with those instincts.
Being president and CEO of the Atlanta Botanical Garden, what are some of the things you do day in and day out that excite you? What are the challenges of running this organization?
MPM Number one, I love nature and I love plants so I get to run an organization that's driven by that. If I'm having a hard day or there's an issue, I can walk in the garden. Yesterday I went to see the Alice show and went to look at the orchids. You can't come back to your office feeling bad after you've done that. You just can't. The same is true for everybody else who's listening. If you can't walk through a botanical garden when you're having a hard day, just go for a walk in the park. Go for a walk in the woods. It lowers blood pressure, stress, and anxiety, and we know our children are suffering from that at huge levels.
When gardens were started hundreds of years ago, some were started for wealthy manor houses in Europe. In fact, in the 1700s and 1800s, the really wealthy and royalty in England and other places would send orchid thieves to South America. That was where the orchid rape happened, and they stole them out of the out of the rainforest. If they took a million orchids on a ship back to England, they would be lucky if 100 survived. Terrariums were finally built so they could keep the orchids alive. So some gardens started with wealth. Some started as medicinal gardens, particularly monasteries that needed medicinal plants to help people heal. Then a lot of gardens started with universities as science collections, all of which are good, and many of those are still here today.
But today, public gardens exist for lots of reasons, not just a narrow few. Forty-five years ago the big gardens would have lots of guests, but not all gardens have that. But because the world we're in today is disconnected from nature, and the globalization of our populations, we have more people coming to botanic gardens now than at any time in history. So this is our century. The bad news is that it means the environmental issues have gotten so severe that people do want to come for other reasons. But the good news is we're the havens for our community. That was proven in 2020 during Covid. People flocked here. We were the only cultural destination in Atlanta, along with the zoo, that was open. We had to limit numbers through the front door but we were the place where people came to preserve their sanity and feel safe. So I love that this is a time when gardens are thriving and more important than ever.
I also love to raise money and build so we're in a $150 million capital campaign. We want to build another eight acres of gardens that will be connected to the ones we have now. But the real catalyst for this is that the new front door for these gardens is going to be on the Atlanta Beltline, which is a 22-mile connected loop around the city for walking, biking, and scooters that will be done in 2030. It's changing the way we move through our community. We are going to be the cultural destination on the Beltline. So my comparison is, that it's like the Whitney Museum in the High Line Park. We're going to be the Whitney on the Beltline. We're going to have one garden and two front doors. One for people arriving with cars and one for people on foot or biking. That is great in terms of looking at sustainability and how we get our guests here. We're very excited about that. I think we're right at about $120 million raised and we'll break ground next year.
FB How do you go about raising that kind of money?
MPM I love to raise money and I love America and its philanthropy. We are unique in the world in that our tax system was set up a long time ago to benefit people who wanted to support nonprofits and, as a result, we have some of the most successful nonprofits in the world. You look at Atlanta, where there is really no public funding, very little from the city and the count, and none from the state to speak of whereas other big cities like St. Louis, San Francisco, and New York, have public money for nonprofits and cultural institutions. We don't here but we have a vigorous, wonderful cultural community of museums and the garden and the Center for Puppetry Arts, which has the most famous puppets in the world.
All of that is because of the generosity of this community and America's culture of philanthropy. So we have big foundations, generous individuals, and very generous corporations that support the work that we're doing. That's number one. Number two is to raise the kind of money that we're doing right now. It takes a bold vision. Everyone in this city knows how important the Atlanta Beltline is to changing the city. The first two miles that opened, eight or nine years ago, there was immediately $4-5 billion worth of development along it with apartments, condos, and restaurants. Our section will be the green section because it goes through Piedmont Park and then to the garden through a quiet part of the city and it connects neighborhoods.
I think you have to have a bold vision that makes sense for the community. That it's more than the nonprofit. It's about, how you make Atlanta a better place to be for the people who visit here or live here. Then you have to deliver on the promise and those are really the key things in fundraising, at least in the cultural community. I think it's much harder in social services.
The BeltLine, to their credit, is doing a lot of work on affordable housing to make sure that it's not all these really expensive apartments and condos. I think private equity owns about 40% of the real estate in Atlanta and that's really driven up housing prices here and in every city in the United States. But the Belt is doing a really good job as is the city. We have a mayor who's all about affordable housing to try and turn that around. That's not our focus or our mission but we want to make sure because you have to pay admission to come into the garden or you can be a member. You could buy a dual membership for $120 and come in for free year-round. But we're also going to do free programming outside the enclosed area in a courtyard garden that we're building, where we can do Tai Chi, or we can talk about pollinator gardens. We can let people take an herb garden home to their little apartments. We want to do things that are about equity as well.
I love the Huntington. When I first saw the Cactus Garden as a young horticulturist, I think I cried. I was just so moved by it.
FB To your point, certainly, during the pandemic, it was a safe place to socialize but I've also noticed that even on weekdays, when I would expect it to be quiet, I show up and the parking lot’s completely full. It’s such a spectacular garden but it's also just a place to get away and have a walk. I was recently reading the biography of Steve Jobs and he talks a lot about going on walks with friends or co-workers to talk through problems and to get away from it. That's the amazing thing about going on a walk and then if you're in nature, things come into your mind that you just don't expect because you're looking one way, you're thinking about something else, and then you see an animal, a plant, or a cactus. You're like, “Wait, where did all this come from?”
MPM When I go there, I never go inside. I just stay in the garden the entire time. It's so well maintained and so beautiful and so diverse but it's interesting when you were talking about taking a walk. I hope your listeners all know how walking out in nature can help you solve problems and de-stress, and we need to get our kids to do that more often, or just go play. But we forget that human beings are animals. We're an elevated animal and so being in nature, where we are hearing animals and smelling things, that's what we're supposed to do. That's what our bodies are craving. We've just forgotten that in our busy lives.
FB If you combine that with Alice in Wonderland, you're combining nature and what it was like to have a childhood imagination and wonder, which is one of the things you were talking about earlier. So you’re bringing those things together, the wonder of story, the wonder of character, the wonder of whimsy and fantasy. Bringing it back to the Alice’s Wonderland Returns exhibit, can you bring us back to your exhibit and highlight some of the areas visitors really admire and talk to you about the feedback you're getting so we can have our little walk through our Alice in Wonderland on this podcast?
MPM When you walk into the garden from the visitor center, immediately, there are two books and they are 18 feet tall. These are huge and they're made out of steel with fabric and soil and then they're completely planted. The letters are the only things that are metal. Everything else is a plant that makes the binding of the book and the front of the book, and that starts you off. Everyone wants their picture taken in front of that because when you go home with your photos and show them to your family, you begin with the story, which is Alice in Wonderland.
