The Unimaginative Liddells: Princess Alyss’ Never-Before-Seen Letters – Part 2
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.
In April, we released the first round of never-before-seen letters, journal entries, and art from Princess Alyss Heart’s exile on Earth. Part One spanned Alyss’ flight from Wonderland and how she survived her first days on the rough streets of London.
When we last left Princess Alyss she had just been arrested by the London bobbies and sent to the notorious Charing Cross Orphanage. In Part Two, Alyss recounts the horrors of this ignominious institute, her disappointment at being adopted by the unimaginative Liddells, and why she tried to break into Buckingham Palace.
(*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!)
Agnes MacKenzie Worlds collide in this document dated May 24, 1859, when a man of science, Dr. Williford, the physician at London’s Charing Cross Foundling Hospital unknowingly examined a princess from another realm. Written in his precise script, the intake form lists Alyss’ height, weight, and hair color, and contains notes on her attitude and dress. Special attention was paid to the unusual fabric of her dress, “finer than any silk and yet so strong as to repel all stains and misc. damage with the exception of one vicious gash”. Alyss is described as having luminous coloring, a willful, imperious attitude, and an intense aversion to felines. When asked where her family is she insisted they are in a place called “Wonderland”. The doctor’s keen eye noted the unusual qualities of the child, but his mind could not open to the concept of ‘Wonderland’. Dr. Williford comments that if her oddness can be contained the wardens have high hopes for placing her in a family of good standing because “the child obviously has quite exceptional bloodlines”. Indeed.
October 2, 1861 When I was delivered to the orphanage I erupted into a terrible screaming temper tantrum. How dare they???? This place was certainly not meant for children, it must be a prison for something exceptionally evil and nasty. But I was wrong, children were everywhere and the only things evil and nasty living here were the ward mistresses with their stiff collars and drab skirts weighed down with bundles of heavy keys to lock the doors that kept us all from running away. I loathed it there so much that I looked forward to escaping into my dreams each night but even this became unbearable because my dreams soon had a very unwelcome visitor.
The Cat! Each night it would sneak into my sleep and invade my dreams with its growls and hisses and hot, stinky cat breath! It had the stinkiest breath I have ever smelled in a dream!
October 8, 1861 Dreams are only nightmares if you let them do what they wish. One night I decided that rather than being frightened of what was chasing me, I would imagine that I was running towards something beautiful. There were endless doors lining the halls and I imagined I would find my mother if I opened the very last door. But when the door opened, instead of seeing her I saw all her favorite flowers. And I could smell her favorite perfume. Eau de’Pink. It smells very PINK and I love it.
November 10, 1861 I was adopted by a very dull and unimaginative family named Liddell and brought to live in their home in Christ Church, Oxford. Living in a home was very different from living in a palace and I found it difficult to adjust as I believe ANY Princess would. Everything was so small and smelled rather of burned vegetables while my bedchamber was just ridiculous. The bed didn’t even float! How could I even begin to get a perfect night’s sleep???? The Liddells did not believe in Wonderland or that a real princess could come to their world and even though I repeatedly corrected them, they insisted on changing my name to Alice. HOW RUDE!!!!!
Agnes MacKenzie Uncertain of their adopted daughter’s bloodlines and wishing to make a suitable marriage (a prince perhaps???) Henry and Lorina Liddell chose to keep her origin top secret by destroying all records of the adoption, even going so far as to forge an ‘Alice Liddell’ birth certificate which modern genealogical forensics easily exposed to be false! The child was simply not born in this world.
November 11, 1861 In Wonderland I had always remembered my dreams. Why was I unable to remember my dreams now? Aha! I wasn’t sleeping in a dreamgown! When I inquired of Mrs. Liddell when I would be fitted for my dreamgown, she looked alarmed. I explained that in Wonderland there were special gowns in which you slept to capture your dreams. The dreams would be reflected on the gown so you wouldn’t forget anything important. I had closets full of dreamgowns in Wonderland but requested only ONE for here. I thought I was being quite modest but Mrs. Liddell opened her mouth very wide and shouted at me “You must STOP your incessant impossible imagining. You dream too much as it is ALICE!” Dream too much??? How sad to think that anyone could ever dream TOO MUCH. I spent the rest of the day locked in my dark little dungeon of a bedroom imagining and drawing dreamgowns….
From left to right: Proper sister Lorina – A grown-up lady in the body of a little girl; Cruel Governess Pricks – She actually prefers sour to sweet!; Mr. and Mrs. Liddell – Equally gloomy on all occasions; Me – If it weren’t for my hollizalea headdress and mini-rainbow I should fear becoming just like them!; Baby Edith – There may still be hope for her.
February 22, 1862 Yesterday Mr. and Mrs. Liddell brought Lorina and I to London to visit the exhibition at the Crystal Palace. The palace reminded me very much of Heart Palace and I felt all sorts of sad and glad memories about Wonderland. It also made me remember something VITAL! When I first arrived in London I shot out of that puddle into the center of a parade and saw a golden carriage. There was a woman in the carriage waving to the crowd. It was a Queen! Had mother traveled here to meet me? I had run after the carriage and chased it all the way to a palace but a row of soldiers blocked my entrance. I told them I was Princess Alyss Heart and ordered them to allow me to pass. At this, they began to laugh. Vowing to return to this palace called Buck-ing-ham I ran back in search of the puddle that had brought me here. I had forgotten all of this until the Liddells brought me on this visit to London. And suddenly I knew what had happened! Mother had followed me to London but had been kidnapped and imprisoned by Redd at the palace known as Buck-ing-ham!!!!! It all made perfect sense and it was up to me to rescue my mother.
February 23, 1862 Enough was enough! How could I pretend to live the childish life of Alice Liddell in her nursery eating porridge when I was certain that Redd had imprisoned my mother in the palace called Buck-ing-ham? This had to be the reason for everything horrible that had happened. Redd had wished to be queen but Wonderland already had a queen, my mother. Redd must have come to London through the Pool of Tears and become the queen known as Victoria! Being the Queen of London was not anywhere as grand as being the Queen of Wonderland and Redd was jealous of my mother so she kidnapped her and locked her in Buck-ing-ham Palace!!! I was positive that my mother was there now waiting for me to rescue her.
February 27, 1862 My preparations complete, I set forth on my mission to rescue my mother from Queen ‘Victoria’ (ha!). I noticed that whenever I thought of seeing my mother my imagination would suddenly become very strong. I would picture my mother and I in the garden at Heart Palace and I would suddenly be filled with all sorts of imaginings on how to get to London and how I would find a pair of jollyjelly wings and sail over the wall past those snickering guards. I had my train tickets, maps, and a packet of peppermints should I become weak from hunger and need energy. I was so excited I could have flown to London. I did consider collecting and pasting bird feathers to my arms and setting off from the roof of the Liddell’s house but I could not find enough feathers.
March 10, 1862 Disaster! Unable to locate a pair of jollyjelly wings I decided to dig my way in under the palace fence. The passage under the fence was a tight fit and horror of horrors I became stuck! I felt a tug on my feet and was soon face to face with the redcoated guards laughing harder than ever. I was imprisoned and given only a very small amount of tea and cake until Mr. Liddell could come and fetch me back to Oxford. Oh, the dreadfulness of my mood. And the worst was yet to come. Governess Pricks was waiting at the front door when we pulled up in the carriage. Her words felt like a storm of pinches as she scolded me for being a selfish, ridiculous child. But as she continued on and on with ever more insults I could only hear my own small voice repeating over and over “How shall I ever return home now?”
Agnes MacKenzie Not long after this ill-fated excursion to London, Alyss was to meet someone who would lift her spirits and give her hope (if only to later smash it to pieces!)
*Stay tuned for Part Three, in which Alyss meets the Oxford mathematician who would change her life forever – Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).
Where Are They Now? Johnny Depp and the Cast of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”
We figured out how to make pictures move in the late 1800s and not long after, adaptations of one of the most popular stories in world history started popping up. The first film adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ran twelve minutes and was noted for its innovative use of special effects. Since then, there have been over thirty Alice in Wonderland films including the iconic Disney animated movie. In 2006, Disney went into development on an updated Alice adaptation and hired Batman and Sleepy Hollow director Tim Burton, whose gothic sensibilities and singular visual style had delighted both audiences and critics alike.
Released in 2010, Alice in Wonderland is a loose adaptation of Carroll’s tale, following nineteen-year-old Alice Kingsleigh as she rediscovers Wonderland and learns she is destined to dethrone the tyrannical Red Queen. The film was a smash at the box office, raking in over $1 billion worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing film of the year behind Toy Story 3. Burton’s Alice was lauded for its style, tone, and use of CGI, with Michael Rechtshaffen writing in The Hollywood Reporter, “Burton has delivered a subversively witty, brilliantly cast, whimsically appointed dazzler…” And what about that cast? The star-studded ensemble featured longtime Burton collaborators Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter alongside Anne Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska, and Alan Rickman. Their subsequent careers have been filled with franchise blockbusters, critical acclaim, and (interestingly) Les Miserables.
Let’s take a look at what Burton and his stars have been up to since the release of Alice in Wonderland:
Tim Burton – Director A favorite of film students and Halloween enthusiasts, Tim Burton came into Alice on a twenty-year hot streak. From Beetlejuice to Batman, from Sleepy Hollow to Sweeney Todd, Burton was the go-to guy for offbeat stories infused with humor and horror set against a backdrop of surreal and fantastical visuals. Alice in Wonderland proved to be his greatest commercial success, grossing more than his previous four films combined, and earned Burton a Golden Globe nod for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Since then, the results have been…mixed. Burton found critical success with 2012’s Frankenweenie while Dark Shadows, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and his 2019 adaptation of Dumbo were moderate financial successes but failed to win over critics. In 2022 he dipped into TV for the first time in thirty-five years with the hit Netflix series Wednesday starring Jenny Ortega, who, incidentally, would be a perfect fit as Princess Alyss. Burton’s next project is the highly anticipated Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The sequel to his 1988 cult classic sees him reunited with Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, and Ortega and is slated to be released in September 2024.
Johnny Depp – Tarrant Hightopp/Mad Hatter Johnny Depp’s career since Alice in Wonderland has been a smorgasbord of hits, tent poles, flops, and some quintessentially Deppian performances. First the good. The alt-core heartthrob followed up his predictably quirky turn as the Mad Hatter with a Golden Globe nomination for his work in the romantic thriller The Tourist and provided the title voice for Rango, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Depp reprised his role as the iconic Jack Sparrow in the latest installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and stole the screen as Gellert Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and The Crimes of Grindelwald. Critical and commercial flops came in the form of The Lone Ranger and Transcendence (and a few others) but Depp earned rave reviews for his performances as two of the 20th century’s most successful criminals – Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger in Black Mass and Donald Trump in Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie. He has also found time to indulge in his passion for music, releasing two albums with Hollywood Vampires, a rock supergroup featuring Alice Cooper and Joe Perry, and collaborating with guitar legend Jeff Beck. Up next, Depp is at the helm of Modi, a drama about Bohemian artist Amedeo Modigliani, and is set to play Satan opposite Jeff Bridges’ God in Terry Gilliam’s new comedy.
Mia Wasikowska – Alice Kingsleigh Australian actress Mia Wasikowska was a relative unknown before being cast as Carroll’s heroine at twenty-one years old. She had earned critical acclaim for her performance in the HBO series In Treatment but playing Alice launched her into the stratosphere. Wasikowska won the Hollywood Awards’ Breakthrough Artist Award, the Australian Film Institute International Award for Best Actress, and was included in the 2011 Time 100. Immediately following Alice, Wasikowska starred in the Oscar-nominated dramedy The Kids Are All Right and played opposite Michael Fassbender in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s adaptation of Jane Eyre. Wasikowska has also worked with an impressive list of directors including Gus Van Sant, Park Chan-wook, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, and Guillermo del Toro. After reprising her role as Alice in the 2016 sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Wasikowska took a step back from the mainstream industry, choosing to focus on more intimate, character-driven projects. She was nominated for an Australian Oscar for her work in the 2019 dark comedy Judy and Punch and starred in the 2021 romantic drama Bergman Island alongside Tim Roth, which premiered at Cannes. Wasikowska’s latest film was the 2023 dark comedy thriller Club Zero, which also premiered at Cannes and was nominated for the Palme d’Or.
Helena Bonham Carter – Iracebeth/Red Queen The endlessly versatile Helena Bonham Carter had a pretty good 2010. She starred in The King’s Speech as Queen Consort Elizabeth, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, won an international Emmy for her work in the BBC Four television film Enid, and played the deliciously evil Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. After Alice, Bonham Carter finished her work as the unhinged Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter franchise and played the unscrupulous Madame Thenardier in Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables. Her choice of film roles over the past decade and a half has reflected her love for period pieces (Suffragette, Enola Holmes) and quiet dramas (One Life). Bonham Carter has also been nominated for Golden Globes and Emmys for playing Elizabeth Taylor in the TV film Burton & Taylor and Princess Margaret in the Netflix series, The Crown. Her upcoming projects include the 2024 drama Four Letters of Love alongside Pierce Brosnan and an adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel The Seven Dials Mystery from Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall. Also, in 2011, Bonham Carter narrated Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl for Penguin Audios.
Anne Hathaway – Mirana/White Queen Anne Hathaway was a movie star before Alice in Wonderland. She’s been a movie star since Alice in Wonderland. In another fourteen years, she’ll probably still be a movie star. After starring in Alice as the multidimensional White Queen, Hathaway continued to conquer Hollywood. In 2012, she starred in another $1 billion movie, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, in which she played the enigmatic Selina Kyle/Catwoman and broke hearts in Les Miserables as the tragic Fantine, a performance which earned her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Hathaway has also showcased her range playing in comedies The Intern opposite Robert DeNiro and The Hustle alongside Rebel Wilson. She also channeled her own exeperiences (possibly) for the 2018 heist comedy Ocean’s 8. Recently, Hathaway starred in the Apple TV+ miniseries WeCrashed and the Amazon romcom The Idea of You. Her upcoming projects include David Robert Mitchell’s sci-fi film Flowervale, also starring Ewan McGregor, and David Lowery’s epic melodrama Mother Mary. Offscreen, Hathaway has devoted much of her time to activism and charitable causes. She has worked with the World Bank, was appointed a UN Women Goodwill ambassador in 2016, and was one of 300 women who founded the Time’s Up initiative.
Michael Sheen – Nivens McTwisp/White Rabbit Michael Sheen is delightful as the voice of the twitchy, chronophobic White Rabbit. Before being cast in Alice, Sheen was already part of a billion-dollar franchise, playing a telepathic vampire in the Twilight movies. He reprised that role in the final two installments, Breaking Dawn Parts 1 & 2, in 2011 and 2012. On stage, Sheen has played Hamlet at the Young Vic in London and Mozart’s rival Salieri in a production of Amadeus at the Sydney Opera House. Most of his notable work post-Alice has come in TV. He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performances as sex researcher William Masters in the Showtime series Masters of Sex and has received critical acclaim for his work as the angel Aziraphale in Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens. In 2024, Sheen co-created and directed the BBC One three-part series The Way and is currently in production on A Very Royal Scandal, in which he’ll portray Prince Andrew. Like Hathaway, Sheen is also passionate about charitable work and social advocacy, with most of his efforts centered on his native Wales. In 2021, in an interview with The Guardian, Sheen declared that he would give all of his future earnings to charity.
Alan Rickman – Absolem the Caterpillar The beloved Alan Rickman sadly passed away in 2016, but he left a glittering legacy as a tremendous actor and warm and generous coworker and friend. His iconic voice lends gravitas and humor to the character of Absolem the Caterpillar. After his work on Alice, Rickman wrapped up his decade-long portrayal of sinister Potions Master Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise and directed, co-wrote, and starred in the period drama A Little Chaos. On stage, he starred in productions of the Henrik Ibsen play John Gabriel Borkman in Dublin and Brooklyn and was nominated for a Drama League Award for his work on Broadway in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar. In addition to his work as an actor, Rickman was also an ardent humanitarian. He was a patron of the Saving Faces charity and was honorary president of the International Performer’s Aid Trust. His last recorded work was a video in support of an Oxford University campaign to raise money and awareness for Save the Children and Refugee Council. Rickman’s final two films, Eye in the Sky and Alice Through the Looking Glass, were devoted to his memory.
Stephen Fry – Cheshire Comedian, author, and actor Stephen Fry was a perfect fit for the Cheshire Cat with his professorial bearing and imperious voice. Fry has kept extremely busy since Alice, starting with his turn as the villainous Master of Lake-town in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films. He has also starred in the Amazon romcom Red, White, and Royal Blue and played opposite Lena Dunham in the 2024 tragicomedy Treasure. On TV, he has appeared in Heartstopper, The Dropout, The Sandman, and The Morning Show, in addition to hosting the acclaimed British panel show QI, which he left in 2016. He has produced and presented documentaries about mental health and Dutch resistance to the Nazis for the BBC and Channel Four. Fry has also churned out five books in the last fourteen years, including a memoir and a three-part retelling of Greek myths. Fry’s charity work and advocacy has focused on nature and wildlife conservation and climate change.
Crispin Glover – Ilosovic Stayne/Knave of Hearts Alice in Wonderland was one of four films in which the singular Crispin Glover appeared in 2010. In another example of perfect casting by Burton, Glover is excellent as the Red Queen’s right hand, the shifty Knave of Hearts. After a busy 2010, Glover continued his eclectic work in film and television. He played opposite John Cusack and Robert DeNiro in the neo-noir crime thriller The Bag Man and appeared in the 2018 mystery thriller We Have Always Lived in the Castle starring Alexandra Daddario and Sebastian Stan. On TV, Glover starred in the History Channel miniseries Texas Rising and played Mr. World in the Starz fantasy series American Gods. Glover currently has two films in post-production, the mystery Mr. K and the thriller A Blind Bargain.
Matt Lucas – Tweedledee/Tweedledum Tweedledee and Tweedledum are arguably the creepiest characters in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and they’re perfectly portrayed by British comedian Matt Lucas. The Little Britain co-creator has grown in prominence on both sides of the pond since appearing in Alice. Lucas stole scenes alongside Rebel Wilson as one of Kristen Wiig’s cringey roommates in Bridesmaids and received BAFTA TV and British Comedy Awards nominations for the BBC One comedy Come Fly With Me. In recent years, Lucas has appeared in two iconic British shows, Doctor Who and The Great British Bake Off, the latter of which he co-hosted with Noel Fielding until 2023. On stage, Lucas has played Thenardier in Les Miserables in the West End on three separate occasions and in a 25th-anniversary concert at The O2 Arena in London. His upcoming projects include an unspecified role in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2 and the animated musical Fairy Tale Forest alongside Mel Brooks and Whoopi Goldberg.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
A Royal Affair: The Suit Families Who Rule Wonderland
In Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars trilogy, he reimagines the iconic characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Whimsical, silly, nonsense characters become fantastical warriors, fierce creatures, and politically savage families grasping for power. I’m just scratching the surface but here are my favorite examples: Hatter Madigan is Beddor’s reimagined Mad Hatter. Instead of a caffeine-addicted crazy person, he is a multiple-blade-wielding bodyguard for Princess Alyss. General Doppelgänger, who is based on Tweedledee and Tweedledum, is a fierce general who can split into two separate entities. And, of course, there is the Cat. Frank Beddor’s take on the Cheshire Cat, the Cat is Queen Red’s faithful assassin. Frank expanded and transformed the already rich world Carroll created into his own. This is most obvious when it comes to the different suit families.
The suit families in The Looking Glass Wars are the rulers of Wonderland. Every royal in Wonderland is allied with one of the four suits: Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs. With each suit family, there is a unique culture, skillset, and card soldier fighting force. Instead of simply stating each family’s culture and such, I think it would be fun to compare the suit families with other families from media and history.
Let’s start with the Hearts. The Hearts are the oldest suit family in Wonderland. They are the ruling house, where the matriarch rules as the Queen of Wonderland. Due to the family’s deep history, they value loyalty above all else. Another fictional family that shares a lot of similarities with the Hearts is the Stark family from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones. The Stark family, much like every family in Game of Thrones, is put through the wringer, especially after that whole “Red Wedding” debacle. No matter what happens to them though, they are always there for each other. This is just like the Heart family. In The Looking Glass Wars, there is a coup that can be compared to the Red Wedding. The family leader, Queen Genevieve, is killed, leaving Princess Alyss Heart on her own, forcing her on a long arduous, journey towards becoming a warrior princess, much like Arya Stark in Game of Thrones.
Next up are the Spades. The Spade family today are known for their stealth and wild technology. Their cities are so technologically advanced they look similar to central Tokyo in our world. The Spades are essentially addicted to technology, so much so that mad scientists carry out forbidden experiments in dark towers and castles on the outskirts of Spade cities. The Spades have the bloodiest history of all the suits. Originally slaves, they managed to stage a successful rebellion against their rulers. Due to their past enslavement, the Spades are a tight-knit group who are wary of outsiders. The Spades have fought for their power and will do anything to keep it. A great comparison for the Spades is the Borgia family. The Borgias were a power-hungry Spanish noble house active in Italy during the Renaissance. The Borgia family murdered, bribed, and stole their way to the top of the Catholic Church then did some more murdering, bribing, and stealing to maintain control of the Vatican. In fact, we still are feeling these effects today. I want you to close your eyes. Now I want you to open your eyes because I realized you won’t be able to read this. But imagine Jesus in your mind’s eye. You see that blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy, right? Well, that’s Cesare Borgia, SON of POPE Alexander VI. That’s a golden calf if I’ve ever seen one. While some may refute this, many other smarter people don’t. This is the type of power the Borgias had and if I’m comparing them to the ruthless Spades…I’ll let you figure out the rest.
Alright, now we are onto the Clubs. The Clubs came from explorers and wandering outcasts, rebellious against authority and valuing freedom above all else. I’m stuck between two different options for comparisons. The first are the Orks from Warhammer 40,000. These are not your Tolkien-esque orcs of yesteryear. No, these Orks are extremely aggressive semi-psychic space fungi who are most happy bashing heads on the battlefield. Okay, extremely aggressive semi-psychic space fungi might not sound like the Clubs at first but allow me to persuade you. Like the Clubs, Orks are broken into different clans (tribes). They value absolute freedom (on the battlefield to kill whoever they want), are fantastic warriors, and are green which is the regimental color of the Club military. Right, so that’s option one for the comparison. My second comparison for the clubs is the United States. Actually, if you switch out Orks with the U.S., it has the same sentiment, so I’m going to say it’s both.
Finally, there are the Diamonds. The Diamonds are descendants of merchants and traders and have an insatiable lust for acquiring wealth. The Diamonds, much like their literal gemstone counterparts, enjoy flaunting their wealth. Their desire for financial gain makes them exceptionally cunning in their political schemes. A great comparison is House Harkonnen from Frank Herbert’s Dune. For those of you who only saw the movies that came out recently, Dave Bautista and Austin Butler were members of House Harkonnen. While Dave and Austin’s characters were extremely volatile, Baron Harkonnen, who was played by Stellan Skarsgård, embodies the Diamonds the most. He wanted acquisition at all costs, manipulated politics into his favor using “spice” and the money he made with it, and was extremely opulent. Those black goo baths had to be expensive, no one else partook in them.
While these comparisons are not exactly apples to apples, I wanted to show those who have not had the pleasure of reading The Looking Glass Wars what the different suit households of Wonderland were like in a very digestible form. Comparing one intellectual property to another can sometimes be a bit reductive. The suit families are more complex than the descriptions I used just as the other IPs are more complex. That being said, I’m remaining hopeful that one day in the future an underpaid writer will create a blog comparing their boss’s characters to other IPs and use something from The Looking Glass Wars TV show as an example.
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?
Mushrooms and Rabbit Holes: “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Alice in Wonderland”
Ba da dun da dun dah dun! For those of you who can hear the melody in my head, you already know what this blog is about. For those of you who lack ESP skills, we’re talking about the Super Mario movies, yes movies as in two, and how they relate to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. A bit of back story on why I’m so excited for this blog. I’m going to take you back to the year 2002. My family is packing for a flight to Canada. Little five-year-old me was probably passing time in my room by solving complex equations on string theory as part of my fellowship with Harvard. Well, that day, my mother came into my room with a surprise for me. The surprise was an original Gameboy and two game cartridges. One was a port of a Russian block stacking game but the other was Super Mario Land. The game was already thirteen years old but to little five-year-old me it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. With one flick of the switch, the little green and black screen came to life and I was transported to the Mushroom Kingdom. I could only get to the fourth level before I died but my dad told me tales of a seventh level with spiders that he only reached once. To reach such heights, I knew what I must do, I put down my scientific calculator and told Harvard, “To hell with your fellowship.” From now on the only string theory I was interested in was…I don’t know…I played a lot of video games and now I’m not as smart as I could have been. I still have that same game cart and every now and then I pick it up. The game is only about 45 minutes from start to finish but I still remember the feeling the first time I beat it.
Mario is an instantly recognizable character and there’s good reason for it. When the Nintendo Entertainment System was released, it came with the game Super Mario Bros. It’s synonymous with Nintendo. The games are simple and well-made. Go from left to right and don’t let the enemies touch you. With how popular these Mario games were, it seemed only natural that Hollywood would want to get in on some of the action. In 1993, they did, and people HATED it. But not all people. There was one person who when given a VHS of the Mario movie, sat down and ate it up. That person was me.
Look, I’m aware Super Mario Bros.is not “good” but I was Mario-obsessed and just wanted to see how they would create the Mushroom Kingdom in a movie. I was not expecting the Mushroom Kingdom to be a Blade Runner-esque dystopian society in an alternate universe where instead of primates evolving as the dominant species, it was dinosaurs that evolved into humans. That being said, I accepted it for what it was and locked myself in for the ride. The weird story and setting aside, the casting was sick. The movie starred Bob Hoskins as the titular Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi and they really looked the part. One short and “rounder” and one tall and skinnier. The person who didn’t look the part was Dennis Hopper, who played the famous antagonist Bowser. While Dennis Hopper is awesome, Bowser was just, like, a guy. Also, I just remembered, Mario is both Mario’s first and last name. So, the Mario brothers’ full names are actually Mario Mario and Luigi Mario.
The movie is pretty much a mess, but apparently, it was even messier during production. John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins would deal with the troublesome production by drinking between takes. This drinking led to Bob Hoskins breaking his hand. Bob was also stabbed four times, electrocuted, and almost drowned. Needless to say, the movie was considered a failure. Such a failure in fact that Nintendo basically closed its doors to Hollywood for thirty years.
In those thirty years, Hollywood changed, the studios basically stopped making anything original for fear of failure (which in itself is setting themselves up for failure since people are growing bored of remakes) and seems to have cracked the code for adapting popular non-film franchises into films. I’m not too sure how it happened but a Mario movie was green lit by Nintendo. If you don’t know, The Super Mario Bros. Moviewas a massive hit, raking in over 1.3 billion gold coins at the box office. Chris Pratt was the controversial choice for the voice of Mario, Charlie Day voiced Luigi, and the true saving grace of the film, Jack Black, voiced Bowser. Except for Bowser, I did not like this movie. I know I’m a “grown-up” and the movie was “made for kids” but I don’t accept that as an excuse for the surface-level film they put out. One year before, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish came out and that was incredible. That movie was made for kids. So is every Studio Ghibli movie. All are incredibly deep and original kids’ movies, so what’s Mario’s excuse?
Both Mario movies start with the Mario brothers living in New York, doing their normal jobs, and living their normal lives. In both movies, they end up going through some kind of tunnel, a “rabbit hole” if you like, to the Mushroom Kingdom. In the 1993 film, it’s like a portal or something that looks like a rock, and in the 2023 movie, it’s a classic warp pipe from the video game. Regardless of what the method is for their transport to the Mushroom Kingdom, both movies start pretty much the same way as, you guessed it, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Regarding story similarities, in both Mario movies as well as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the protagonists have to learn the “rules” of the wild lands in which they have found themselves and a moment where they use things they learned from their outside world in the current “Wonderland.”
The similarities don’t end there though. Going back to the video games, when Mario gets a red mushroom, he gets bigger. When he gets a purple one, he gets smaller. Seems an awful lot like “Eat Me” and “Drink Me” from Alice in Wonderland. A weird thing both IPs have in common is drugs. Alice has become an unofficial mascot for LSD. People claim the movie perfectly encapsulates an acid trip and while the story does lack a scene of Alice panicking while inside a music festival porta potty, I can see where that argument comes from. Being sucked into a new world, learning how it works, not being at the wheel of the journey, having to roll with the punches. It makes sense. But when LSD is mentioned, its more natural cousin is always right around the corner. I’m of course talking about psilocybin mushrooms. See where I’m going here? Since the beginning of Mario, people have pointed out that a guy eating mushrooms and stepping on monsters sounds a whole lot like a mushroom trip. I do want to point out that talking to someone who played a Mario game for the first time is much better than talking to someone who did mushrooms for the first time because instead of misquoting headlines from internet articles about psilocybin therapy, they will talk about how they defeated Bowser and saved Princess Peach.
From similar beginnings in their stories to similarities in how people perceived them in popular culture, the parallels between Mario and Alice are not hard to see once you know where to look. Like I’ve said in previous articles, if you examine popular franchises across all forms of media, you’ll find that many of them have a lot in common with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Which of course means that, whether they knew it or not, the creators drew inspiration from Alice. It makes sense. Alice was groundbreaking, it changed storytelling forever. This is Alice’s Wonderland and we are just living in it.
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: Interview with Mark Saltzman
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 screenwriter and playwright Mark Saltzman 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 Thanks for being on the show, Mark Saltzman. I was delighted to come across your musical, somebody else who’s been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. It never ceases to amaze me how Alice has become a muse for so many creators. I’m really curious. Why do you think Alice has lasted so long and continues to be reinvented?
Mark Saltzman I have given that a lot of thought. There’s a uniqueness about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that nothing’s really eclipsed. There’s a looseness and an irrationality to the original books. I think that could only be from Reverend Dodgson, Caroll’s intimate knowledge of logic, which allowed him to avoid logic. He knew where it would fall. Most children’s stories have a moral and a very clear narrative. A beginning, middle, and end, with a heroine or hero who learns a lesson or something like that. Alice defied all of that. I think it’s because of that uniqueness that nothing else has ever come along in the past 150 years that qualifies in the same way or entices kids when they first read it.
Alice has inspired but really, where is the adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that truly, truly succeeds? The adaptation of The Wizard of Oz absolutely supersedes the original but with Alice, from stage productions to Disney to Tim Burton, they have just avoided the whole story completely. Nobody’s been able to really wrap their arms around this elusive, mysterious piece of work by Lewis Carroll.
FB That’s a really interesting take because you could never teach writing using that book because there is no beginning, middle, or end. You could never write a TV show, a movie, or a play for that matter, because it’s so episodic and there is a randomness to it. But thematically, it’s really interesting and really strong, because it’s asking “Who am I?”
To your point, there is no adaptation that stands out. There are just really good references like The Matrix. The Matrix did an amazing job. Tim Burton threw it out. You focused on parts of real-life Alice, Lewis Carroll’s muse, Alice Liddell. I did the same thing in a different way with The Looking Glass Wars.
Tell us the concept behind your play, Alice, Formally of Wonderland, A Musical Story of the Real Alice. The real Alice inspired Lewis Carroll and met Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son. So you went from there and did this show, which I’m assuming is some sort of romance.
MS Correct. It is a romance. We know there was some sort of relationship, presumably romantic, between Leopold and Alice Liddell and it seemed to have not been chronicled. Out of all the Alice works, somehow that was missed. I just loved this idea. Because for one thing, you knew going in this did not work out. In the Victorian era, if there was a romance, it was not going to end with them skipping down the aisle to be married. “So what did happen?” I wondered. When you’re writing historical fiction, you want to always be plausible and factual as much as you can. From what I learned from my research talking to a Lewis Carroll expert at Oxford, it seemed they did get together. There was proof they had a hunting trip together up the Thames which echoed the original Alice in Wonderland boat trip. In the scene in the musical, I figured Alice would certainly reflect on that. Ten years earlier, she took this boat ride with an Oxford don, Lewis Carroll. Within those 10 years, she became this famous figure as the muse of the Wonderland books and now she’s on the boat with Prince Leopold. It also made me think, “Who is this young woman who thinks she is worthy of a prince?” She’s an Oxford professor’s daughter who, for all we know, had never been to London.
Then I started thinking about her character, being this beautiful young woman, one of the few young women in an all-boys school, and the daughter of a professor. I felt it doesn’t give you the impression of a modest, humble, young lady. I thought, “That would be a fun character to write.” Then I started looking at Leopold the same way. What could he have been like? Here’s a prince royal and he wants to go to Oxford, he wants to be educated. He’s not a Playboy Prince. They seem like they really would be interested in each other. Then, what would destroy this? Of course, Victorian society, not to mention Mom.