Then you go into the show and you walk over where our restaurant, Longleaf, is, and when people are walking somebody inevitably will look up to the left, and on top of a stone wall when you're coming around a curve, is the Cheshire Cat. He's just up there looking down on you like he should be. It’s usually a child who finds it because they're always looking. Moms are talking, dads are talking, friends are talking, and then they all stop and they all have to have their pictures of it. Then you come to a water feature, which is at the end of a grand alley of crape myrtles, and in this water feature is Alice herself, and Alice is spinning because she's going down the rabbit hole.
FB Oh, that's spectacular. And you have some teacups right near her as well, right?
MPM There are two reasons for that. One is the reality of the book, you have to spin to go down the rabbit hole. The other is more practical. It's a 360-degree fountain. The reason is, that she's planted. There are trees here and sunshine on the other side. The plants all enjoy the sunshine in the shade. Otherwise, on one side of her, the all plants would get long and lanky in the shade and the sun is nice and tight and beautiful. So we had to turn her for photosynthesis. It's both the science and the art.
Everyone stands and looks at her because the teacups are there and she's got cards on her and then she's falling down the rabbit hole. It's just so funny. I saw a Chinese couple there this spring when we had just put it in and they were so excited. Then you go over to the Red Queen, who is probably 20 feet tall and pretty intimidating as she's supposed to be. But what is she doing? Croquet. Remember what the croquet ball is? It’s the hedgehog.
FB That's very clever. That's fun.
MPM The hoop is one of the card soldiers. They have to bend to the Red Queen’s will so they have to bend over so they create a hoop for the hedgehog. Now you're just laughing. You're absolutely delighted. You're seeing details you never expected to see in the show. Of course, every moment is a photo op for family, friends, or whoever you're with. Then you go around another corner and you can hear music, or sometimes it's quiet, and the music doesn't come on until you trigger it, because it's triggered by movement. That's where the Singing Flowers are. They're 15 feet tall, and they're 12 of them, all along a linear pathway. They're singing this wonderful song to you like little cherubs and you're more mystified than anything. “Where did the music come from? What are these things?” It’s so delightful.
Then you end up in the Skyline Garden, which is wonderful because you've got this really beautiful urban view of Atlanta. You're above a huge water feature in a courtyard and looking down is the White Rabbit. The White Rabbit is about 25 feet tall and he is sitting in an umbrella, and he’s all white with a pink nose and whiskers. He's got his top hat on and there's a clock on him because he's always keeping time for when she has to leave. He is just awesome. I should note we keep the White Rabbit for the holiday light show so he gets lit up during the holidays. He is just a charming part of our holiday light show, which, last year, ABC News declared the best light show in America. We won the Light Fight competition. It's a fabulous light show.
We have a canopy walk in our woodland and it's 45 feet off the ground with a 120 or 140-foot deciduous tree forest, we hang 1,500 light strands from nets in the trees, and they're all choreographed to music. It's fabulous. Then next to the White Rabbit on the lawn is the chess set you talked about and they're all the playing cards and the horses and the knights of the chess set. There's a great photo op in front of it and we have so many wonderful photos of families and children and friends together. People spend a lot of time there because there are so many pieces on the chess set. The lawn is a checkerboard lawn. It's a delightful show with the whimsy, the humor, and the delight from the book. And whenever you blow scale up like that, it's so surprising to people. They love it.
FB I imagine these kids coming through. They're looking up and their necks are arching back, looking all around them at all these huge exhibits and characters. It's pretty remarkable.
MPM I love it. Some of them come so many times. They lead people around because they know it so well.
FB Having this conversation with you and you describing the exhibit was so compelling. It is very clear to me why you're the president and the CEO, and why you've raised $120 million of the $150 million. I want to get on a plane and come see that right now based on the way that you described it and the love, creativity, and care that is communicated through you in terms of the work that you're doing in this incredible exhibit. I really appreciate the time and your sharing your passion for Alice in Wonderland and this beautiful garden you oversee.
MPM It's my pleasure, Frank. Come anytime you want. We'd love to have you.
FB So, let me just ask you a question, if you were to describe your husband as a character from Alice in Wonderland?
MPM He can be really funny or kind of introverted when he wants and he's very creative sometimes. Right now, he works in the garden with the speaker tied to his waist to listen to the Braves games. Maybe he's the Mad Hatter.
FB He'd have to be for being such a Renaissance person.
Thank you again. It was a terrific conversation. Thank you.
Amazing Alice in Wonderland Pumpkin Carving Ideas for 2024
Halloween, aka the Met Gala for people with Jack Skellington tattoos, is right around the corner. With the 31st fast approaching, we must prepare a few things. First, we single folks need to come up with the PERFECT costume. Personally, I believe in striking a balance between funny and attractive. If you lean too hard on either side, you look like you’re trying far too hard, and the opposite actually happens. That’s right, going as any character portrayed by Johnny Depp is uninspired, and we all know you did it just to be hot.
Second, you must get candy for the kids lest you suffer the wrath of an egging. I guess egging houses doesn’t really happen anymore. I blame TikTok for stealing the joy of ovum-based vigilante vandalism from our youth. Without egging, how will houses that hand out fruit learn to stop pushing their hippy ways? Finally, and most importantly, you have to decorate your house. Whether you like to go all out and create a full haunted house or prefer the minimalist approach, there is one decoration that will always appear: the jack-o-lantern.
Frank allows me the privilege of coming out of his basement on one condition. I carve the pumpkins. Naturally, since we are talking about our glorious leader, Frank wants his jack-o-lanterns to be Alice in Wonderland-themed. If the designs please Frank, he allows me the privilege of eating those fibrous sodium bombs known as pumpkin seeds that everyone shoves in their faces around this time. This year, I wanted to show you all my favorite Alice-themed jack-o-lanterns I found while researching designs for Frank. These designs may inspire your pumpkin carving as well.
Card Suits
Maybe you want to be subtle with your Alice in Wonderlandjack-o-lanterns. You love Alice and want to show the world, but you only want people in the know to recognize your Alice-related easter eggs. Or maybe you don’t have the best pumpkin carving skills and want something easy. Either way, this first pumpkin is perfect for those who prefer subtly, and it’s easy enough for an Alice-obsessed kid to make. The card suits are a trope that has been in every Alice iteration from the very beginning. Why not give the card soldiers the love they deserve?
Card Suits Plus
No, Card Suits Plus is not a streaming service for poker. Well, it actually might be. But as you can plainly see in the accompanying picture, this is the upgraded version of the card suit jack-o-lantern previously shown. This jack-o-lantern has the four card suits, but what’s so cool about it is that poking out of each suit is a giant Alice holding the “Drink Me” bottle. I love that the person who made this took a simple idea and elevated it.
Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!
Pspspspspspspspsps. Those who have owned cats know what this means. While researching Alice in Wonderland-inspired jack-o-lanterns, I was inundated with Cheshire Cat designs. This makes a lot of sense, as cats, specifically the black variety, are synonymous with Halloween. The design can be simple enough for most people to pull off, and the idea of the Cheshire Cat is actually a little spooky. Eyes and a mouth surrounded by darkness is a horror trope that has been used for as long as the genre has existed. I pulled some of my favorites I found online.
Of course, we have the Disney Cheshire Cat jack-o-lantern. Cartoons are naturally quite easy to execute in the art of pumpkin carving due to the necessity of the designs being simple enough to be hand drawn repeatedly.
Okay, now let’s make it scary; it’s Halloween, after all. Adding jagged teeth to the traditional Cheshire cat’s smile amps this pumpkin to a new level.
Now, this one is actually a twofer. We’ve got the March hare from the Alice in Wonderland Disney cartoon, which is incredibly detailed and executed perfectly, and we’ve got a more realistic-looking Cheshire cat’s smile. If you want to take a crack at a more complex design, this one seems like a fun project.
Off With Your Head!
Of course, the Red Queen would make it onto a pumpkin. The decapitation-obsessed matriarch is perfect for Halloween. I wonder if she is friends with Ichabod Crane. Well, I guess they wouldn’t be friends since Ichabod was a recipient of the head removal that the Red Queen is so crazy about. But I digress.
Though this design is quite complex, the person who carved it gets an A+ from me. I didn’t know you could do shading on a pumpkin.
Since the previous design was complex, I wanted to add something that might be a bit easier, though it’s also not technically a jack-o-lantern.
This gourd sculpture of the Red Queen from the Disney movie is perfect for an Alice-themed Halloween decoration for two reasons. First, it’s obviously the Red Queen, so there is the Alice portion. Second, it kind of scares me, especially the weird gourd arms.
Doorknobs and Drink Me
I’ve been struggling to come up with a fun title for these jack-o-lanterns, so if the title is not as inspired as the rest, it means I gave up, and the placeholder is now the title. But, just because my creative energy is lacking here does not mean these designs are.
I especially like the "Drink Me" pumpkin because there is something inherently spooky about a potion bottle with no description that reads “Drink me.”
Alice, Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, and the Blue Caterpillar, on a Pumpkin
This pumpkin is one of my favorites. It’s the perfect Alice in Wonderland jack-o-lantern. It’s straightforward and executed perfectly. Plus, it’s got the famous quote, “We’re all mad here,” carved into it.
The Jack-o-Lanterning Glass Wars
If I did not include some jack-o-lantern designs inspired by Frank Beddor’s Looking Glass Wars novels, I would be forced to sit in the mistake box. So, here are two blueprints (Orangeprints?) inspired by The Looking Glass Wars and the Hatter M graphic novels.
We’ve got this simple yet elegant design of the Looking Glass Wars logo. It features the four card suits that, if done correctly, would look like a stained-glass window on a jack-o-lantern.
And now we’ve got a design that, at first, was a bit confusing to me because if you follow the directions as written, the part you cut out would also have the design on it, and that wouldn’t really work because you would just have a hat-shaped hole in your pumpkin.
BUT, I realized if you place the hat cut out back into the whole with the scraped rind, then you would have a really cool outline of Hatter Madigan’s top hat.
Ok…So…This is Just Art…
Do you fancy yourself a pumpkin artist? Do you walk around on Halloween scoffing at the amateur jack-o-lanterns these plebeians proudly display because they don’t know any better? Do you understand the “rule of thirds?” Well, then, do I have the Alice designs for you. This jack-o-lantern is carved in the original art style from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. So much detail is carved into it, including the blue, well in this case orange, caterpillar.
Hey, I’m Not Good at Carving Pumpkins, but I Love Alice in Wonderland and Halloween
If the previous jack-o-lantern made you doubt your skills or made you want to give up because you’re carving your first pumpkin, worry not, for I have the simplest Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland jack-o-lantern that literally anyone can make.
Step One: Cut a circle into a pumpkin.
Step Two: It’s a rabbit hole.
I hope this collection of Alice in Wonderland jack-o-lanterns inspires some whimsical creativity at your next pumpkin carving party. Happy Halloween, everybody, and for those who were not born on October 31st, Happy Unbirthday!
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
Wonderland: Curious Nature - An Alyssian at the New York Botanical Garden
Alyssian Reporter-at-Large and Defender of Imagination Lynne Henderson recently took a trip to Wonderland via the Bronx. Here is her full report on the New York Botanical Garden's magical Wonderland: Curious Nature. For more information on this enchanting exhibit, check out my interview with NYBG VP of Exhibitions and Programming Joanna Groarke on the All Things Alice podcast or visit their website.
“Alive, but not talkative, quelle dommage…”
Running through October 27, Wonderland: Curious Nature at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx is an exhibit you can glide through one “golden afternoon” or evening and easily imagine yourself in Wonderland. Spread throughout NYBG’s 250 acres; the immersive displays guide you through a cornucopia of Victorian flora with an Alician twist. While on a recent “staycation,” I took the Metro North commuter railroad 20 minutes from Manhattan to the NYBG and wandered through this gorgeous expanse of rich greenery and colorful flowers. The dirt and noise of the city seemed a world away as I lost myself in the quiet and beauty. I almost forgot I was in a city and not the countryside.
I certainly got my steps in for the year as I wandered the grounds. White Rabbit footsteps and meter-high color cutouts and ground decals of the Tenniel engravings usher you to displays that delight the mind as well as the eye. A lovely topiary garden has giant floral playing cards and caterpillars. In the center are giant mushrooms from FoldHaus that light up in different colors at night. Nearby is the Victorian-style Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, with a display inspired by the verdancy of the Oxford Botanic Garden, which Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell probably lost themselves in on many a day. To the Victorians, flowers were not only valued for their beauty but used as a coded language to convey messages to friends, lovers, and even enemies! More Tenniel cutouts are hidden among the plants to surprise and delight (I even saw the White Rabbit scurrying towards his hole!).
The LuEsther T. Mertz Library near the Garden’s entrance has a wonderful collection of Alice in Wonderlandmemorabilia that shows the impact and influence Alice had on her society as well as ours. The Victorian Era was one of great changes and exploration in the United Kingdom, especially in science, and much of the collection explores the medicinal and recreational properties of plants common to Brits in the 19th century. Various editions of Carroll’s stories and art, traditional and surreal, showcase how Alice inspired and continues to inspire imaginations (the Heart Crystal still lives!).