FB She had a little bit of power back then.
MS She did and she didn’t seem to use it for good very often.
FB Indeed she did not.
MS She’s held in such high esteem, the beloved Queen Victoria. As England was becoming more and more woke and Oxford was trying to redo its past and take down statues of Cecil Rhodes and similar benefactors, Queen Victoria remained untouched. Here she is, the epitome of British imperialism. Who represents it more? I asked an English friend, “Why does she get a free pass? Why aren’t they taking down statues and renaming streets?” He said, “Well, she’s Queen Victoria.”
FB I got a little criticism for portraying her as a baddie, along the lines of comparing her to Redd as if they were doppelgangers. People said, “We really love our Queen Victoria so you’re gonna rub some people the wrong way.”
MS I could see loving Prince Albert, her husband. The more I read about him and his policies, which were much more progressive, I wonder if the history of the 20th century would have been different had he lived. He was kind of skeptical of the future of colonialism. Charles Dickens is writing here in this era. How much more blatant could the social ills of England be than in Dickens? Did she open a book? Did somebody mention workhouses and child labor to her? It seemed like all of England was aware of it because of Dickens and others. People were so riveted to his work, other than Her Majesty. It’s hard to even picture those two in the same room.
FB I’m with you. I’ve been playing around with it a little bit more in adapting my book series into a TV show. I didn’t focus very much on the part of her story that you’re focused on. But then when I started to work on the show, I thought, “Oh, let me see. What was she like as a teenager?” I jumped from her at 13 to her at 20 and then I brought her back to Wonderland, not dissimilar to what Tim Burton did, I suppose. But I was wondering what was going on in English society at that time. What was going on with Queen Victoria? What is something that would make Alice feel a bit more modern? I did quite a bit of research and came to the same conclusion. They’re really giving her a pass. So, you have a scene on the River Thames with Leopold and Alice?
MS Yes, that’s maybe the one thing I can say is absolutely factual. They did take that boat trip.
FB That’s very romantic and very intimate.
MS What do they talk about? That’s what it comes down to. Once again, you want to make it plausible but still a little surprising. I imagined she would have spoken about the golden afternoon, being on the river with Lewis Carroll. I imagined he would have asked, “What was it like that day?”
FB Do they have a perspective on the books in your musical? Alice is famous because of the book but does Leopold have a take on it that might reflect your take on Alice in Wonderland?
MS Her first take is she loves what it did for her. She loves the fame and she loves the social position. Her dad does not. He thinks it’s too much attention and it’s gone to her head. Leopold is so enchanted with Alice herself. He wants to know if the girl in the book is like Alice the real girl. It’s more about the young woman than the literature. But the book gets him curious. She says, “Really none at all. The fictional Alice is in a strange and dangerous land. She never thinks about her family, sister, or parents. She doesn’t even miss them. If that happened to me, I would just be destroyed.” She’d be Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. This doesn’t cross the fictional Alice’s mind. The girl in the book has a strange emotionality.
That’s another reason why the book is sort of unadaptable. The central character is essentially passive. She’s just taking it in, like a camera, and isn’t motivated to get from one place to the other. In Through the Looking-Glass, there’s a mission, but in the original, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she’s wandering. Alice happens to make it home but she’s in no real rush to get there. She seems happy to be away from her family. Leopold says, “She must have had a mother like me.” That’s their exchange. He’s also a little interested in Dodgson and what he was like. Through my research into Dodgson, it seems like he was quite the entrepreneur.
FB He was way ahead of his time in terms of being in control of everything surrounding his work. He picked the artist, the print style, and even the font. I think he might have been the first author to come up with merchandise for a book.
MS How come we don’t talk about him the way we’re talking about Walt Disney or any other entertainment industry titan? We like to put him in a garret.
FB It’s a very good question. L. Frank Baum. We all know his story.
MS Dodgson was maybe the wealthiest don teaching at Oxford. They don’t get paid a lot.
FB He was one of the first people to explore photography. He was very ahead of his time in a lot of ways. But he was never married. He was entrepreneurial but he didn’t seem to go out of his way to promote himself, even though he wrote endless letters to all of his friends.
MS He did go out of his way but it was to promote Lewis Carroll, not himself. The characters were on plates and tea towels. There was always an Alice show somewhere. Not to mention, Through the Looking-Glass is an actual sequel. What did he do with his money?
FB That’s a good question.
MS Why don’t we know that? I feel like there’s some English social taboo around this.
FB I don’t understand why Charles Dodgson is not recognizable and why you have to say Lewis Carroll right afterward. But to my point, he didn’t want any recognition. That’s why he had that name he worked on. He came up with a bunch of ideas and it’s some kind of anagram. It creates space between him and the work.
MS But, you can be pretty sure the bank accounts were in the name of Charles Dodgson. But that’s what makes me curious. This aspect of him is just ignored. It’s like writing about Walt Disney and saying, “Look at how beautifully he drew,” and that’s the end of it. You’re missing the whole point of building an empire and the “Alice Empire” is still with us.
The Dodgson estate isn’t making anything off it. But just as a thought experiment, if Alice wasn’t in the public domain, how much would his estate be taking in from the licensing of Alice projects around the world?
FB It’d probably be hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars but, of course, it wouldn’t have been so successful if it hadn’t been in the public domain. It wouldn’t have been successful because it was so episodic. But once it was in the public domain, then you’re just riffing off of it. But nevertheless, it’s still remarkable. No matter what medium you think about, Alice is everywhere.
I think the idea you put forth is right and I also think a lot of people can see what they want to see. Some people see it as a fairy tale, as it’s described, while some people see it as a horror story. I think it was written for adults on some level. They didn’t have all the categories we do now – Children’s, Middle Grade, Young Adult.
MS This really wasn’t meant for a huge popular reading public given the satire and references to local Oxford residents. It was meant for the Liddell girls and their family.
FB Your show, Alice, Formerly of Wonderland, is in Santa Barbara but it originated in Wyoming, correct?
MS I used to be affiliated with the Wyoming Theater Festival and when the show was in the workshop stage, I brought it there to put it in front of an audience and see what I had. It was a very skeletal version but I needed to put it on stage because the musical element is acapella singing. Leopold was musical and joined musical groups at Oxford and I love musical theater. I thought, “How am I going to make this musical? I didn’t want to do a traditional musical, it would seem like just another Alice musical. I thought, “I can use the Oxford Glee Club as a musical motif through it and Leopold would sing with them. I used some traditional British folk songs, Victorian parlor songs, and standard historical Oxford songs, and I wrote a couple of new ones. With six actors, it wasn’t easy to get that big glee club sound but our music arranger, Jack Woodson, is so brilliant. He managed to make it sound like a big chorus. We were very pleased with the musical sound of it and that people consider it a musical even though it’s very unorthodox.
FB The glee club is a great idea. I didn’t realize Prince Leopold was in the glee club. That’s just a natural fit and using music of the time is appropriate. Plus, you don’t have to deal with the rights.
MS We used the public domain songs and my own because, as you know, music licensing is one of the most unbearable aspects of making good art.
FB When you say you’re putting your show up, this is at the Wyoming Theater Festival so it’s public and people are coming to see it, but it’s rough. What’s in it for the audience? Do they participate? Do they give notes?
MS Generally, I talk with the audience and find out what they think. But I found at that point, at the end of the show, I already knew the audience’s reaction. If there’s a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh, you don’t have to ask them. You just bury your head in your hands and now you have to fix it. But you can’t find that out sitting in your office at the computer. You really have to have actors.
This show has not had a typical development. We were in Wyoming then I went home and did rewrites and then COVID came. As soon as COVID started to abate, I did another reading here in Studio City at the Whitefire Theater. It’s a black box and I use that for my local experiments. We went in there with a bunch of actors and some UCLA a capella guys. Then I did one more when COVID was basically done. That one I actually solved the problems and then submitted it around and it found its way to Santa Barbara.
FB How are people responding to the music?
MS They seem very surprised. Even though we made no secret that it’s a musical, it’s a capella. I don’t think that’s really processed until you’re in the room. Such exciting things have happened because it’s a tightrope act. I didn’t see any loss of attention during the numbers. In fact, there’s more leaning forward because it’s such an act of derring-do to sing this much a capella. We had terrific actors who all had a capella experience and knew how to adjust if you feel yourself going off. There’s so much nuance involved and so much concentration. Sometimes they even had to dance while they were doing it while with glee, they rarely had to do it. So it was a surprising and pretty unique element.
FB It’s a romantic comedy so when you’re fine-tuning, you’re making sure you’re putting those buttons on the jokes. Having seen it now, were people laughing where you needed them to laugh?
MS At this point, all the bad jokes are gone. We also had two previews before opening night. Fortunately, most of the clunkers had been weeded out by then. I am going back up to see it next weekend and from what I hear, as the actors have been relaxing into it more laughs emerge because I think they feel free enough to explore and try different readings. “I’m going to try to get a bigger laugh on this so I’ll hit that word harder. I’ll look right at the audience on this word.” They make these discoveries as they realize how to play this particular kind of comedy.
I tried to do that in the English drawing room style. You can’t do an Alice story without a tea party. Alice is trapped by her father into having tea with the young Oxford man he has chosen for her. Alice is already in love with Leopold so it’s awkward, to say the least. I did that in a drawing room style and the actors got it to go into a different gear. Some of it’s pretty broad. I figured one Wonderland character oughta have an appearance and I made that the Caterpillar. He really was the only one with actual useful advice in the novel. Other people were saying the most insane things to Alice but the Caterpillar really was helpful in his haughty way. I thought in her mind Alice, if she needed advice, could imagine herself going to the Caterpillar as a thought experiment. We have Matthew Greenwood, a British actor playing the Caterpillar and doing it in the style of one of the knighted-grade actors.
FB What are the conflicts with Alice? You brought up Queen Victoria. That’s pretty clear. Are there other conflicts these two lovers are dealing with?
MS They both have parental conflicts. One of the things that’s also factual is that Queen Victoria was not a fan of Leopold’s desire to go to Oxford. It could have exposed him socially to the “wrong family”. There’s a very funny scene on stage, but it actually happened. There was a negotiation between Leopold and his mother as to how he would live there. Certainly not in student housing, God forbid. He would have to be in a rented house. There was a discussion about who needed to be on the staff. Would there be a doctor in residence? Talk about control over-controlling mothers.
FB The ultimate helicopter parents.
MS Queen Victoria demanded if Leopold had a dinner, she would have to approve the menu and the guests.
FB It was her youngest son. I think he was the fourth-in-line to the throne. So he probably knew he had no chance for the throne and the youngest are usually a little bit more rebellious. He had some health issues as well.
MS That’s what made Queen Victoria feel it was valid to have 24-hour medical observation, but Leopold was having none of that. Alice has a conflict with her father, who wants to see her happily married but knows when he finds out about her relationship with Prince Leopold it just can not be. Alice’s father has the cream of England right outside his window, these Oxford guys, and he picked one especially for her, Edward Brocket. This is an invented character but I’m sure there were many such men. I made him the captain of the Christ Church rowing team and a medical student, a perfect guy.
FB Tall, strapping, big shoulders. Okay, I got it.
MS Exactly. Played by tall, strapping Sawyer Patterson. When he walked into the audition I went, “Well, there it is.” As Leopold says, ruefully, Brocket is healthy. Leopold backs off and says, “Go with the healthy personnel and have a long life.” Alice is too insanely in love at that point. But Brocket isn’t a big dumb jock or a hostile Gaston. He’s a good guy and he’s exactly who she should have had. One of the reasons I made him a jock was eventually the real Alice Liddell married a professional athlete, a cricket player. That probably was on her radar. She married a famous man. She didn’t marry the country doctor.
FB That was Reginald Hargreaves.
MS I think she still wanted to maintain her position. She married someone famous in some way so she wouldn’t suddenly fade from sight because she married an obscure, even wealthy, son of an Earl from Northumberland or something. I don’t think she was married for money. I’m sure she loved him but it was good for her public image. A famous athlete was certainly an attraction.
FB I made the connection between Leopold and Alice having a love story. That was real because they both named their first child after each other. She had a boy she named Leopold and Prince Leopold named his daughter Alice. So I thought, “Okay, that’s enough of a connection. There must have been something there. I’m gonna go with that.”
MS When I got to that in my research I thought, “The universe just handed me the end of the play.”
FB Is that the end of the play?
MS The Caterpillar is a kind of wrap-around character. He gives that information and there’s occasionally a little gasp in the audience. It hammers home the truth.
FB Beautiful. Very exciting. How long is it running?
MS This is the last week. June 16th is the last show.
FB What’s the hope for the next steps?
MS It’s six actors and off-Broadway sized. My last show in New York, Romeo and Bernadette, was off-Broadway. It was in a nice little theater on 42nd Street. I’d like to have Alice, Formerly of Wonderland follow that trajectory to Off-Broadway in New York.
FB Fingers crossed.
What was your introduction to Alice in Wonderland? Did you read it as a child or was it the Disney movie?
MS I think I read it before the Disney movie. I was a big reader. Reading the initial books, I don’t think was that life-changing because you’re reading everything. I remember gravitating to English children’s books like Winnie the Pooh when I was really little. But when I was a little older, I found The Annotated Alice, which I’m sure you know. That was a rabbit hole I dove into. I talked to fellow English major nerds about this and it turns out, for a lot of us, that was the first literary criticism we ever encountered. It was the first time we recognized there’s more to a book than we may have imagined. It was so easily readable and digestible. Martin Gardner did the notes in the margins.
FB I thought it was brilliant. I think everybody should read it, even if you don’t care about knowing everything about Alice, because to your point, it’s so consumable and digestible.
MS It gives you the goods. It’s not holding back. Rather than reading a magazine article about literary criticism, The Annotated Alice was in these teaspoon-sized bits to take in and be fascinated by. In some way, that put me on a path towards being an English major in college. That book said, “There’s more than you imagined here. Let us explain.”
FB Have you thought about your play as a show or movie?
MS I have but if it’s not Merchant Ivory making it I’m not sure I’m interested. The depiction of the Victorian period has to be so beautiful. I don’t know if that’s a Netflix movie. What else are we gonna have?
FB They don’t make movies like that anymore. Barely any movies at all.
MS I don’t really see how it could find its way into the media universe that way. I wish but we just don’t live in that world. Maybe there’s some English film company. But first, I want to move it down the theatrical path.
FB Your other show, Romeo and Bernadette, what was that about?
MS That was another fantasy, exploiting an English author.
FB Wonder why they hate us American authors.
MS We try so hard. Romeo and Bernadette started as a movie script that never got made. It’s essentially, at the end of Romeo and Juliet Romeo doesn’t drink the poison. He drinks more of Juliet’s sleeping potion and that puts him out. He wakes up hundreds of years later and finds a girl who looks a lot like Juliet but she’s an Italian-American girl in Verona on a family vacation. Romeo follows her back to Brooklyn and finds out she’s the daughter of a mafia don. He gets involved with the wrong mafia family and the whole thing starts again, except they’re happy. It was knocking around, including with some British companies for a movie and it didn’t happen. Everybody said to me how good it was and how funny it was. So I made it into a little musical, nine actors, and we played New York with really nice reviews.
FB That sounds like a great idea.
MS We’re mixing the cast album right now.
FB Are you musical yourself?
MS I am. I always say this, coming out of college I had an Ivy League English degree and the ability to play piano. What was gonna get me work? I started playing piano in New York for auditions and bars, got my feet on the ground, and started writing. On occasion, I’d work on a show like Sesame Street where I could also write songs in addition to the script writing and Alice has two songs that I wrote. So I tried to keep a toe in the musical world, too. I really love it and listen to a lot of music every day.
FB When you were writing on Sesame Street did you just suggest some music or did they ask you if you could write a song? Or was that just part of a song that you put into a script?
MS I think one of the reasons they hired me in the first place was because they knew I was musical. I was writing songs and sketches for off-Broadway reviews. A Sesame Street actor was in one of them and she brought me over there and said, “He’s gonna write for me now. When you were writing a script, often the writers were the lyricists. For Sesame Street, every sketch has to teach something. So if you want to teach that it’s good to try new foods, you might do that in the form of a song or you might do an informative sketch. On occasion, I would be paired with a composer but other times a tune was hidden in my head and I would just submit it. Sometimes they’d take it, sometimes they rejected the music and passed it along. But it was a rare opportunity to be writing songs while writing television scripts.