Of course, no foray into Wonderland would be complete without food and drink. The Garden’s food venues offer a delicious range of treats from al fresco food trucks to a full afternoon sit-down tea (if you’re lucky, you may be joined by the Hatter or White Rabbit). The obligatory gift shop has various editions and interpretations of Carroll’s stories as well as magnets, T-shirts, and other collectibles such as invitations and cocktail menus. I bought a set of “flash cards” with ideas for an Alice-inspired celebration.
Even though Fall is here, the days are still warm enough to comfortably enjoy wandering the grounds and losing yourself in the quiet and serenity of nature for a few hours. If you live in or plan to visit New York between now and the end of October, come up to the Bronx and enjoy the magic of Wonderland in our world-famous garden.
In Queendom Speramus! Long Live Alyss!
Hope Renewed: Princess Alyss Embraces Her Destiny - Part 4
Back in 2007, we collaborated with noted Alyssian historian Agnes MacKenzie to publish Princess Alyss of Wonderland, a stunning collection of letters, journal writings, and art from Her Royal Imaginer, Princess Alyss Heart. These breathtaking documents chronicled the incredible childhood of Wonderland’s exiled heir apparent and future hero of The Looking Glass Wars.
Part One spanned Alyss’ flight from Wonderland and how she survived her first days on the rough streets of London. In Part Two, Alyss recounts the horrors of the notorious Charing Cross Orphanage and her disappointment at being adopted by the unimaginative Liddells. Part Three follows Alyss' pain and indignation when she is betrayed by her good friend, Lewis Carroll.
When we last saw Alyss, she was slipping into despair over the gross falsehoods contained in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” She thought Lewis Carroll believed her when she told him about Wonderland, Redd, and Hatter. But he had just twisted her words and now she had to admit that “Alice” had won.
Yet Alyss wouldn’t be down for long. A surprising message from home soon arrived and helped remind Alyss of who she was meant to be…
(*As always, I am indebted to the tireless and exhaustive research of the eminent Wonderland historian Agnes MacKenzie. Her dedication has helped keep the true story of Queen Alyss alive!)
Diary Entry - October 19, 1865 Since the BETRAYAL, I have been in the darkest of moods, unable to smile or even enjoy a delicious toffee twist. Wanting to be alone and as far away as possible from any mention of “Alice,” I decided to walk to a meadow where I often go to think about Wonderland when a ray of brilliant, almost crystal, sunshine cut across the meadow and all of the flowers lifted their faces skyward and began to sing. It was the most wondrous sound I had ever heard. Unbelievable, perhaps, to anyone from this world but for me. I was immediately aware of the presence of Wonderland.
Diary Entry - October 19, 1865 (continued) I now realize that flowers are the link to Wonderland and that they are the purest receivers of Imagination. Everything and everyone else I have encountered has been rather lacking in spirit, form, and IMAGINATION compared to what exists in Wonderland. In this world, animals are treated as if they have no mind of their own and respond by being inarticulate while in Wonderland so-called animals hold public office and play instruments. And the buildings here are so SQUARE and SOLID. Who could bear to live in a box all of their life? Boxes are for transporting items, not a place to live, laugh and dream! My mind continued to race as I recalled the creatures and streets and shops of Wonderland. I became so dizzy with color and space and Imagination that I immediately began painting and by teatime had covered every inch of my bedroom walls with art.
Diary Entry - October 27, 1865 I was in my room today when suddenly and very clearly I heard Bibwit Harte’s voice call out to me, “Princess! You must check your pockets!” What could it possibly mean? Thinking hard all day I went to each of my pinafores and coats and dutifully checked every pocket. Nothing but one stale peppermint twist which I immediately ate. Hmmm? It was very puzzling. And then I knew! My birthday gown from Wonderland! I went to where it was stored in the closet trunk and pulled it out. I checked every pocket. NOTHING!!!
But wait…
Letter from Princess Alyss to Royal Tutor Bibwit Harte Most Honorable and Learned Bibwit Harte,
Of course, it would be you, the knower of all of Wonderland's secrets past, present, and future, who would find a way to contact me. Unfortunately, I possess no such knowledge so I am forced to use the British Post. Dear, dear Bibwit Harte you have no idea how thrilled I was to hear your voice and receive your message. But it wasn’t until I remembered the secret pocket sewn inside the right wristband of my Birthday gown for keeping treasures that must never be lost that I made my discovery. I unbuttoned the tiny pocket and immediately felt the cool, clear roundness of the Imagination Sphere! I remembered how you would leave the sphere on my pillow whenever you wished to summon me for Imagination Training. Now that I have found the sphere I will begin training immediately. Expect updates.
Your most promising student,
HRI Alyss
Diary Entry - November 22, 1865 After training all day with the Imagination Sphere, I fell asleep and immediately began to dream of traveling with Bibwit over Wonderland in an enormous illuminated bubble. As we floated to all seven corners of the land, Bibwit told me the Secret of Finding Your Imagination. I have tried to record them exactly as he told me because I am certain this information is vital for everyone.
The Secrets of Finding Your Imagination
What you see behind you is as important as what you see in front.
Do cartwheels twice a day while humming your favorite song.
Laugh very loud if you cannot remember something.
Walk backward if you are in a hurry.
Never hurry to something unpleasant.
Eat something delicious before bed.
Look out the window immediately upon waking and say hello to the twin suns.
Bid the Thurmite moon goodnight before sleeping.
Remember to dream.
Dream to remember.
Tickle your imagination when stuck.
Agnes MacKenzie Dear reader, you see before you one of the most valuable documents ever given to our world. It is with the utmost sincerity that I encourage each and every one of you to practice the secrets revealed here and be prepared to experience an imagination that has no bounds.
Letter from Princess Alyss to Royal Tutor Bibwit Harte Most Honorable and Learned Bibwit Harte,
I have been faithfully training with the Imagination Sphere three times a day and am very happy to inform you that my Imagination is becoming very powerful. The skies are bluer and the sun brighter and people smile much more now. When I see with my Imagination I see things that are hidden and I am able to assist others with their searches. For instance, Lorina lost her favorite doll and by simply imagining where she could possibly have left it I was immediately able to find it. And most importantly, I breathe in the air and imagine that it fills me so much that I can float above the trees and see all the best puddles. I will continue training each day and hopefully will find the puddle that will return me to Wonderland in time for my next birthday. I have also learned many new ways of imagining that are useful here in this world. Painting and drawing are very much like imagining in Wonderland, only here I use a brush with colored paints or a piece of lead to make what I need to see or feel or remember. My imaginings must stay on the page here in this world but they feel no less real to me than what I once imagined in Wonderland.
Your forever grateful pupil,
HRI Alyss
Diary Entry - January 1, 1866 When mother ordered Royal Bodyguard Hatter Madigan to take me away from Wonderland I begged her to let me stay. Her last words to me were “No matter what happens, I will always be near you, sweetheart. On the other side of the looking glass. And never forget who you are, do you understand?” Since arriving in this world I have spent much of my life staring into looking glasses and hoping to see my mother but it wasn't until my powers of Imagination began to increase that I finally understood what she had meant. I must first IMAGINE that I see her. Trembling and nervous, I approached the looking glass and imagined my mother smiling back at me, within moments a message appeared!
Aces, Spades, Diamonds and Hearts
Lost their princess off the charts
Your Majesty's subjects await your return
So the light of imagination can continue to burn.
Someday, sweet daughter, you'll find your way home,
Hurtling out of this mundane realm,
Even though I cannot tell you how far,
A way can be found if you remember who you are,
Regal destiny is yours to win
Take Heart and always remember to….Imagine.
Agnes MacKenzie Fascinating! What Alyss describes is an advanced form of 'mirror scrying' or receiving messages from other realms by images that form in your mirror. Known to every culture, 'magic mirrors' were used throughout history to enable one to see the present, the past, and the future. But the mind boggles at the concept of having a personal message written in such a lyrical manner suddenly appear in a looking glass. Some may question the authenticity of the message, but if not Queen Genevieve, who else would have sent this message of hope to a long-lost daughter? I wonder what messages await me in my own looking glass should my Imagination ever grow strong enough to see them.
Diary Entry - Undated Today upon waking I realized that I no longer cared about Lewis Carroll's book or what others believe to be true and that all that matters is what I believe. As soon as this thought flashed through my mind I felt incredibly confident and decided to go puddle hunting. Towards late afternoon, I saw IT, shimmering in the center of Queen's Lane, a puddle where no puddle should be! I am certain that, this is the puddle that will take me home to Wonderland. I will always remember my mother’s words: “You will be the strongest Queen yet. Your Imagination will be the crowning achievement of the Land.”
Go back and read Parts One, Two, and Three of Alyss' Letters to discover how the Princess of Wonderland adjusted to her rude awakening on Earth.
All Things Alice: Interview with Dr. April James, Creator of The ALICE Way
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have wellness educator and opera singer Dr. April James join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Dr. April James, it's so nice to have you on the show.
Dr. April James Thank you. It’s so nice to be on the show.
FB Your approach to Alice in Wonderland and wellness is really interesting. The way you use Alice and the five steps is very clever. I’m excited to get into that.
AJ Thank you. I use them as they come to me.
FB I want to start with a question about your introduction to Alice in Wonderland. Your website states it was Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which is very unusual that his film would be the introduction, given how long Alice has been in pop culture. Most of the time, people either read the book when their parents introduced them or they saw the Disney animated movie. Before you saw Tim Burton's movie, what did you know of Wonderland?
AJ I didn't know a whole lot. I might have seen the animated Disney film when I was a kid. I'm sure it was on television and it might have flitted by my consciousness. But I never read the books as a kid. The only bit of Lewis Carroll I really knew before seeing the Tim Burton film was the poem “Jabberwocky.” I took a Victorian literature class in undergrad, at Queens College, and we had to read that for an assignment. I loved that poem because I was into medieval stuff. I had taken Arthurian literature classes, and I was really big on knights in shining armor. The mock Old English style in which “Jabberwocky” is written really appealed to me and I just loved that. But I didn't really know anything else about Lewis Carroll or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland until after that Tim Burton film.
FB Tell me about the experience of seeing the Tim Burton movie and relating that to “Jabberwocky” and its author. What was your reaction to the movie and where did you go from there?
AJ I almost didn't see the film. I was at a really difficult point in my life. I returned to New York after getting my doctorate up at Harvard. I moved back in with my mother because that's what you do when you can't afford to do anything in New York. I came to call it a “Decade of Awfulness.” I was trying to build an opera career, some kind of creative career, but my mother kept having health issues and we kept having family friction because I have an older brother who was creating havoc at a distance with her. By the time March 2010 came around, I was borderline depressed and nothing was really working. But I was a member of the Actors Work Program, which is part of the entertainment industry unions, and I'd met someone who was a member of SAG. She had passes to the then newly opened Alice in Wonderland and she invited me. I thought, “Well, I don't really know anything about Lewis Carroll. I don't really care about Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.” I hemmed and hawed but eventually, I decided to go. I’d not seen a 3D film and I figured it'd be worth the price of admission.
It just totally blew me away. The moment the music came up and the lights came up on the screen, I felt something reawaken in me. I'm a singer and a classical musician and the music caught my ear. There was some mystery and some magic and wonder and innocence in there. Then the visuals started to reach me and as Alice was going through her story, I kept finding resonances with my own life. Adults telling you what to do, “We think you should do this. Everyone should do that.” “What, I don't get an opinion here?” Then what really got me was the Mad Tea Party scene where Alice comes out of this clearing and there's a table with the Dormouse and the March Hare. Hatter’s at the end of the table asleep in his chair. As he awakens, he sees Alice coming out of the clearing and his face fills with delight. The moment his face filled the screen, I heard, inside my head, this British-accented voice go, “That's me.” I asked, “Me who?” No response. I just went back to watching the film and by the end, I came out of that theater and I felt this buzzing inside of me. Something reawakened in me. That's when I started being obsessed with Hatter, Lewis Carroll, and all things Alice.
FB Had other films evoked such a strong reaction in you previously?
AJ Not as strong as that. I had seen films that I just loved. When I was a teenager, I was really into the Beatles and I saw A Hard Day's Night. I'd sing the songs at the top of my lungs. Something like that.
FB Alice in Wonderland resonated with you to the point where you have a career built around wellness. You said you went back and started thinking about the Mad Hatter and all things Alice and Lewis Carroll. Where did the journey take you after the movie? Did you read the book? Did you see a documentary? What happened?
AJ I read all the books. I read both of the Alice books and “Hunting of the Snark” and Sylvie and Bruno. I read biography after biography about Lewis Carroll and the more I learned about him, the more I fell in love with him. Especially reading the collections of his letters, I felt like I was encountering a long-lost uncle. That's how I felt and still feel about Lewis Caroll. He gets me. He gets children. He gets people. If we're in a foul mood, he knows how to pull us out of it.