FB It sounds like a great experience and a great gig.
MS It was. It was exhausting though. It was the hardest scriptwriting I’ve ever done. It had to appeal to preschoolers. It had to appeal to adults. It couldn’t be lame. It had to teach something and it had to be funny. That’s a lot in a little sketch.
FB So you’re saying it’s difficult to put all that into a little sketch? Or were the powers that be demanding these things have to all work together? Were they difficult or was it just the actual writing and creating that made all those elements gel?
MS Everyone agreed this was the Sesame Street formula. This is what made Sesame Street, the notion that the humor was not going to be lame. It was going to be sharp humor, like any sketch comedy show. If you think about it, if you’re writing for Saturday Night Live or any other comedy sketch, it just has to be funny. But with Sesame Street you have to do all those things at once in every single sketch. They’d be tested on kids to see if the sketches actually did teach them. In my time the head writer was focused on television comedy, not education, but over your shoulder was the Harvard School of Education saying, “That’s not teaching.” Also remember, this is public television so the wages aren’t going to be like the compensation at a network. So if you’re a good comedy writer, what are you doing here at PBS? It was tough to find the right kind of writer and keep them. But if you didn’t get paid in wages, you got paid in Emmy Awards.
MS That’s a TV musical musical with songs by Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!) and starring Angela Lansbury. It still seems to be a perennial online. I used to get contacted about people enjoying it. We gave it a progressive slant. I still can’t believe we got away with that. Mrs. Claus comes to New York in 1910 and she gets involved with the women’s suffrage movement, child labor, and unions. The feminists love us for it. It’s an easy way to teach how difficult it was to vote and how to organize around that. I’m pretty proud of that one. I’m glad it’s been living on.
FB Do you see many Broadway shows? Anything you’re a fan of that you wish you had written?
MS When I get to New York there’s never enough time. The last thing I saw was a production of Sondheim’s show Merrily We Roll Along. I had tremendous affection for it when I was young. It first opened in the eighties and finally, people are making it work and it’s a hit now with Daniel Radcliffe. I love that. I also saw Sondheim’s new posthumous show, Here We Are. To be involved in musical theater at all is to be worshiping at the feet of Sondheim. Whatever might be playing of his, I’ll make a special effort to go see.
FB Do people come to you about writing a book for an idea? Or do you generate most of your ideas and work on those?
MS It works both ways. I’m trying to think what people in theater have come to me for that has actually been produced. There’s so much of it. If I’m doing it myself, I have my steps. I know what to do but it can be very painstaking and slow and I’m not sure collaborators can put up with that. People do come to me and I’d say fifty percent of the projects I want to work on and fifty percent I don’t, whether it’s because I’ve done something like that before or I just don’t see how it’s ever gonna get done. But it’s always flattering when someone comes to you and invites you to work with them. But I would say the shows I’ve had produced have all been originated by me.
FB Theater is much like film or television. There are a lot of plays or musicals being developed that we never get to see because it’s really difficult to get them up on their feet and for all the elements to come together. One of the things that’s really underrated is the book writer. To get that book right to make a musical work is really hard.
MS It’s no different from screenwriting or TV writing. It’s the same skills. you know, playing songs. But if you find yourself with those skills at an early age, wouldn’t you jump into TV? I did. I needed to make a living,
FB They don’t pay very much in theater.
MS As they say, “You can make a killing but you can’t make a living.”
FB So if you’ve done Wicked, you’re good.
MS Pretty much. But there’s only one or two shows like that per decade. Yet there are so many other positives about it. But if you’re starting out and you do need the paycheck, you really can’t do theater. The payoff is after opening unless you were lucky enough to be commissioned, which you won’t be at an early age. You could be working for years on a project and then get to opening night and hope for the best that maybe now you’ll get paid. Whereas, in TV and film there is a union, of which I’m a proud member, and the union makes sure, like any union, that you get paid at a specific pay rate. On the other hand, you’re selling your copyright. Whereas you own the copyright in theater and you have the final word on casting and the script. That’s all up to the playwright.
FB It’s the same with the novelists. Part of my interest in writing was born out of losing copyright and being frustrated and saying, “I’d like to be the author from beginning to end and play in my own sandbox.” Not that those always pay enough to pay the bills and so forth. But creatively, It’s so fulfilling.
MS That’s it. There are other rewards. The union jobs for money, the theater, and novel jobs for us.
FB If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland who would you be and why?
MS The Annotated Alice is still in my head but it’s the White Knight. There’s inventiveness and kindliness about him. The Caterpillar was helpful but had that horrible attitude, which I exploited.
FB And he’s stoned a lot.
MS If only. To me, it would take that horrible haughty Oxford edge off him. He seems to me, and I wrote him this way, as the most Oxfordian of any of the characters in Alice in Wonderland. That attitude of “Who are you?” That superiority is so absurd. Whereupon the White Knight is humble and kind but completely inept and not helpful at all. But at least she didn’t end up in an ocean of saltwater or having your head stretched. At least he was kind. I think that the Caterpillar’s attitude is coming over decades from The Annotated Alice. It was pointed out there and I never forgot about it. I also remember there was speculation that the White Knight was the Lewis Carroll self-portrait because you can’t imagine him as any of the other characters. The White Knight is slightly ridiculous and that might be how Dodgson felt with his speech impediment, that he was a figure of ridicule. He probably was ridiculed because of the way kids talk about their teachers.
FB Riding in on the horse also puts him above everybody so that’s got to feel good.
MS It’s a quiet episode compared to beheadings and croquet. That was always a place in the books where I felt at home.
FB Very good answer. I read in an interview, that somebody asked you if you were an expert on Alice in Wonderland or Lewis Carroll and you said you weren’t an expert, but you did so much research. I did the same thing. I went to Oxford and spent six months there and it was so much fun.
MS This is the one place where the show expresses anything I felt, but Prince Leopold has a speech where he says, “Oxford is Wonderland.” That’s how I felt. I’ve been to places in Europe before and nothing was ever like Oxford to me. I just can’t compare it to any other place I’ve been. I would love to spend months there.
FB I’ve always been a big fan. I love the British Museum and then being in Oxford it does feel like its own Wonderland. There are Wonderland Gardens that look like they are from Oxford. I didn’t even realize there were so many people who create Wonderland hedges out of characters.
It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you, Mark. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
10 Best “Alice in Wonderland” References in “The Simpsons”
It’s been said often, and a lot on this site, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandis a titan of pop culture. It has left an indelible mark on our language, art, music, and more. So it’s no surprise that Alice and the denizens of Wonderland have been frequently referenced in another piece of pop culture royalty, The Simpsons. For thirty-five (no, that’s not a typo) seasons, Springfield’s first family has been a cornerstone of comedy. The show often features heart-warming explorations of family conflict and brilliant character work, providing the foundation for a rapid-fire succession of pinpoint pop culture references, gentle satire of American life, and delightful silliness. The writers also seem to have some form of clairvoyance, with the show becoming well-known for foreshadowing a variety of future events, including video chat, the Fox-Disney sale, and a certain angry orange-tinted man becoming president.
Much like Alice, The Simpsons isn’t just part of culture, it is culture. It was a phenomenon upon its release. It redefined what was previously thought possible to achieve in its format. The show gave birth to numerous spin-offs including comic books, video games, theme park rides, and a Golden Globe-nominated film. Its influence is felt in language, internet culture, and how we think about the world. The Simpsons and one of the Alice adaptations even share a composer. Legendary composer Danny Elfman created the iconic Simpsons theme song as well as the score for Tim Burton’s two Alice in Wonderland films. Three stars of the Burton Wonderverse have also visited Springfield – Sacha Baron Cohen, Stephen Fry, and Anne Hathaway, who apparently had such a great time she guest-starred in three episodes.
These two masterpieces of Western art have also shared the stage directly. The Simpsons’ penchant for copious pop culture references and Alice’s societal ubiquity has resulted in a litany of allusions to Wonderland. Here are ten of our favorites:
10. Lisa Down the Rabbit Hole
A classic Alice in Wonderland reference comes in at number ten. The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horrorepisodes are almost as iconic as the show itself. For “Treehouse of Horror XXIV”, part of season twenty-five, Guillermo del Toro took the helm of the opening. Del Toro packs an almost overwhelming amount of horror and sci-fi references in his three-minute segment including Alfred Hitchcock, The Shining, and Mr. Burns as the Pale Man from Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.
The opening follows the Simpson brood as they fight and flee a never-ending wave of horror and sci-fi monsters until they reach the safety of their trusty couch. Or so it seems. Suddenly, Lisa falls through a hole in the couch. Clad in a blue and white dress, she falls past tea sets, a clock, and playing cards before landing on a mushroom. Alice falling down the rabbit hole is a common reference and it is the last thing the audience suspects when the Simpson family sits on the couch. Its use does seemingly emphasize darker interpretations of Alice in Wonderland, aligning Lewis Carroll’s novel with iconic horror franchises. It’s also important to note that Lisa shares a lot of similarities with Alice, a young girl trying to find herself in an often topsy-turvy and infuriating world.
9. “We’re Through the Looking Glass Here, People”
Milhouse Mussolini Van Houten, Bart’s hapless sidekick, is one of The Simpsons writers’ favorite punching bags. He’s run over by a train, has the skin polished off his head, gets dropped by his psychiatrist for being too annoying, finds himself on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and when Bart is asked why he and Milhouse are friends, Bart response is “geographical convenience”. Ouch. However, the writers have given Milhouse some classic lines, like in the wonderfully titled “Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy”.
The children of Springfield get suspicious when their parents suddenly start going to bed early. Bart convenes an emergency meeting in his treehouse and the kids come up with a theory. Milhouse explains how the RAND Corporation, the saucer people, and the reverse vampires have conspired to force their parents to go to bed early in a plot to eliminate dinner. Milhouse finishes his summation with the declaration, “We’re through the looking glass here, people.” The expression is used when someone finds themselves in a bizarre situation and it’s utilized perfectly here. Unfortunately for Milhouse and Co., their grand theory is completely wrong. It turns out the parents of Springfield have collectively rediscovered their mojos after drinking a libidinous toxic concocted by Grampa Simpson.
8. Lisa Down the Rabbit Hole…Again
Guillermo del Toro wasn’t the first to throw Lisa Simpson down a rabbit hole. That distinction belongs to Simpsons maven and King of the Hill and The Office creator Greg Daniels, writer of the season six classic “Lisa’s Wedding”. The episode opens with the Simpsons at a Renaissance fair where Lisa wanders off after being embarrassed by Homer. She enters Friar Wiggum’s Fantastical Beastarium where she encounters the mythical Esquilax, which is just a rabbit. The rabbit runs off and Lisa follows it, a la Alice and the White Rabbit. The rabbit leads her to a fortune teller where she is told the story of her first love. Alice following the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole signifies a character following their curiosity and being thrust into a strange land. For Lisa, that curiosity leads her to 2010, where, as a college student, she falls in love with the posh and arrogant Hugh Parkfield. They soon get engaged and travel to Springfield for the wedding where Hugh insults her family due to their boorish ways. Lisa realizes how deeply she loves her family and breaks up with Hugh. It’s a journey of self-discovery perfectly suited to an Alice in Wonderland reference.
7. “You May Remember Me From…”
“To Alcohol! The Cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” There are few things Homer Simpson loves more than a nice, cold Duff (or Fudd). So it’s not surprising when he skips work to tour the Duff Brewery with Barney in “Duffless”. The shocker is that Homer drinks responsibly on the tour. Barney, on the other hand, is on a mission to drain the brewery dry and almost succeeds. He’s so hammered Homer refuses to let him drive and takes the keys himself, another uncharacteristically responsible decision. But after being pulled over by Chief Wiggum, Homer fails a breathalyzer test and is sent to traffic school as part of his D.U.I. punishment. At traffic school, he watches a video presented by Hollywood has-been, future husband of Selma, and noted fish romancer Troy McClure (voiced by the legendary Phil Hartman). In the intro to the video, McClure mentions his other driver-ed credits include “Alice’s Adventures Through the Windshield Glass”. This macabre joke has no deep meaning or connection to anything in the narrative. It’s simply funny. A joke thousands of comedy writers would include in their portfolio but on The Simpsons, it’s a throwaway line. The joke was reworked thirty years later for the title of the season thirty-four episode “Homer’s Adventures Through the Windshield Glass.”
6. Milhouse the Cat
Another Milhouse moment comes in at number six. Town pride is at stake in “Lemon of Troy” when a gang of ruffians from Shelbyville steal Springfield’s beloved lemon tree. Why does Springfield care so much about a lemon tree? According to Grampa Simpson, the tree was planted in the ground upon which Jebediah Springfield and Shelbyville Manhattan first settled. Yet after a disagreement about cousin marriage (Springfield was against it, Shelbyville for it), they split and founded their own towns.
The kids track the tree to a Shelbyville impound lot. Bart decides to lead a raid into Shelbyville where they’ll recover the tree or “choke their rivers with our dead!” While prepping, Milhouse finds camouflage gear in his room and imagines a scenario in which Shelbyvillians are chasing him. Because of his camouflage, he’s able to disappear in a clump of bushes. He then taunts the befuddled bullies, who can only see his glasses and smile in the leaves, reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat. It’s a perfectly crafted reference to Alice in Wonderland that directly ties into a deeper level of Milhouse’s psyche. Bart’s sidekick is often powerless and under emotional or physical attack. It makes sense he would fantasize about having power over others, one step ahead of the bullies who so often terrorize him.
And what happened to the tree you may ask? Well, the Springfield expedition force, now including Homer and some of the other dads, steals back their lemon tree using Flanders’ RV as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate the impound lot. Some stories do have a happy ending.
5. Moe Gets a Date
Poor Moe. The pathetic proprietor of Springfield’s favorite dive is constantly rejected by life. But sometimes, The Simpsons’ writers take pity on the pugnacious publican and give him some happiness. “Eeny Teeny Maya Moe” begins with Homer and Maggie going to Moe’s Tavern (he’s trying to be a better father). He and the other barflys are shocked to discover that Moe, their Moe, actually has a date. Moe relates how he met a woman named Maya online. He reluctantly sent her a picture of himself and she thought he was cute, prompting him to exclaim – “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
This, of course, is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass, in which the narrator rejoices at vanquishing the feared Jabberwock. “Frabjous,” “Callooh,” and “Callay” were invented by Carroll and wholly capture the feeling of elation. They’re perfect words to encapsulate Moe’s joy, as he is seldom found attractive. Their use in this episode is actually a reference to a moment in season thirteen when Mr. Burns exclaims “O frabjous day!” after scoring a date with a policewoman, creating Inception-likepop culture references.
Moe’s rapture continues as he falls in love with Maya. However, Moe has one problem, himself. Maya is a little person and Moe can’t stop himself from making tactless jokes about her height. Maya eventually breaks up with Moe, leaving him heartbroken. But all is not lost. Moe and Maya reconnect in season thirty-three and she accepts his proposal. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
4. Krusty the Ventriloquist
Krusty the Clown is one of show business’ great survivors. The hard-drinking, hard-gambling TV comedian has weathered lawsuits over his hazardous merchandise, a revolt at his children’s camp, and a vengeful former sidekick to maintain his status as the idol of Springfield’s children, especially Bart. But Krusty’s empire is threatened with extinction in “Krusty Gets Kancelled” when a new ventriloquist act, Gabbo, takes Springfield by storm. Krusty tries to fight back with his own ventriloquist act, appearing on his show with a dilapidated dummy and asking it, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” This is a reference to the confounding riddle the Mad Hatter asks Alice during the tea party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Simpsons shares Lewis Carroll’s love of the absurd, the surreal, and the silly, so it’s fitting the show’s iconic children’s entertainer would reference a work that redefined how children are entertained.
Krusty’s plan backfires when the dummy falls apart in his lap, horrifying the children in the audience. Krusty is canceled. He sinks into depression but the ever-loyal Bart and Lisa help Krusty resurrect his career. They get Gabbo canceled by recording him insulting his fans and engineer a comeback special featuring Bette Midler, Johnny Carson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Luke Perry (Krusty’s “worthless half-brother”). Krusty is back on top and bigger than ever.