FB There are two camps when interpreting Lewis Carroll's books. There's the interpretation that it’s whimsical, very nonsensical, and magical. I suspect you subscribe to that interpretation because of the work you do. However, on the other side of it, people really look at Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as dark and twisted. The terror of being out of control in your body, growing and shrinking, and things like that. Were you able to see both sides of it reading the text? Did you have a really strong first impression of where Lewis Carroll was coming from?
AJ My impression has always been that he's coming from the whimsical, nonsensical side. The good side, the magical side of everything. He was very interested in imagination and he was very spiritual and connected to God. This love of life permeates his best works. Joy and love are positive emotions that connect us to the good that's in the universe. The good that lies at the heart of all of us.
FB I agree with you. The first word you used was imagination and that's what struck me about the text. As an adult, writing for adults and for kids, I always thought it was about keeping that childhood wonder and imagination going and how we lose it as an adult. In a lot of ways, Lewis Carroll was a very rigid man who taught mathematics, yet he was flipping to the other side with his writing. One part of your wellness program is about getting back to that youthful, imaginative joy that you always lived as a kid.
AJ Exactly. One of the sayings I like is, “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”
FB Excellent. I love that.
AJ Some people didn't necessarily have the happiest childhood, right? I had a good childhood but I had a rather responsible kind of childhood, too. “You're going to go to school and you're going to learn, and you're going to do this and this and this.” College was never a question. I was going to college. But I always wanted people to play with. My brother is way older than I am so he wasn’t around when I was a kid and there weren't any other kids my age in my neighborhood. So I really had to use my imagination a lot growing up. Creating worlds of wonder for myself. As we get older, for some reason, society tells us not to be playful, or we get this idea that can't be playful and do good work, which is absolutely not the case. I had to relearn that.
FB Kudos to your parents because education is really important. You went to Harvard, which is exceptional as well. Tell me what your household was like in terms of the educational part of it versus the playful part of it. You said that when you were on your own, you were imaginative. Was there a crossover, or did you carve that out yourself and your parents were by the book?
AJ My parents were both teachers. My mother was a special education teacher, and my father was an attendance teacher, which is like a truant officer, but you work for the Board of Education. So they were both really responsible and interested in learning. My mother comes from a family of teachers. Her mother was a teacher and her sisters were also teachers or librarians. It's a very educated family. I was always expected to go to school and do well, and it wasn't hard for me to do that. I liked learning. I loved reading. As a kid, I was in the library all the time, pulling out whatever interested me. I remember reading The Chronicles of Narnia series when I was a child.
Harvard was actually the first time I started to believe in myself and my ability to do anything. I'm a singer by inclination more than training. I've always loved music. I had these two tracks going in my life. There was the liberal arts education track, but I loved music, and I wanted to study music. However, I was discouraged from doing music as a major during my first bachelor's degree at Queen's College. I understood that, so I studied communications, and I went into TV and publishing. I hated it. I didn't like the field. After a couple of years of job to job to job, I was laid off right before Thanksgiving, and I said, “You know what? I'm going to go and study what I wanted to study before. I'm going to go back to Queens College and study music, and we'll see how it works out. That’s how I ended up at Harvard.”
FB Good for you.
Do you think that was a smart thing for your mom to say to you, versus saying, “Follow your passion”? I find that to be really difficult. I have two teenage kids, one who just went off to college and knows what he wants to do. He doesn't want to be in entertainment, he wants to be more in business. But my daughter, she's going all over the place.
My father was a real entrepreneur, a risk taker, and he was like, “Yes, go do it.” I started off on the ski team and it seemed like a ridiculous idea that I would ever make money or that I would be good at it. And I would have to not go to college, where I was going to go to college part-time, and my mom said, “Absolutely not.” My dad, however, said, “Absolutely do it.” I wonder how you feel about your mom’s advice and, if you were giving that advice to yourself, what would you say?
AJ It’s taken me a long time to get over my mother's advice. I realize that she was right in a way and she was wrong in a way. My father, even though he was an attendance teacher when I was growing up, was laid off from the city in the 70s. He was also an entrepreneur and he started his own driving school after a time. So I have both this toeing-the-line thing and the entrepreneurial thing going. Now, I understand and I actually appreciate my mother's take on the arts career-wise. I wish she'd been a little more nuanced in what she had said.
After I got out of Harvard, I tried to have an arts career. My research was on women composers and operas composed by women. I started my own opera company and it was so difficult. Even if my mother had been in perfect health and we'd had perfect stuff going on in the family situation, it still would’ve been so difficult. I just said, “You know, what? I don't want to be a full-time artist.” I got to that point.
But I understand what my mother was saying. What she was saying was it's very difficult to make it in the arts. You can, but it's not as clear a path as getting a nine-to-five job somewhere or getting a teaching degree and then teaching. I understand where she was coming from.
FB It’s not just talent. Talent can only get you so far. If you’re an actor, you have to be so driven that what you're saying to yourself is, “I don't care if I do community theater, I am going to act. I am not thinking about being a movie star. I just need to be on the stage. It's how I live and breathe.” If you don't look at it that way, then you're not going to make it. You're doing it because you can't do anything else.
AJ That's exactly it. I love singing. I sing all the time. I wake up in the morning, and I'm singing. During the day, I'm singing. I'm singing Bach. I'm singing Handel. I’m singing Mozart. All this gorgeous music that I love. I don't have to be out in front of people to do it. I came to that realization. I do need to be with other people. There's a pianist I'm working with now. I sing in choirs. I've done some recordings, but I don't have to be in an operatic role on stage.
FB You found your way in terms of combining a lot of different interests. You have your website and your wellness program, the ALICE Way, which is how I originally found you. I love the way you describe helping adults rediscover their natural joy and playfulness so they can better navigate life's ups and downs. Alice in Wonderland is so deeply rooted in culture and brings lots of joy and amusement to people, and you've attached these five steps. Could you tell us the five steps, how you came to them, and why it's been effective for people?
AJ Alice is not just the name of the heroine of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. For me, she also gives her name to the acronym for the five steps. They’re equations. “A” equals “Awe plus Authenticity.” “L” is “Love plus Levity.” “I” is “Inspiration plus Impossibility.” “C” is “Courage plus Clarity.” “E” is “Exercise plus Expressivity.”
FB Beautiful. There's a double meaning for everything. Then you sign up for your program and you work your way through the acronym. People want awe in their life and they want to be authentic. To be authentic, you have to know yourself. And to know yourself is one of the themes of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Do you tie the story and Alice as the protagonist into the exercises?