3. Selma’s Child
Selma Bouvier, one of Marge’s cantankerous older sisters, is yet another Springfieldian who has been hopelessly unlucky in love. She has been married to Sideshow Bob, Lionel Hutz, Troy McClure, Disco Stu, Grampa Simpson, and Fat Tony’s cousin, Fit-Fat Tony. She has also dated Hans Moleman, Moe Szyslak, and Barney Gumble. She needs some help when it comes to relationships.
In “Selma’s Choice,” Selma has an existential crisis when her aunt Gladys dies and leaves a video will in which Gladys urges Selma and her twin sister Patty not to die alone without a husband and children. Selma becomes obsessed with having a baby. She tries a host of options – video dating, a love potion, artificial insemination, and a mail-order husband. But video dating goes nowhere, the love potion is a fake, Barney is the fertility clinic’s top donor, and her mail-order husband turns out to be a cardboard cut-out. Marge takes pity on her depressed sister and suggests she take Bart and Lisa to the Duff Gardens amusement park to give her a sense of being a parent. Selma’s afternoon with the kids goes horribly (Bart gets arrested, Lisa gets drugged by toxic water) and Selma realizes she’s totally not ready for a child. She decides to adopt her late aunt’s Iguana, Jub-Jub and sweetly serenades him with “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” as the episode ends.
Jub-Jub the iguana, named by Conan O’Brien during his tenure as a staff writer, is a reference to the dangerous bird-like creature Lewis Carroll created for “Jabberwocky”. Its voice is “shrill and high” and it is “desperate,” living in “perpetual passion.” It’s unknown if O’Brien was consciously making an Alice reference when he named Jub-Jub. But Selma is desperate and in perpetual passion, evidenced by her scattershot approach to dating. She is often seen as ugly and unlovable. It’s poignant that the being who makes Selma feel loved and seen is named after a creature who exhibits so many of the qualities that made Selma feel alone in the first place.
2. Moe the Babysitter
Curiously, many of the Alice in Wonderland references in this list are associated with frequently depressed, downtrodden characters searching for meaning in their life. Maybe the writers tried to give their distressed creation a little bit of levity. Maybe it’s a commentary on how Alice is an archetype for a journey of self-discovery. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Whatever the reason for this link, it holds true in “Moe Baby Blues,” in which our old friend Moe Szyslak unexpectedly bonds with Maggie after saving her from falling off a bridge.
Moe quickly becomes Maggie’s babysitter. In one scene, Moe puts Maggie to bed and she gives him a copy of Alice in Wonderland to read to her. Moe cracks the book, assuming it’s related to “that Alice in Underpants movie I saw,” and quickly becomes horrified. “White rabbit, chicks poppin’ mushrooms, this is like the Playboy Mansion!” Moe tosses the book and tells Maggie a more suitable children’s tale, The Godfather (and Godfather II), which she loves because she’s a baby of taste. The interpretation of Alice’s journey as twisted and dark is common. Moe’s review of Alice ties into a revisionist reading of Lewis Carroll’s novel which highlights its surreal aspects as evidence of drug use and debauchery. Here, The Simpsons isn’t just referencing Alice, but the theories surrounding the book that are prevalent in modern pop culture.
Moe eventually submarines his relationship with Maggie by being himself, his desperation for human connection leading him to be overbearing and just plain weird. But Moe redeems himself by saving Maggie again, this time from a mob war (long story). His impassioned plea to the belligerent gangsters about how his relationship with Maggie brought meaning to his life brings tears to their eyes, prompting Fat Tony to say “I haven’t cried like this since I paid to see Godfather III.” Same here, Fat Tony, same here.
1. Lisa in the Library
We begin with Lisa, we end with Lisa. Alice’s avatar in The Simpsons undertakes one of her many journeys of self-discovery in “Summer of 4 Ft. 2”. It’s the end of the school year and everyone is excited except for Lisa, who can’t find anyone to sign her yearbook. The Simpsons go on a surprise vacation when Flanders lets them use his beach house while he’s on jury duty. The Simpsons, and Milhouse, head to Little Pwagmattasquarmsettport (probably in New England), “America’s Scrod Basket”, where Lisa resolves to shed her nerdy shell and become “cool”. She makes friends with some cool locals and, to her delight, they accept her.
The Alice reference comes when Lisa meets her new friends. She’s walking to the town library when she spots them skateboarding outside. Torn between going into the library or introducing herself to the skaters, Lisa imagines a host of fictional characters urging her to join them in the library. Alice and the Mad Hatter appear and Alice asks her to join their tea party before suddenly warning her, “It’s a trap!” as the Mad Hatter holds Alice at gunpoint. There may be something deeper at work. A reference to Alice’s fear and confusion at being stuck in Wonderland, perhaps? But mostly, it’s just plain funny. A hallmark of The Simpsons’ love forabsurdity and silliness, which perfectly matches the tone of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Lisa’s odyssey runs into rocky shores when Bart, jealous that Lisa is making new friends and he only has Milhouse, cruelly unmasks Lisa as a nerd. She runs off crying but the next day, Lisa discovers that Bart wracked with guilt, showed Lisa’s friends her yearbook, which they signed with heartfelt messages. They also decorated the family car with seashells and wrote “Lisa Rules” on the side. They don’t care about her being a nerd. They love her for it and see her as the great person she is. Lisa feels accepted and gains a new sense of self-confidence. She returns to Springfield filled with happiness, while Homer is filled with rage because seagulls keep attacking his seashell-covered car.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
All Things Alice: Interview with Stan Just
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 video game developer Stan Just 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 Welcome to the podcast Stan Just. Thanks for being on the podcast. It’s always exciting to talk to another creative person who has been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. But I’m particularly interested in games because when I first started writing my books and I went to comic book conventions, people would always say, “We’ve read all of your books, but what are you going to do?” So I had the idea of doing a game, but, this was so long ago, it was in Flash. A lot of people came to it but I didn’t know I could monetize it with microtransactions or anything. So it cost me a fortune. People were really happy but I didn’t make any money. Then Flash disappeared two years later and all that work went for naught. Since then I’ve had a keen financial eye watching how people put games together and monetize them.
Stan Just I’ve had a similar experience with my first game that went out last year. We spent a lot of money and effort on it but, all in all, it didn’t pay it out. Not many people bought it.
FB I hear it’s pretty tough. I also had an agent for a while who worked exclusively in games. This was probably 15 years ago. My book was first published eighteen years ago and we went to all of the Activisions of the world. I would get in the room and I would pitch a vision of what I thought the world could be in the game. In the room, people seemed really engaged but at the end of the day, if there wasn’t a movie first, they weren’t interested. They would say, “Come back to us as soon as you have a deal with Warner Bros. I thought, “Well, once I have a Warner Bros. movie, what do I need you for?” Warner Bros. Games would have probably wanted to buy it. It’s hard to be independent out there.
SJ Absolutely. It’s very difficult to be publishing games right now.
FB Let’s talk about your game though. I’m gonna get into your history. I want to hear about your work on The Witcher games. I’m a big fan of the TV show.
You’re the CEO of your company. It’s called Covenant.dev. Tell us about the inspiration behind your upcoming game To the Star.
SJ It’s a survival adventure game that is aimed to support cooperative gameplay for up to four players. It’s a game in which players explore a whimsical fantasy realm inspired by Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince, craft bizarre objects in their private dimension, and fight incredible creatures on their way to the star. The initial inspiration and the initial idea kind of came out of the blue. I was thinking about a game that would have a relatively simple main objective. This main objective was the spark. It’s inspired by the notion of a star falling on your planet and you want to get to it and uncover the story behind it. So that was the initial idea.
It evolved after a few months. We were exploring what the star will be. What kind of environment or what kind of a planet did it hit? Is it Earth? Maybe it could be something different? That led me to be inspired by this literature and led me to answer the question of what the star is. We decided to go more fantasy. It won’t be a comet or asteroid or something like that. It will be more whimsical, more fantastical. There’s a character on the star and that character has a story. I don’t want to spoil too much but he comes from a different planet and he crash lands on our planet. Again, our planet is not normal. It’s more whimsical because whimsicality is something cool and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity, as the creators, to do something new, to do something crazy, to do something surreal. It’s easier to surprise the player. If the game was set on Earth, it would be more grounded and more boring in the sense that people would have seen it all before. There’s not much room for surprise. So it was, let’s take the story of The Little Prince for the character on that piece of a planet that fell on our planet. He traveled some ways across the galaxy. He has a story of his own.
FB Let me ask you about combining genres. You have a fantasy, you have sci-fi, and you have Earth which is very grounded. So when you start to put those pieces together, how do you find a tone that feels consistent in terms of the gameplay and storytelling? Because, from my creative process and experience blending different genres, if it feels fresh and grounded enough that it’s not just random, then you feel like you’ve come up with something new that people can relate to. But if you combine too many things, they bump up against each other and then it doesn’t feel like a new form.
SJ I absolutely agree. If you mix too many things, it just becomes an unattractive blend. You need to be very careful about the believability of the world and the believability of your creation. For example, the sci-fi aspect is very, very limited. When you say “sci-fi”, many people think of technology and spaceships and lasers. We don’t have any of that. For example, the vehicle the character is on when he crashes on your planet is not a spaceship. It’s just a fragment of earth. There’s no technology there. The player doesn’t have the feeling of, “This is a sci-fi technology kind of thing. It’s rather a fairy tale, whimsical thing.”
That’s the most fun part, creating a believable world that is different, and whimsical, so the player can believe in this fantasy and be immersed in the atmosphere. Even though there are crazy things happening, it is all within the constraints of your creation. For example, we’ve got a character who’s a honey bee that is in the form of a jar with wings. But this creature doesn’t, for example, relocate within light speed, it doesn’t suddenly grow a shotgun and shoot you. It wouldn’t fit the story setting. He needs to fly. He’s a jar filled with honey, so he needs to be heavy in the animation. The movement needs to be believable even though it’s a jar of honey with wings.
FB There’s a logic to the weight and so you feel it’s not a speedy thing. It has its limitations. You bring up whimsical aspects a lot. Alice in Wonderland, to some people’s minds, is really a whimsical story because there are a lot of absurd things that happen. But, at the same time, there are a lot of people who interpret Alice in Wonderland as very dark and nightmarish because you’re out of control, you’re shrinking and you’re growing. It depends on your point of view.
Do you see Alice in Wonderland as a fantasy? Do you see dark elements? Which elements did you blend in? What was inspirational for the game?
SJ That’s a very interesting question. We use some scarier elements to a degree because we are still targeting a relatively young audience (10+) so we do not want to use very significant fear themes. That said, even if I watch animation or Disney movies with my five-year-old, there are some fearful themes. They’re oftentimes very useful in storytelling in order to show there is a threat or a challenge that the protagonist needs to overcome. This is useful in games as well, which rely pretty heavily on the notion of challenge. The challenge doesn’t need to always be scary. But if the challenge isn’t scary from time to time, if it’s funny, it’d be rather irritating. If something is rather scary, you’re feeling motivated to overcome it.
My point is that it will be used from time to time but it is not something you will see often in our game. It’s rather very visually appealing, even during the night. The biomes in the game, during the day, look like a fantasy world, dreamlike. But at night, they look similar to the Avatar movies, which is also attractive. So people don’t need to be afraid of the dark, right? We do not play on this theme anymore because we’ve played on this very often in our previous game. Now we’re not using it.
FB Can you share anything specific from Alice in Wonderland? Or is it more the idea of somebody coming in on a star and coming into a new world like Alice falling into the rabbit hole and encountering these quirky characters and the conflict she feels as she’s navigating this world? For instance, is there a Jabberwock?
SJ Not yet not in the current design but we are using bits and pieces. We are using references to either Alice or The Little Prince whenever we feel we’d have a good idea of how to use it. For example, in terms of enemy design, that’s definitely a direction we will be going in. But not necessarily in the format that you might expect. The rabbit was a very important character, obviously, in Alice but it was a positive one. We are using the rabbit in the form of an enemy, a very important enemy. I won’t spoil much, but it’s in the form of an iron Golem. It manipulates time and it has watches incorporated in its body. So we’re playing on this notion of a rabbit with clocks but it’s a scary one and he’s actually a robot with a clock. We want to be creative about it, we don’t want to just copy-paste things.
FB I love that idea because it incorporates elements from Alice in Wonderland but, as we just talked about, it has a sci-fi feel because it’s a robot. It serves both purposes, it gives you the whimsy of Alice that people will identify with and think is cool but it’s got the sci-fi bent. You’re talking about the development of To the Star, where are you in the process and where are you trying to get to?
SJ You can break the development of a contemporary video game into a concept phase where you do all the thinking and writing, and then prototyping, then you usually go for something called a vertical slice which is a representative fragment of the game. So concept, prototype, a very rough element of the game, then the demo. Then you go into full production. All the enemies, all the story, all the environments, and at the very end, you’re debugging. You’re erasing any mistakes that you made along the way. Currently, we are after the prototype but before the production so we are trying to do this demo that will showcase the idea that we’ve got and hopefully get some interest from potential investors in order to fund the project.
FB So, the demo is to show off the design and the gameplay. When you say investors, are you talking about going to publishers? Or are you looking for hard money, then move it along and take it to publishers afterward? Or are you going to be the developer and the publisher and have it on Steam or Twitch or something like that?
SJ We are considering both options. We are a stock option company and we are considering issuing shares or getting a publisher and proceeding down that path.
FB As a CEO raising money and doing a stock option, that’s its own beast.
SJ I have been there already. Our previous game was financed through both options. We started with issuing shares and then signed with a publisher.
FB What was your previous game?
SJ So the previous game was called Gord. A gord is a Slavic fortification from ancient times. It’s a strategy game, a very dark game based on Slavic mythology that we adapted to our needs. We actually wrote the whole mythology around the game. This is posted on YouTube, the player has an option to actually read through our version of Slavic mythology before playing through our story.
FB Wow, that’s amazing. Did you grow up writing? There’s so much creativity and writing needed when developing games, especially when you’re building worlds. Was that something you did a lot when you were a kid and into your adulthood?
SJ No, unfortunately, not. I was always somebody who had a talent for organizing stuff. That’s why I became a producer and that’s how I started my career. But when I became an independent developer, owning a small studio, I needed to wear a lot of hats. I needed to learn a lot of things. I really enjoyed both writing and directing so that was something I was really keen on doing. We even received a nomination a few days ago for a Digital Dragon Award for the Best Polish Narrative for Gord. That’s quite an accomplishment for us.
FB Congratulations. Since you’re playing in the Alice space, why do you think Alice continues to be a muse for so many creative people, whether it’s musicians, movies, or games? In your culture, Alice is big like it is in all cultures. Why do you think it translates?
SJ It’s appealing to me because it really opens up your imagination. There aren’t that many creations of literature that you actually know. Works that have so much imagination and, at the same time, are not totally crazy surrealistic things that don’t make any sense. It’s still believable and very appealing in that manner. But from a utilitarian standpoint, as I have to emphasize as a game creator, it is very practical to have such a setting because then you can allow yourself to do a lot of strange things and still have it fit in the setting you’ve chosen. Because not all the settings are like that. If you go with a realistic setting, you cannot teleport people or do anything magical. You are constrained within your setting. So the more open-ended setting you choose the more weird mechanics you can throw at the player and surprise them. So that’s very valuable.
FB What about the value of Alice in Wonderland being recognizable, or the value of The Little Prince being recognizable so that the player is grounded at the beginning of the game? You have Wonderland as a brand, as an IP, that’s helping position your game.
SJ Absolutely. That’s a good point on its own because when I’m saying I’ve got a game that’s inspired by this piece, then immediately people who know and like the inspiration can relate to the game. They already know how I’m positioning the product. So that’s very valuable. Because if I would say I’m doing a fantasy game, we wouldn’t be talking.
FB Exactly. That’s true.
SJ That’s very valuable. I’ve learned that when talking with investors but also publishers like you, you need to have a short sentence where you explain what your product is an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton, especially the movie. You immediately know it’s these mechanics with this setting.
FB They understand what it is. You’re taking a brand and you’re redefining it for your own storytelling. Hundreds and thousands of people have done it and it’s really going to come down to the execution. If you execute right and you get that tone and you get that playability, then the investors can see there’s a way of selling it. It works in all businesses. As you said, Alice in Wonderland is a universal story and a universal world. It’s been around for so long that we almost forget how often it interplays with our day-to-day life, so why not put it into gameplay?
Why did you choose a survival adventure game for To the Star?
SJ Gord was a strategy adventure game, as I called it, so strategy adventure and now survival adventure. The main genre would be adventure. Doing adventure games is something that is very close to my heart. I think this notion of traveling, going on a journey, is very attractive and I had an idea of how to execute it. Why survival? Survival video games are not necessarily defined by the fact that somebody is struggling to survive.