AJ That's exactly what I do. I have an online video course and I also do this in person. I'll talk about the video course as that's most accessible to people. I divide it up into chapters plus an intro and a conclusion. In the chapter on “A” for “Awe and Authenticity,” for example, I do a video where I introduce the topic by reading something from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that relates to awe. Then I tell a story from my life that connects to the same concept of awe. Then there's an exercise, a separate video, on how you can experience awe in your life. Most of the videos are under 10 minutes. I also have a 42-page playbook to accompany the course so people can do written exercises along with each chapter of the ALICE Way.
FB Is there any crossover between the text that you're referencing and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland? Was there anything in his movie that you carried over for your program because you liked it? Or do you stick with the original, Lewis Carroll text?
AJ I keep with the original. The original is the reason why the Tim Burton film is so effective. So let's reference the original work. I really want to encourage people to engage with Lewis Carroll and engage with his work. The ALICE Way is not just about me. I want adults to rediscover joy and I want to have other people to play with. But it's also about appreciating this man who was just such an incredibly loving soul and left us such engaging, enriching, and magical works that can still affect us.
FB That are still important 150-plus years later.
AJ It’s amazing. How many times in a week do you hear the phrase “down the rabbit hole”?
FB I bet you have heard it a lot more since you saw the movie. Before, you probably didn't even know it was connected to Alice in Wonderland.
AJ Exactly. I don't think I ever knew it was connected.
FB You use the word joy. Joy is having a moment in society and culture right now. Why do you think that is?
AJ Joy is one of the most underrated emotional states.
FB It's true. It's one of those things you forget as an adult. Speaking for myself, I'm usually waiting for some something really outstanding to happen, like having this interview, which will create great joy for me. As opposed to finding joy in the little things when you're just going about your day, like a really amazing cup of coffee. I think we should be enhancing joy in life. There's imagination and there's wonder and there's awe, and a lot of the things you talked about, but living with joy is a nice state if you can get to it.
AJ Sometimes people think it's unapproachable or unattainable, but it's not it. I maintain that joy is our natural state. That's something Charles Dodgson understood. His cultivation of these child friendships and his love of telling stories grows out of a recognition that children come in joyful. We come in joyful. Dodgson was the eldest male child in a family of 11, so he got to experience that with his brothers and sisters. He was like the family entertainer. He would make up things for his siblings. I think that's where his love of the theater came from. He was able to access imagination and joy and saw other people who could also do that regularly.
There's something divine about joy and I think Charles Dodgson understood that joy and love come from the Divine Well. That's where we come from. That's the source we go back to. So let's keep that in our lives because that is the actual fuel for our lives. Good energy is the real fuel that keeps us healthy and that's why we need to cultivate these good emotions, speak good words, take in good thoughts, and do good deeds. That's what keeps us healthy as individuals and as a society.
FB You certainly seem to be living the ALICE Way. At the same time as Alice and Lewis Carroll, there's a secondary character that has somehow found her way into you, is that correct?
AJ Madison Hatta, Sonneteer.
FB Can you tell us a little bit about her and her birth?
AJ This is what I mentioned earlier, the voice that came to me during the Tim Burton film. It was about a year later and I was obsessed with finding images from the film to use as wallpaper on my Mac. I came across one that had a picture of the Hatter and a poem on the side, which was written in a Hatter-ish voice. So I'm looking at it and then that British-accented voice piped up inside my head again and said, “I could do better. It's not even a proper form. It needs to be a sonnet.” I hadn't written one of those since I had a Creative Writing class at Queens College years previous. But I had been working with angelic energies a couple of years previous to that so I recognized this as a directive from a spirit.
So I got out pieces of paper and a pen and I started writing. Then I started laughing because 15 minutes later, we had:
"If I were not mad, what on Earth would I be?
It is an unlikely prospect I'm sure you'll agree.
Those voices that whisper when no one is near
Their meaning is all too entirely clear.
I love out-of-turn.
I sing in the rain.
To me, this is custom,
To others, insane.
My past is a mystery shrouded in dreams concealed by blue starlight and moonlit by streams. My present meanders up on common roads.
And as for my future, who knows what it holds?
My friends, they're a mixture of whimsy and wise who come round the bend to drink tea in disguise.
In a world where one plus one equals three,
If I were not mad, who would I be?"
Came right out of my pen. That's how I wrote it. Then the name Madison Hatta, Sonneteer came right out of the pen afterwards.
FB That was really brilliant. I can see the connection with Lewis Carroll and how strong it is in terms of the brilliance of that poem and how relatable it is to his work and to your own creativity. Thank you so much for sharing that. Have you published that somewhere or where would somebody find that?
AJ That is in a little chapbook called Madison Hatta’s Book of Unreasonable Rhymes. That was published by Moonstone Press in Philadelphia back in 2015. They may still have some copies available. The ALICE Way is a course but I also plan to have it as my second book. I published my opening essay from that book, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” on the Gulf Coast Writers Association website. It won third place in the Non-Fiction category of their 2024 Writing Contest.
FB Amazing. How cool.
Your first book was The Tenth Muse. Tell us about your first writing experience and what the book is about.
Maria Antonio was a noblewoman who lived in the middle of the 18th century. She was well known at the time because she was a composer, poet, and singer, as well as a patron of the arts who wanted to turn the German Electorate of Saxony into the fine arts capital of Europe. She composed two operas. She wrote the music and the lyrics, and she sang as the lead. This is extraordinary for anyone of any time to do, but particularly at that time and for her to be a Princess. People wrote poems to celebrate her life. They named their kids after her. In fact, one of the people named after her was the Queen of France, who everyone has probably heard of, her cousin, Marie Antoinette.
FB Wow, that sounds like it could make a good movie. She seems like such a fascinating character and so ahead of her time.
Is there anything else you would like to talk about regarding your ALICE Way program? I really hope people will check it out. It's been so much fun talking to you about Alice in Wonderland. I really appreciate your taking the Mad Hatter and turning him into Madison Hatta. I named my reimagining of the Mad Hatter, Hatter Madigan. We both need that “mad” somewhere in the name. Yours was divine. She came to you. I think mine came up from below.
AJ I call Madison the guardian angel of my sense of humor. She came at a time when I was starting to lose my sense of humor. I think we all need that reminder.
FB Thank you for offering this wellness program and for the incredible amount of optimism you shared. Most importantly, I'd like to end on the joy that you communicated and the joy it's been having you on the show. We wish you the best of luck and thank you for taking the time to chat with us.
AJ Thank you for having me on your show, Frank. It's been wonderful chatting with you.