It’s not the only element of the definition. It gets tricky when you’re talking about game genres. For example, if you ask somebody from the games industry what the definition of a survival game is, they would say the survival aspect is one thing, but there is also the base-building aspect. The progression of the character or the crafting itself as a core mechanic is very important. Crafting is a part of the definition of a survival game. Those mechanics are useful in your journey in order to craft stuff, have better gear, and in our game you also grow food because Alice has magical food so we wanted to build on that. Then we figured out we’ve got a survival adventure game. This genre is also very popular on our target platform. So that was also an argument.
FB As the CEO of a company you get to work with your team on the creative aspects and then you have the business aspect.
You mentioned when you’re pitching to investors, you have to have your elevator pitch. What games do you reference when saying to investors, “It’s like this game versus this game?” In movies, it’s “this movie meets this movie.” Do you have an equivalent for your game that our audience might be able to relate to?
SJ The main game we reference is called Grounded. We say it’s Grounded mixed with Tim Burton’s interpretation of Alice in Wonderland because we are using a lot of swirly shapes and Burton-esque art style. We wanted to use it in a positive and optimistic version, not a dark one, not a scary one. This is also our angle because a lot of survival adventure games are scary, very grounded, and very down on Earth. We want to offer the game to the same audience but give them something more positive, something more whimsical, and something more fun, hopefully.
FB This just popped into my mind. Do you have a boy or a girl?
SJ I’ve got a boy, Gabriel.
FB Since you’ve had Gabriel, how has your thinking towards games changed, if at all?
SJ Absolutely. My thinking about indie development actually started when I was preparing to be a father. Then he was born when I was actually doing my first indie game. So my child and my company are being developed simultaneously. It definitely affects me as a creator. In my first game, Gord, we were playing with the fact that you were a steward supervising a village full of subjects. You needed to provide them with food, tuition, housing, etc. But there was also a sanity parameter. You need to take care of the psychological aspect of their health.
As a psychologist by education, I was asking myself what would be the strongest stressor, the most emotionally heavy thing that would affect the mentality of your subject. So, immediately, the death of a child popped into my head. Being a father affected some of the decisions I made like putting children into Gord. There are also some aspects of To the Star but I cannot spoil it.
FB I have two children, 16 and 18. I’m a little further along than you are but when I was writing my novels, the way they would see the world, the way I would tell them stories, and the way they would react to these stories really influenced my writing. That whole thing you talked about with imagination and opening up your imagination when you’re a kid and having these really powerful imaginations. That became thematic in my books as a magic system. Because you start to lose that when you get older. The world wants you to fit in a box. There’s no such thing as a box for kids.
Can we chat a little bit about The Witcher? I’ve actually never played the game but I’ve watched the shows and it’s a very deep mythology and very complex in the way they tell the stories using different timelines and then connecting them. But can you talk a little bit about your experience with the game? Then, have you watched the show?
SJ My first question is, have you watched the Polish show from the early 2000s?
FB I have not. How are they different?
SJ There are a lot of similarities, especially to the first Netflix season. However, the early 2000s adaptation had a much lower budget and production capabilities. The Witcher franchise is very political, it gets very complex. There aren’t as many main characters as in Game of Thrones, you’ve mainly Ciri and Geralt. But I would say The Witcher is on par with Game of Thrones in terms of complexity.
When I was playing the second installment of the game, after just thirty minutes you’ve got the dialogue, you’ve got so many names of regions and characters. If you haven’t followed the books you can get easily confused about what’s actually happening. The people are trying to explain the political dynamics of the world and how it came to be in the current setting. That’s not often seen in video games.
FB You see that in novels because you can read it slowly and you can go back. For The Witcher game, why do you think that ended up working? It was so complex and there’s so much to carry in your mind. Or was it that, if you couldn’t carry it all, the playability was still really engaging? Because that’s a lot to ask of the audience or the player.
SJ Absolutely. The games are often framed in a way that allows the player to choose what they’re interested in and what they want to ignore. There is a deeper story layer that you can get into and it will be rewarding to you but if you’re not interested you can just follow the marker on your map. You keep the dialogue, skip the cutscenes, and just follow the marker, kill the guy, and get the reward. You can fine-tune the game to your needs. That helps.
Then The Witcher games were framed in a way that they had their own Unique Selling Point (USP). The main USP of The Witcher franchise was the choices and the consequences. We tried when working on the third installment, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, to make a game where you felt the choice and the burden of the choice you’ve made along your journey. The game definitely succeeded in that, although it was very difficult to pull off because it’s a complex game. It has a lot of quests and a lot of missions. It’s a very long game. Then the quest designers, who were the best in the world, actually needed to control that. So they needed to say, “All right, so if you just ignored that guy a few hours before and then you get into a romantic relationship with this person a few hours later, then it somehow intertwines into this aspect of the game. It gives you a bonus option you can pursue. That was very, very complex. I was the producer of the cinematics and the dialogues and we had around 1,500 interactions. In each interaction, there was a lot of branching off in how you could go about your dialogue. That was very laborious to pull off and still give value to a lot of those options that you chose.
FB How many years did it take to develop that game? I mean, I’m assuming it’s built off of games one and two, The Witcher and The Witcher Two: Assassins of the Kings, but given the complexity you’re talking about, it’s a long haul.
SJ I wasn’t at the very beginning of the concept phase of the game, but I think it was five years. The next title I worked on, Cyberpunk 2077, took even longer and it went even further in terms of the consequences and how you behave within the world.
FB Have any other games come along since The Witcher games that have anywhere close to that level of complexity?
SJ Yes, especially Baldur’s Gate3, which launched last year. That’s a very complex game but they do it in a different way and it’s also fantastic. But The Witcher has its own flavor.
FB I assume you’re not playing The Witcher with your son yet?
SJ No, no.
FB Does he play any games or do you allow him to play games?
SJ I allow him to play games. He has his own phone, on which he cannot call, but he has some games there. Those are the only games I allow. They’re usually logic games, chess, and learning words.
FB Very, very good parenting. How about other kinds of games, like tabletop games? Are you a gaming family across genres?
SJ Absolutely. We try to play as much as we can. However, video games have the advantage of oftentimes being flashy and very rewarding, and also being very helpful in regards to showing you moves that are allowed and preventing you from doing something that is not allowed in the game. I’m thinking about chess, for example. On the physical chessboard, you can do some stuff that is not allowed by the game but is still fun to do. But in the video game version, you can’t. So I see many advantages of the video game, but tabletop is something that we utilize as well.
FB I understand you lecture quite a bit about game development. How are you in front of an audience of I’m assuming students?
SJ Right now, I feel rather good, especially if prepared. I’ve been lecturing for a few years now but at first, it was a struggle for me since I’m rather an introvert. Also doing it in English because it’s not my native tongue. But right now, especially if I’m prepared and not improvising, it’s going pretty well.
FB What you just said about improvising versus being prepared is a critical component of speaking in front of a large audience. I did a lot of school visits. If you’re talking to fifth or sixth graders, they’re so happy to be out of class you can just start telling them a story. It’s great when you get around eighth graders where they’ve hit puberty and they’re all trying to be cool. They’re all chatting and there’s a couple hundred of them. You better be on your game to get them engaged and if they’re not engaged, you better be brave enough to call them out. Whenever I did school events, there were always the two kids who weren’t paying attention that I focused on, not the hundred who were engaged. I would try and make a joke like, “Do you guys want to go make out somewhere?” Then the audience would laugh and they would be embarrassed and they would shut up.
SJ I wasn’t brave enough to talk in front of the younger audiences.
FB It’s a different skill set but I enjoyed it almost more than the adult audiences because with the adult audiences, they’re really engaged in the process. But when it’s a young audience, especially fifth and sixth graders, they would just sit on the ground, it looked so uncomfortable, and they would just look up. You’d just have to find some way to turn their attention away from the friend next to them and then they would be like, “Whoa,” and so you tell a little story. It really showed the power of storytelling.
The other part of it is you’re teaching, so once you have them, then you can communicate the lesson, whether it’s the struggles of being a writer or being a game developer, and how that relates to life and overcoming challenges. Lots of times, the teachers wanted me to say how many times I had to rewrite my book because their students would write their work once and say, “I’m done.” And the teachers would say, “No, you have to rewrite it.” So I would show photographs of all of the notes from my editor, the things they liked, and the things they didn’t like, which were in red. On the first page, there’d be a couple of items in red, and on the next page, it would be full of notes. The kids would go, “Oh, whoa,” and I’d say how I had to rewrite it ten times. The English teachers would come up to me afterward and say, “Thank you so much.”
SJ The rewrite process you’re talking about is also very often used in video games. It’s always very painful. One of the ways CD Projekt RED is doing what they’re doing is through iterations. When they were asked in an interview how they achieved such high quality in the writing and quests, they said, “Through iterations.” Some people were working on their quests for a year or two but their work actually ended up not landing in the game. Somebody else took over, rewrote it, and then they released it. You were working on the game for some time and you’d be amazed that your work hadn’t actually made it to the final version. That’s sad but this is the cost of quality. I’ve done many versions of a trailer for To the Star. I think we’re currently on the twenty-second iteration and I’m getting a feeling from my editor that he’s already tired with my notes. I think we need to be wrapping up.
FB Luckily, you pay him. So he has to continue until you’re satisfied. Just have them read Steve Jobs’ biography and they’ll probably be very happy he has you as a CEO. In the movie business, that development process can be very similar. You’re developing and developing and sometimes you do over-develop and you don’t even remember what the inspiring idea was in the beginning. Then it turns out to be terrible and you have to go back and bring in another team and they go back to the beginning. But, in redoing things, if there’s somebody in charge, if there’s the general and they’re making the decision it’s okay. It’s when there’s a committee, that’s the problem. I don’t mind rewriting it over and over if my editors have good notes but at the end of the day, it’s my decision on what the sentence is, what the paragraph is, what the chapter is, and what the book is. I imagine you’re the one who says, “Okay, this is good enough or this is perfect. Let’s put it out there.”
SJ That’s how we structure our work at my company. I am a big fan of participatory management styles that invite anybody to participate in the process regardless of your position in the company. Whether you just joined and began or you have been a director at some posh company, that doesn’t matter. If you have good ideas, then just bring them up. Hopefully, I will see that and use that in the development process. But also, I do agree with you that there needs to be a person who actually keeps it all together, a vision holder.
FB I really appreciate chatting with you today. I wish you luck in finishing To the Star, your Alice in Wonderland, and The Little Prince video game.
RADIATION AND RABBITS: THE PARALLELS BETWEEN “FALLOUT” AND “ALICE IN WONDERLAND”
Remember when video games were good? I know good games come out all the time but take my blanket statement at face value for a second. Recently it feels like every triple-A developer is just rehashing old games and not taking any risks. I remember a better time, a time when big studio games felt like a labor of love and not a cash grab. For me, there is no better example of a game studio that used to be amazing but has fallen from grace recently than Bethesda. Their Fallout series is a perfect example of this, Fallout3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4 were amazing games, probably some of my favorite games of all time. It seemed like they could do no wrong. But everything changed when the micro-transactions attacked… Today, Bethesda is run by greedy little piggies who have no idea what their player base wants and just continually re-releases their rapidly aging catalog of hit games with minor graphical updates so they can continue to charge the consumer full price for ten-plus-year-old games. At one point, many moons ago, they created and released fun and creative games, and the Fallout series, for me, was their peak.
For those of you who have never played any of the Fallout games, it’s a first-person and/or third-person role-playing game set in an alternate, retro-future timeline of America. In this timeline, EVERYTHING is nuclear-powered, and I mean everything. Televisions, microwaves, cars, robots, and there is even a soda called “Nuka-Cola” which is radioactive. Well, when everything is nuclear-powered, it’s pretty easy to assume that every single country in the world would probably have a sizable stockpile of nuclear missiles as well. That assumption is correct, and unfortunately, those countries decide to nuke the shit out of each other. I guess we only see that America was nuked but I’m going to assume that we responded before we were reduced to radioactive dust. Isn’t mutually assured destruction wonderful? The thing is, some people were prepared for this nuclear armageddon, they had “insurance.” The insurance was that they had paid to be locked into giant underground vaults. These vaults were built to ensure the survival of the human race in the event of nuclear war and they are set to open once the surface is habitable again.
In the Fallout games, you play as a “vault dweller” who, for one tragic reason or another, has decided to leave their vaults and enter into the unknown surface above. The exception to this case is Fallout: New Vegas where you actually play as, what is essentially, a vengeful mailman. Regardless, while one would assume that the surface is a barren landscape after the nukes, that is anything but the case, people survived, but they did not thrive. The surface is full of mutants (both human and animal), raiders, religious knights in power armor, mad scientists, and much more, all battling for control of the wasteland in an attempt to fill the power vacuum that was left behind when every government ever fell. From there, what’s left of the world is your oyster.
That overstuffed paragraph is a brief overview of the world of Fallout. I’m honestly barely scratching the surface here. With a story that rich, it’s only natural that after the massive success of HBO’s The Last of Us T.V. adaptation, other studios would want to cash in on the video game television show hype. I’m sure we won’t get tired of it… Well, Amazon adapted Fallout into a television show, and let me tell you, it’s awesome. The Fallout show follows three different characters whose paths intersect but for the sake of this blog, I’m mostly going to focus on Lucy MacLean played by Ella Purnell. Lucy is a vault dweller whose family has lived in the vaults for many generations. Well, something happens that I don’t want to spoil and she has to leave the vault. There she faces the wild world of the radioactive wasteland that was once Los Angeles.
If you haven’t figured out why I’m writing about this show on an Alice in Wonderland-themed website by now, it’s time to realize you might not be as smart as you think. I’ll put it in terms you can understand. Woman lives in a world where things make sense to her, goes in a hole, and enters a world where everyone is crazy and must learn rules to keep her head. Fallout is Alice in Wonderland. Replace a rabbit hole with a vault door, the whimsical nature of Wonderland with the wildness of the Wasteland, and the Jabberwocks with Deathclaws, and boom it’s the same story. People even lose their heads in the show too. Now, you might not be completely sold on this fact but lend me your ears, or I guess eyes in this case, and by the end of this blog, I will have you shoving this fact down people’s throats too.
I’ve already given an overview of the Alice character, Lucy, but I want to go a bit deeper before tackling the other characters. Okay, I said there wouldn’t be spoilers but I lied skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want any… One.. Two… Three… Spoilers, the first person Lucy meets perfectly sets the stage for my argument that she and Alice are the same character. Lucy meets a person living on the surface who is trying to use a machine that will extract water from whatever is put in it. This person is struggling to use said machine because when he puts sand in the hopper, only sand comes out. Which is a problem we have all had. In his mind, the machine is broken, but to Lucy’s logical mind, dry sand can’t be turned into water. Their interaction mirrors many of the interactions Alice has in Wonderland. Where Alice explains that something a Wonderlander is doing is “illogical” to her but the Wonderlander finds it perfectly logical. After Lucy and the Wastelander’s brief interaction, the Wastelander asks Lucy if she wants to marry him because she gave him water. Not in a hyperbolic way, he means it. He even shows all the great stuff he has to offer, like his sand. In his mind, this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
I lied about the spoilers ending here, go to the next paragraph to truly skip the spoilers… Another example of the Wasteland essentially being Mad Max: Wonderland is in a scene where another character, Maximus played by Aaron Clifton Moten, saves a man who is about to be killed by another person. On the surface, it seems as though the would-be killer is a crazy person. It turns out that the victim he had rescued, who claims to be a “scientist” was having biblical relations with the “aggressors” chickens. Killing someone for fraternizing with poultry is pretty logical. There is a choking the chicken double entendre joke opportunity here but that’s too blue for me to say… Hey, don’t get mad at me, you’re the one who came up with it in your filthy minds… How is this Alice in Wonderland related? Well, I would argue that this scene is meant to establish the madhouse that is the Wasteland and those who inhabit it. The man who was trying to protect his birds even says the fact with an air of exhaustion in his voice, as if this isn’t the first time this has happened and probably won’t be the last. It’s just the world he lives in. Maximus has grown up on essentially an army base his whole life so the wilds of the wasteland to him are just like the wilds of Wonderland for Alice. Things just are the way they are because that’s how they are.