Of all the articles I have written for Frank, I have always had the most fun writing about the Mad Hatter and his many different versions. From the original Hatter to the Disney cartoon to Frank’s badass Hatter Madigan, the adaptations of Hatter always seem to be a crowd favorite. So much in fact that October 6 is actually National Mad Hatter Day. Mad Hatter Day is a bit of a free-for-all for those who like to be silly. It’s quite easy to celebrate, you can wear a silly hat, watch a silly movie, throw a tea party, eat some mercury, or just be authentically silly. When I was let out of Franks's basement to write this blog, I was told it should be “…pretty light and leave a lot of room for comedy.” Which I have interpreted as “Be as weird as you want Jared.” To which I say, “Your funeral.” So, I have gathered a collection of my top five Maddest Mad Hatter Moments for you to enjoy.
5. Tea down the neck, through the shirt, and out the sleeve - Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.
Starting off this list is arguably the most recognizable version of the Mad Hatter. Voiced by Ed Wynn, the 1951 Disney Mad Hatter was probably most people's first introduction to the wild character. While he has many funny and whimsical moments in the movie, I chose this slick maneuver as the first “maddest” moment. You really would have to be suffering from mercury poisoning to pour tea down the collar of your shirt and out your sleeve and not be screaming from the beverage singeing your skin. I know it’s a cartoon, but it’s still mad.
4. Martin Short’s Mad Hatter Haunting My Dreams - Alice in Wonderland TV Movie
I had to see it and now so do you! Martin Short is awesome, the comedian is beloved by many. But he has a dark secret. You see when he isn’t solving crimes with Selena Gomez and Steve Martin, Martin Short is busy haunting my dreams. Specifically, his performance as the Mad Hatter in the 1980s nightmare fuel Alice in Wonderland TV movie. First is his laugh, a high pitch truly crazy laugh that sends a chill down my spine. On top of that is the fact that his head is MASSIVE. I know this was an attempt to make him look more like the cartoon but instead, it made him look like a terrifying Steve Madden shoes ad. I have included the full tea party scene so you can have nightmares as well.
3. The Mad Hatter’s Pin Cushion - Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland
Some would argue that Tim Burton’s adaptation of the Mad Hatter made the manic milliner even more famous than before. A part of this, of course, can be attributed to the fantastic performance of Johnny Depp, who brought his signature flare into the role. This specific performance is arguably the most cosplayed version of the Mad Hatter due to the costume, hair, and makeup being exceptionally striking. Also probably because Depp is a sex symbol and if you're going to cosplay, might as well be cosplaying that. Don’t believe me? Well, the video I found was titled “Tarrant Hightopp being sexy af for 5 1/2 minutes straight” Don’t get me wrong, Johnny Depp is a good-looking guy but…I mean…to each their own I guess. I need a shower.
Depp’s Hatter has many great moments but the maddest moment of all is when he is fighting the Knave of Hearts. During the sword fight, the Mad Hatter uses a pin from his pincushion to poke the eye of the Knave gaining the upper hand in the fight. This is truly mad because I never expected to see something so violent from the Hatter. But hey, all is fair in love and war.
2. Human Chess - Batman: The Animated Series, “As Mad as a Hatter”
The Mad Hatter isn’t just limited to the collection of Alice movies. He was also a less popular Batman villain who made his first appearance in the 1950s comics. The version of the Mad Hatter portrayed in the comics and cartoons has nothing to do with Alice and I’ll prove it to you. First, his hats are mind-control devices. Second, he’s in love with a woman named Alice. Finally, in one of the comics, he had a monkey called Carroll Lewis. Completely different. In Batman: The Animated Series, there is a scene where the Mad Hatter has placed mind control devices on people and Batman has to figure out how to fight through them while on a giant chess board. The queen on the chessboard even says, “Off with his head.”
1. Mad Hatter Bot - Futurama, Insane in the Mainframe
This is only a quick moment but as a massive Futurama fan, I had to mention it. In this episode, an error happens in Fry’s sentencing for a crime and he is sentenced to the Hal Institute for Criminally Insane Robots. While in a group session, the Mad Hatter Bot, whose hat tag reads 5/3 instead of 10/6 (probably because a robot would do the math on the fraction) periodically makes the other robots change places, causing the therapy robot to end up as a patient, thus receiving “treatment” in the form of a hammer. Is this one of his maddest moments? Well, he is in an insane asylum.
I have more moments and decided in the spirit of Mad Hatter Day, traditional listicle numbering be damned.
This time, the Hatter is portrayed by Steve Buscemi, who, side note, would make an amazing Mad Hatter outside of a skit. In the sketch, Alice, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter have a mad-off to show Alice who is the most “mad.” It starts off quite whimsical but when it gets to the Mad Hatter, he seems to actually be insane, claiming to wash his hands over one hundred times a day to wash off the smell of his mother, making toy cars out of his poo, and eventually flipping the table and being placed in a straight jacket. He was both the winner and the loser of the contest.
-1. Special Guest Bonus Moment
*AIRHORNS* That’s right, before wrapping up this list, I wanted to bring in the author of The Looking Glass Wars. You know his name because it’s humbly the name of this website. He’s the man who kindly allows me to see the light of day once a month. My boss, Frank Beddor.
So, Frank, I have purposely left out any moments of your version of the Mad Hatter, Hatter Madigan because I wanted to hear what was your favorite mad moment that you came up with. I didn’t leave it out to make you mad. I definitely don’t want that. The Disappointment Box is so small and dark. But yes, what is your favorite Hatter Madigan moment?
SPACE FOR FRANK’S ANSWER
*Response to Franks's answer has been pre-written and will not be edited as the author of the blog kept calling it “censorship”:
Hahaha, I couldn’t agree more. Or if the answer requires it, Hahaha, I disagree completely.
Well, there you have it, my list of the Mad Hatter's Maddest Moments. Before I reach the finish and am forced back into Franks's basement until another blog is needed, I wanted to mention one more quick, “mad” Mad Hatter moment I thought needed to be mentioned.
-2. Frank Beddor vs. Tim Burton: The Trial of the Century
I guess it's not so much a moment but a snippet from a trailer. In the trailer for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, we see the Mad Hatter throwing his hat. This is early similar to Frank Beddor’s very own Hatter Madigan, who famously uses his hat as a weapon. While it is legally distinct, the Hatter throwing his hat was first conceptualized by Frank Beddor. What, or should I say, who, is so mad about this? Well, Frank Beddor of course. IP theft is no joke and as Frank Beddor’s official lawyer-
(The rest of this sentence has been deleted. It must be stated that Jared Hoffman is not, has not, and never will be, the legal council of Frank Beddor or those associated with Frank Beddor. Frank Beddor loves Tim Burton’s adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” and does not believe there has been any theft of IP. Additionally, there is no Disappointment Box and Jared Hoffman can leave the basement any time he likes, he just chooses to stay there.)
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