The Fallout television show doesn’t just share a lot of similarities with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it also has characters eerily similar to other Alice-related IPs. Take Cooper Howard a.k.a. “The Ghoul” played by Walton Goggins. First, because I have to, a “Ghoul” in the Fallout universe is a human who has been exposed to high levels of radiation, causing their flesh to melt. Due to their appearance, they are essentially second-class citizens. The terrible hand they have been dealt is compounded due to the radiation affecting their minds as well, all ghouls are slowly going feral and without constant medication will eventually become essentially human-shaped animals that kill and eat anything that moves. Well, Cooper Howard is a bit of an antihero in this show. He’s survived in the Wasteland for hundreds of years and knows the rules of this world and how to navigate it. He’s a badass bounty hunter who’s honed his fighting skills living in a harsh environment. Nothing surprises him and his gruff exterior shields a tormented past. He instantly reminded me of a character created from the mind of my overseer, Frank Beddor. That character is Hatter Madigan, Frank’s version of the Mad Hatter. While Hatter Madigan is an elite member of the Millinery, in the Looking Glass Wars novels, he wanders the globe looking for Alice. Wherever he goes, tales of his epic deeds follow. Much like The Ghoul. Plus they both wear long coats.
If I haven’t sold you on the fact that the Wasteland is Wonderland, Lucy is Alice, and that Fallout, whether the writers of the games knew it or not, is quite similar to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I have one final thing to drive my point home. Let’s look at the mysterious antagonist of the Fallout T.V. show, Lee Moldaver. I haven’t finished the show yet and my internet is down at the moment, but from what I’ve gained from the six episodes I have seen, she is a powerful woman whose name alone strikes fear into the hearts of those who live in the Wasteland. Just like the Red Queen/Queen Redd does in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
When a piece of media is so popular and transformative to storytelling as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was, it’s not hard to notice similarities in all the media that comes after it. The basic premise of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the perfect foundation for a fantastic story. If done correctly, like the Fallout series, it’s a recipe for success. Due to this, it’s easy to see why Alice has endured for as long as it has.
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: Interview with Jake Curtis
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 hilarious and talented Jake Curtis 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 Welcome to All Things Alice Jake Curtis.I’m interested in your creative journey as a young writer and how one comes to their creative process and aspirations. Where did it all start in terms of writing? Were you someone who loved to write in school?
Jake Curtis I’ve pretty much always done some kind of performance thing. I come from a big family of writers and artists who are all too loud for their own good. So growing up, you had to learn to talk fast and talk loud.
FB Was that at the dinner table? Or was that all the time?
JC Twenty-four seven. We used to say that everyone was unconditionally loved, but not everyone was unconditionally liked.
I came to performing and writing from improv actually. I started doing a lot of improvised comedy when I was 12-13 and it was huge for me because I’m quite an anxious person in general. I’m an analytical person. So the chaos and acceptance that has to come with improv was pretty huge for me. There’s no second draft. There’s no planning.
FB There’s no getting out of it. I thought improv was the most terrifying concept I’d ever heard of. I’m not going to get up on stage and then somebody’s going to tell me some little story and I’m supposed to go from there. I admire the chutzpah at 12. But I suppose at 12 it’s like sink or swim. So much stuff is going on at that age.
JC I was a big lover of live comedy shows. England, especially then, had a really vibrant live comedy scene. Going up to the Edinburgh Fringe at young ages, you see all these shows, and at first, I became obsessed with the idea of an audience. I think that was always the bit that gripped me. It’s not so much the glitz and glamor of a million followers, but it was getting to watch these people who can walk into a room with 20 people and just connect with them and entertain them for an hour. I’ve always approached writing from an entertainer’s perspective. We’re all dancing monkeys making something fun. So I did improv for years and it excited me and I got to go around the world and do shows in Canada and the US.
FB So there was something more structured than you getting up there as a young person and doing something in front of the class. Were you part of a troupe?
JC I was part of a troupe called School of Comedy, which is an amazing company in the UK that gets professional sketch writers to come in, but then they have a troupe of kids to perform the sketches. We did shows up in Edinburgh for two years we would perform around the country at festivals and comedy gigs. That was an amazing experience because we were very much treated like we were a part of a professional show. Like we were an asset and a commodity and a member of the troupe. They were lovely and respectful. But also it was like, you have an expectation. There are people out there who have come to see a show and you are the people to deliver it.
FB How many shows would you do a day?
JC When we went up to Edinburgh, we would do a show every day for 30 days or for 21 days, which is the length of the Fringe. You’re on a full run there. Then, generally, you’d have a week with a couple of shows or a little run at some theater and then a couple of months without a show. But we were working and it gave you this idea of having to accept how the audience reacts. I think a lot of writing classes and creative media share the message of “Oh, you’ve got to tell the story that’s yours. You’ve got to find your soul or your calling.” That’s wonderful and people need to be told that, but I think it does sometimes remove the audience from the question. It tells you to find the thing you think is funny, but I love performing to live crowds because you’re reminded even if you think it’s funny, it doesn’t really matter that much if they don’t. We’d go into shows where we had sketches that had been written for us and that killed five shows in the last five shows. But you deliver it and the crowd doesn’t like it. You can either just say, “Well, this is my schedule and I’m gonna keep going,” or you can try and change it on the spot, try and work out what this crowd needs from you and the show.
FB Obviously, when it’s going well, it fuels you and you can charge ahead and you will take chances and it’s invigorating. When there’s a lull or you feel like the audience’s leaning back and they’re not engaged, for me, I had a sense of panic when I was doing some plays. I went, “Oh, it’s one of those.” I would get into my head on the negative side and trying to find a way out of that into the next moment and being present was difficult.
JC I’ve done shows that have bombed and kept bombing. Sometimes you’re in the mud and you’ve got to stay there. In those shows, I would just try and make as much eye contact with the people on stage as I could. You don’t have to look at the crowd, right? And I’d try and tell myself, “I’m here having a good time with my friend, not bombing and ruining these people’s night.” But generally, with the crowd, I always took that as a challenge and it’s a challenge you can win. Especially with comedy shows, people want to come out and have a good evening. Now working as a writer, all these decisions you make are fueled by “We think these markets might want a script that looks like this.” I hate all of that because it’s not real. You’re like, “Oh, maybe I can do it. I’m a technician.” But when you have a crowd, it’s you and them. It’s head-to-head. My panic mode was usually monologuing. If I’m getting stressed, I’m just gonna keep talking and I’m gonna keep going until I hit something. I’m gonna move faster. I’m gonna go through more ideas until you find a little inkling of a laugh and then just grip onto that for dear life.
FB Is that what you did with your family? Is that what the competition was, people gripping on for their lives to find a little kernel to be heard?
JC One hundred percent. You’re waiting at the dinner table like, “Come on. Someone mention dog. Someone mention dog.” Someone brings up the word dog and you’re like, “That’s interesting! Listen to what happened to me today. I went out and I met three dogs.” You’ve got to take your time when you have it.
FB Wow, that must have been hard to even get the food and drink down. That’s a diet in itself.
JC When someone else starts monologuing, you speed eat. I just loved the immediacy of improv and the presentness and the engagement. For me, the joy of making art is making it for a specific person or specific people.
FB You were making art in that moment. There wasn’t a committee telling you, “I think this joke will work or that joke will work”. The audience is telling you instantaneously, which you don’t get when you’re writing a script for television. That’s amazing because you’re basically writing on stage as you’re going.
JC It forces you to engage in the truthful fact that the majority of art is just people observing other people and enjoying it. There’s this top tier of if you can write a sentence so good it is etched into history. If you’re gonna write “to be or not to be,” go for it. But the majority of art isn’t the cleverest thing you’ve ever heard. It’s some people watching, reading, whatever, some other people and trying to enjoy it, trying to have a good time.
FB It’s the connection to the human experience which is why it’s interesting you’re describing your family because so many stories are about the dynamic of family and it’s very relatable. So when you tap into something like that you’re going to engage the audience in a meaningful way. Your family dynamic sounds really exciting and really competitive and that set you up with the mindset of “I’m being creative all the time, not just when I’m improvising. But my whole family is creative.” Did you have actors in the family? You said writers?
JC In the immediate family, we have a lot of writers. My sister’s a writer, my dad’s a writer, my little brother’s a writer. My mum was a TV presenter in the 80s, which was cool. She used to do little practice things like she’d be playing songs in the car and, in between them, she’d be like, “Okay, you could introduce this one.” I’d have to be like, “And this next song coming on is a smooth hit from Lionel Richie,” and try to time it to the intro to the song. It was all just fun. Then in the extended family, they’re also very loud. I have like 30 cousins on my mom’s side and we have actors, we have everything. It was just a general feeling of trying to have fun trying to push yourself. I thought if I was going to be able to make a career in the arts, it would be partly from muscle growth. How many reps can I do? How many different art forms? I spent so long doing comedy sketches, I don’t do those anymore, but the experience all of it filters into everything else I do.
FB Is comedy the genre you’ve started to really hone is comedy, whether it’s television or film?
JC Comedy is definitely where I lean. That was where all my experience came from in improv. I think these things are muscles, especially comedy. I think people often underestimate how much of a muscle comedy is because people are so naturally funny. But it is a very different thing, being funny to four friends than writing something that can slot into a specific scene in a specific script.
FB It’s completely different. When you’re with your friends and you’re saying it out loud, it can come or go. But when you write it down, people can judge the rhythm and the cadence of it. Somebody’s got to perform it to really nail that cadence. It’s a lot different putting it on.
JC I sometimes hear writers, who are great writers but haven’t done comedy, saying, I think I might, for my next script, just do a comedy.” That’s great and maybe it’ll be amazing but I think the reason I’m good at comedy is, I hope, twenty percent something natural in me but I did a hundred appalling improv shows before doing a hundred mediocre improv shows before doing fifty decent ones. I have so many scripts that are so bad and so unfunny, so many files on my phone, stand-up gigs, improv, and freestyling. This is the thing I’ve done the most and I’m still mediocre to okay.
FB It’s the 10,000 hours. It’s the failing over and over. I don’t know if people realize what a gift that is, as the learning part of the process. When you talk about great comedians and you see their shows, if you see multiple shows, they are so specific night after night. They’re hitting every one of those beats. They’re so worked out. It’s kind of remarkable how specific they are from performance to performance.
JC That was a part of why I felt so lucky getting into comedy so early and the fact that my family did treat it as a serious pursuit. I was able to go through a lot of that education and a learning phase while I was at school. Because I think it can be really daunting if you go through life and you hit 24-25 and you go, “Oh, maybe I want to do comedy.” It’s a six-year path to being kind of fine.
FB Starting at 12 and starting to perform, it’s not dissimilar to sports. If you do it at a young age, it’s so inherent by the time you get to your late teens. It’s instinctual but you need all those reps. Starting that young, the filters are off and so you’re just doing it. It’s not as if you’re 24 and you want to do comedy for your career and you wonder how that’s gonna work out. I think that makes a big difference. With your family being so into all the arts, did you find that to be really nurturing or is there a competitiveness or an expectation you feel moving forward?
JC Not so much. There’s a competitiveness in my family anyway. I’m one of four kids and we all do very fairly similar things so there’s a bit of a jostling. But no, I think it was very much, “If this is a path you want to go down, go down it.” Me and my siblings do similar stuff but it’s different. My sister writes incredible feminist literature I couldn’t write and my little brother writes very dark, edgy films I also couldn’t write. It wasn’t as much of competitiveness but it was more of “This is a legitimate career and a path you can take. If you’re gonna go down it, take it seriously and put in work, put in the hours. We will drive you to the classes and pick you up but you’ve got to put your practice in and put your head down.” It wasn’t treated as a fanciful thing.
FB With a lot of creatives, the family or the parents treat it as a fanciful idea and not dependable.
JC I remember one time when I was 16 we had these national tests and I did really well on the physics one and I suddenly got this brain wave of, “Wait a second, could I be an engineer?” I was like, “Oh my god, this is a radical thought. A steady paying job, career development.”
FB Nothing like my family.
JC I’d become the black sheep.
FB You’re working for Intel.
JC It would be bizarre for them. It was always something I just appreciated and kept going and kept trying to see where I could go. I did a lot of improv. I got to do some shows I loved. I got to do two 50-hour-long shows in Canada with the group Die-Nasty, which was a great experience. It was really COVID that ended that portion of my life. I was already writing a lot by then but when COVID happened all improv obviously shut down. More than most industries improv took a really big hit. It turned out the improv theaters weren’t the people with big financial stores and genius financial skills. So improv took a really hard hit there. Then I just dove fully into writing. I’ve always enjoyed performing as an act for myself, but needing to get my face out there was never a priority. So I really tried to dedicate myself to screenwriting as a way of building a career I would enjoy.
FB Why did you move from the UK to the US? Was that for educational or opportunity reasons?
JC I was living in the UK until I was 19 and then I moved to Chicago to go to Northwestern University and study film there. I made the decision entirely based on improv. In the UK, I was doing what is known as Chicago-style improv, which is long form. Chicago is the mecca of that with Second City and the iO. So I Googled best colleges for improv and some dudes’ blogs came up and at number one he had Northwestern and the Titanic Players. I went great. I applied to two schools. I applied to Northwestern and then I applied to Yale because no one in England had heard of Northwestern. So I thought, “If I can get into Yale and reject them, then I’ll tell people I chose Northwest.” Then Yale rejected me so it wasn’t a great plan. But yeah, I went for the improv and it honestly was amazing. I was in this group, the Titanic Players, run by Mike Abdelsayed. It’s an amazing, incredible organization. I got to do so much improv at Northwestern. It wasn’t the worst decision.
FB Then you had the city so you could go to Second City and you could see some of the best improv in the country. You were getting your fix for sure.
JC A hundred percent. I go to do shows downtown and they brought in guest improvisers to teach workshops. It was an amazing experience.
FB Also, it’s a great city when you’re twenty-one years old.
JC I don’t regret the decision at all. I love Chicago so much. Oddly enough, of everywhere in America I’ve been it’s the place that most reminds me of London. So I felt quite at home there. Lovely people, lovely food, and some of the best improv in the world.
FB Who were some of the people that inspired you in terms of your comedy?
JC The first people were a lot of English comedians and stand-ups that I doubt people listening to this podcast have heard of but there are people like Daniel Kitson and Tim Key. These incredible people who would just do one-person shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. Partly due to the financial situation, one person shows basically dominate and it’s amazing because it’s so personal. I love these very personal stand-up shows. Moving to Chicago, TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi are like the greatest duo in Chicago improv history. They’ve been doing the same show for 35 years. They are genuine masters and are so grounded and confident and know each other so well. But honestly, my biggest inspiration was watching American sitcoms. That was kind of why I wanted to come to America. I grew up watching The Office, Parks and Rec, and How I Met Your Mother. All these shows. For one, they’re so phenomenal and they also made America seem so cool. I was like, “This is great. I’m just gonna go to America and meet all these beautiful people and date them. It’ll be great and everyone’s funny and the sun’s always shining.”
FB Did you discover that?
JC I discovered it was exactly like that. I have not been sad a day since I arrived in America. No, it turns out they’re a little unrealistic at points.
FB So moving to LA, what was the transition here?
JC So COVID happened and I was in Chicago and I started writing more. I only had a year left on my visa and I didn’t know if I could stay in the country. So I thought, “If I have a year, I should go to LA, the ‘City of Dreams.’” So I moved to LA and I got a job working for a motivational speaker, which was a weird experience, especially during COVID.
FB Why was that weird?
JC There was a point where I was locked down in my house and seeing no one. Except once a week, I would drive to this guy’s house, set up a camera, and he would motivationally speak at me for one or two hours. All of his stuff is just down the lens of the camera so I was going from total solitude to this man rambling about the meaning of life, and passion and purpose. Then I was going back to my tiny, empty house, and editing more videos of him talking about the stuff. It was just a bit of a jarring experience, but a wonderful one.
FB Did any of it stick for you?
JC It definitely got in there. It’s definitely deep in my subconscious. I can still hear his voice if I close my eyes. But I was doing that for a year and then I was working on my writing, but I felt like I needed more training, especially because so much of my experience had been in performance and live comedy. So I ended up applying to grad schools to do a master’s in Screenwriting. I got into the American Film Institute, and ended up going there, and that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
FB How was Ed Decter? He introduced us and having him as a professor, what was the takeaway, the one thing you have been able to put into action?
JC Two things come to mind. Because I think the first, which was something I really loved from watching Ed, was where you can get to if you put all this time into screenwriting. I had so many examples of these great improvisers I’d seen who have this, it seems like a superhuman ability to improvise. You drop them in a scene and they know where to take it and where to go. It was seeing those people initially that made me want to do improv. I think it was amazing coming to AFI, all the professors who teach there have to also be working writers in LA. Ed Decter, who I was lucky to get in my second year, is a very prolific writer and has written so much stuff in so many genres. We were a class of six writing six very different scripts and watching him have immediate feedback for every single type of script, which ninety-nine percent of the time was immediately correct, was an amazing thing to see.
We talk about scripts so often like they’re hyper-personal, the story only you could tell, but if you get a really good screenwriter they know the direction a script should go from reading it. Getting to see that up close and getting to see someone be able to latch on to a story someone’s trying to tell, work out the key elements, work out what’s going to translate, work out what’s not translating, and immediately know a direction to go in. That got me excited and inspired because I think it can be depressing as a writer to think your only option for success is writing your soul’s calling. That’s wonderful. I hope to one day write a film that is me in a bottle but that’s a scary prospect. Going to AFI gave me much more of an approach to what a working writer looks like, of what a functional writer looks like, of someone who just gets the job done and who knows what a script needs.
FB Ed has written a lot of sitcoms. That’s where he started. So he has experience in sitcoms but the scripts he’s been writing lately have been adaptations of various kinds of mystery novels. He has a broad range of genres that he plays in. A couple of the latest crime dramas he’s written were really startling to me, because, we obviously did There’s Something About Mary together, but also he’s done so many sitcoms. So I can understand why you guys would have bonded. Also the experience of seeing him jump from genre to genre and script to script, I had a similar experience. We put a little mini-room together that he ran to break The Looking Glass Wars novels as a television show. Seeing him run the room was also another aspect of television production, writing, and development that I hadn’t seen before. That was unique for me because I hadn’t had that experience of taking my novel, breaking it up, and saying, “Okay, here’s where we have to get to for the middle of the season. Here’s where we’re trying to get to at the end of this season. Okay, now, let’s reverse engineer it and figure out the best opening.” It was pretty exciting.
It was not dissimilar to what you did with my world. I asked you to write a lore story and this idea came from you and a number of other young writers that I was introduced to from AFI, who play all these different kinds of games, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. I looked at all the lore stories that go along with those games and I thought, “Well, I want that.” So you wrote this story, The Brother’s Wilde, which I’d like you to talk about. It’s a lore story, a prose short story. You did an outstanding job. Really brilliant, beautiful job. You used aspects of my universe and you made them feel fresh to me, which was like Santa Claus showing up.
JC It was a wonderful experience for me because I’ve played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons for a long time. I love that world and the high fantasy genre, but it never felt like something I was allowed to play in for actual creative work. That was my treat on the side at the end of a long week. So getting approached to write something in a world of high fantasy that already exists and writing backstories was such a treat for me. It felt like getting to my fun times for work. But it was also an odd process. I’ve never really written based on other people’s worlds before and other people’s work. So that was interesting and fun getting into that and trying to see how much I could stretch. The odd thing for me was when I got into it, I was very excited. I’d written out all these plot points and the beats and I was confident in the story. Then literally as I opened up the Word document, I remembered I hadn’t written prose in like seven years.
FB Be careful what you wish for.
JC I’d forgotten it was a completely different art form. I got ready to open up Final Draft and then I was like, “Oh God!” It took a little bit of adjusting. The part I forgot was you can’t refer to someone by the same name every time in prose. In the script, someone is their name and it does not change ever. But I was suddenly deep on synonym.com, “I can’t say ‘the great warrior’ again”. The mighty fighter, heroic hero, I was going deep into my vocabulary to try and switch something up. It was an exciting thing to get to work on. I think especially because Alice is a world that is so rich throughout culture. It’s kind of a bedrock piece of story. There are things I brought into the story that are pieces from Dungeons and Dragons. There’s a lot of Alice in Wonderland lore baked into Dungeons and Dragons like Vorpal swords and Jabberwock. It didn’t feel like building on something completely new. It felt like being given a chance to play in a world that is so familiar.
FB As a Brit too, Alice in Wonderland is probably the most famous piece of literature that you would have grown up with, right? So I can understand that and also the idea that Alice is everywhere. Of course, it makes sense it’s in Dungeons and Dragons. You took what was familiar from Alice’s Adventures, Lewis Carroll’s work, you took elements from my world, but then you brought this brother story together. Tell us a little bit about that part of the story, because you did often reference your younger brother.
JC I have two younger brothers who got amalgamated in the story. I always try to start from a place of relationship because I think that gives you the most fuel for a story and is the part you can’t retroactively put in. If you tell me this story needs a bigger fight scene, I can go do that at the end. But if a story isn’t built around a relationship, it’s tough to slot it in. So I wanted to build The Brother’s Wilde around a relationship. I was looking at the House of Cards, which was where we wanted to focus the story, and I thought brotherhood made sense. It’s this military organization and the brotherly bond felt like it made sense. I have two brothers who I fight with a lot. So that made that track.
But then I was interested in this idea of the houses and I loved the thoughts of the personality types associated with the houses. Me and my brothers are very different and if we’re gonna have two brothers in the story, let’s put them in two different houses. Let’s have them hate each other for the very reasons that make them unique. If we’re trying to expand the House of Cards we’ve got to bake it into the DNA of the House of Cards. So I wanted to build around there. Then I came up with these characters who are half brothers from a philandering father, who they both hate and there’s no love between them. At that point, it started to feel real to me and it started to feel fun. It felt like playing because you built this world and we have this amazing world of the House of Cards which has these rituals and dynamics built in. It was such a gift to build these two brothers who hate each other and try to give them a situation to learn why they need each other.
FB You were tasked with an origin story, an early origin story of the House of Cards. They send card soldiers on missions and when they send people on missions, they decide what kind of hand they’re going to deal. So you came up with the idea of “A Hand in History.” The Brothers Wilde is the beginning of the card soldiers going on these various missions when they’re tasked with saving the queendom or battling a competitive state.
JC I loved the idea of basing it around hands that are chosen and selected because that plays into the joy of Dungeons and Dragons and these old fantasy novels. It’s the idea of “The Party,” the troop. Every story is based around who was selected to go on this journey. That’s what’s so beautiful in a lot of these adventure stories, including Alice in Wonderland, it’s not the adventure that’s enticing, but it’s the uniqueness of who’s gonna solve the adventure.
FB The skill set they have and seeing how they’re challenged when they use their skill set with these various obstacles. That’s the Dirty Dozen idea.
JC I think that’s where a lot of modern fantasy and films go wrong. They put a lot of their energy into these big set pieces, these big boss fights with CGI characters. They put a lot of time into the obstacles when actually the thing we care about is the people solving them. In The Lord of the Rings, you care about Frodo, you don’t care that there are nine Nazgul. That’s what makes Alice in Wonderland so beautiful, and your novels, they revolve around the people going through them instead of the giant nature of the battle.
FB It’s fantasy but you need to be with the characters and with Alice, it’s so identifiable. It’s a “Who am I?” journey, and she finds agency in who she is and pushes back against the illogical world that she finds herself in. But it’s also very amusing. When were you introduced to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
JC I couldn’t say an individual date because, especially in England, it was just a part of culture growing up. My earliest memories were of my mum and my dad reading me the book. I must have been 10 or 11. The 1951 film was something I watched a lot. I love animation. I write a lot of animated stuff. The specificity of the visuals and the tone baked into that film was a real inspiration for me growing up.
FB Why do you think it’s lasted so long? You said it was in culture and this is generations after it was first introduced. Every generation re-interprets Alice. How do you view Alice in Wonderland?
JC I think the reason it has lasted is there are so many ways you can connect with it. It is such a beautiful human idea, the girl who falls through the looking glass and gets swept away on an adventure. The part I really gripped on to from a young age was the world-building. It was the idea of this world that works, that makes sense. It doesn’t feel like someone who’s picked, “Oh, this would be a fun scene. This is a fun character. That would look good.”
It lives and breathes like a world. Something that really drew me to it is I think a lot of world-building goes dark, “It’s a grungy forest with scary people in it.” Then obviously some other world-building goes saccharine and we’re in heaven. I love the feeling in Alice that there’s a danger to the world but there’s a wonder to it as well. There’s a whimsy and a seriousness. The world feels like it shifts based on the situation, like ours does. There’s no one thing to it. I just love learning more about the world, learning about the characters who inhabit it, the places to go, and being able to build this kind of escape.
FB I love the whimsy and the silliness of it and it reminded me of another book, The Phantom Tollbooth, which was one of my favorites growing up because of the silliness and the use of language. I really identified with that aspect of Alice. Many people think of it more as more a nightmare because of getting big and small and being stuck in a place where there’s no logic.
JC The lack of logic, I love. I know quite a lot of people who I would identify as crazy people. They would as well. We have a lot of fun mental health issues in our family. I always grew up with this acceptance that nothing’s gone wrong. There are crazy people who exist in the world and that’s fine. I think Alice, in a youthful way, takes that on the story. It accepts there are people who are going to make some weird decisions and that’s okay.
FB It really does capture that. In terms of pop culture, you mentioned Dungeons and Dragons and the references in video games, I’ve noticed there’s a huge through line of Alice. In almost every game I’ve ever seen, there’s some Alice component. Do you have a favorite Alice in pop culture item that you like?
JC I enjoy Dungeons and Dragons. I love the video game Borderlands, which has a lot of Alice imagery. I think my favorite is probably the Batman: Arkham Asylum graphic novel, which I just love. It’s this beautifully illustrated graphic novel about Batman going into Arkham Asylum and gradually losing his sanity. It’s very inspired by Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the villains in Batman already are. There’s very much these threads of madness and the Mad Hatter.
Even the Penguin, there’s all this imagery that lines up. So you have this beautiful graphic novel of him just going progressively mad, surrounded by Alice in Wonderland motifs and imagery. That’s what feels so special about Alice in Wonderland, it can be drawn for inspiration for something light for a younger audience but it could also be drawn for a very dark and disturbing graphic novel. And it works the same. It’s just beautiful. I think that’s what happens when you’re able to create something that taps so deep into a human level. It means you can use it in so many different ways.
FB A lot of stories now are based on IP because people like stories that are familiar and told in an unfamiliar way. On the business side, there’s a recognizable aspect for the marketing. I know this is not lost on you because you’re working on an animated series that’s based on Edgar Allan Poe, but your spin on it is a little different. Can you talk about that?
JC I’ve been working for a couple of years on a series called A Raven in the Woods. It’s a reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe. I loved Poe as a child. I loved the language, the poetry, the darkness, and, similar to Alice, the acceptance of madness. That’s where they meet in the middle. Poe, like Lewis Carroll, doesn’t treat his mad characters as nothing. They’re just his characters. They’re not irrational. They are just who they are and they are to be dealt with.
So I loved Poe and felt there was something so visual in his language that would pair well with animation. He writes in this incredibly emotive, twisted world that I thought could be best represented by animation. There are a lot of great live-action adaptations but they’re all dark and gloomy rooms, which is technically accurate. But when you’re reading Poe’s work, it doesn’t feel like a dark gloomy room, it feels like a twisting shadow and peering lights. I thought it worked well with animation but I didn’t want to do a direct translation. Similar to how you engage with the Alice world, I wanted to bring the feeling and the parts of Poe that I love into a new story that worked as a standalone piece of animation for kids. It shows a young Edgar Poe trying to get his brother Allan through the woods before Allan is turned into a raven. Allan’s cursed and as they move through the woods, a lot of the people in the woods have gone mad. There’s a curse on the woods and there’s a big, mysterious overlord. A lot of the “mad” people speak in rhyme and speak in poetry.
It’s this adventure through the woods and the logic in my head was that this was the real-life adventure that inspired the later Edgar Allan Poe to write his stories. He actually wasn’t very creative at all; he was just mining from two weeks he had as a kid. It’s got a lot of the characters and the elements and the moments of his work, but it’s its own story about a kid trying to deal with a lot of the themes that come up in Poe. Themes of fear, how to overcome that, and how to deal with yourself and the world when everything feels mad.
FB Not dissimilar at all to Alice. I think that’s really relatable and answers the question we often get from executives “Why now?” Given how chaotic the world feels, it’s great to deal with stories that are realistic to the anxiety that kids feel, whether it’s the various wars they’re reading about or the climate and the fact that there’s nothing they feel like they can do about it. I’ve noticed that with my kids. So stories that are thematically similar to what you’re talking about answer that question of why it’s important.
JC Thank you. I think we need this stuff. We live in a chaotic time and our art needs to reflect that. Thankfully, we’re not the first people to have lived in a chaotic time so there are lovely things from the past.
FB We’re also trying to get grounded in what’s real. One of the things about Alice in Wonderland, if you look back on it, the question is “Is this a dream? Is this real?” Trying to parse out reality versus fantasy, facts versus fiction, which we’re dealing with a lot of late. That sounds like a really exciting project.
JC I’m working with a producer, Rick Mischel, who’s wonderful, and we’ve teamed up with TeamTO which is a great French animation house.
FB They’re terrific. I love their animation.
JC They’ve been amazing so far. Wonderfully French, which has been a great treat. On one of the first calls, the head of finance was just sitting 10 feet away from the camera stroking a cat. I was like, that’s the kind of stuff we need. We’re working with them and a director called Christian De Vita, who’s an incredible director. He’s done a lot of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton stuff. We’re working on putting together a packet for it and then going out and trying to sell it. It’s been a great, great process and hopefully, it will lead somewhere.
FB Fingers crossed. We’ll want to check back in with you and certainly have you on the show when you need to promote it because it’s coming out.
I’m curious about the romantic comedy genre. I would imagine that you know something about that and that it’s been lacking. It’s one of the staples and one of my favorite movie genres. Why do you think we’ve lost that?
JC It’s a really tough question. My dad has made a lot of romantic comedies. That’s his bag. It’s tough. I feel like there’s very little to be learned from him because the truth about him is that he is literally the sappiest romantic person in the world. It is one hundred percent genuine. That’s how he talks, thinks, and breathes. But I think it’s a really tough thing. One thing, it’s a genre that needs to keep changing. Action is action, and you need to develop it, but honestly, action holds up. But both romance and comedy are things that develop as humans develop. If you are romantic in the way people were romantic in the 1950s, you’ll probably get arrested. If you tell jokes that were funny in the 50s, you are not getting laughs, I promise. I think these are things that need to keep being pushed and reinvented because, with both romance and comedy, it’s the feeling of something new. The feeling of being in love is, “I’ve never felt like this about a person before.”
FB What about the formula of the meet-cute and the tension of “clearly they’re not getting along”?
JC We got used to the formulas. I think you can get used to the formula for an action film and it doesn’t lessen it. But to me, When Harry Met Sally, feels radical. It’s weird. It cuts away to things, it’s skipping time. I think romantic comedies have to feel unique because it should feel like meeting a person who’s shifting your life. When we get used to the tropes, they can still be good if you want to make The Notebook. That’s proper romance. But I think with a romantic comedy, it has to feel fun and it has to feel fresh. That takes reinvention.
I think we’re in a weird spot at the moment where no one’s quite cracked it in a while. We’re all just really familiar with the tropes. Everyone watched these films, everyone started acting like the people in these films. There are all these people pretending to be leading men from romantic comedies in the 90s, and 2000s. They’re all on dating apps and it’s horrible. When you go on a dating app you see 200 people’s perceptions of who they are as a romantic lead. You watch everyone label themselves as the Hugh Grant type. Or, “I’m just a witty guy,” or “I’m the Billy Crystal, he doesn’t care.” These things are so played out. You’ve got to find a way of making something feel weird and fresh and new. But that’s really tough when we work in an industry that doesn’t like taking chances on fresh and new stuff. Also, let’s be real, romantic comedies live and die on the stars, on the chemistry. It’s tough to get a weird, new, fresh take that two stars are willing to sign on for and they happen to have chemistry. I think it’s a really tall order.
FB I agree with that. With all the dating apps, trying to find a way to make that at all romantic seems to be an impossibility. But also, somebody will do it and it’ll break out and maybe there’ll be a fresh take on it. But to your point, we have all sorts of other genres that people are spending more time on. I just miss the chemistry between two stars. The Notebook is something my daughter has gone back to and it works because both male leads are equally appealing. So she really has a dilemma that you can buy into. But that was based on a novel that was highly successful.
So the kinds of movies your dad wrote, were his own ideas, right? They weren’t based on anything, your dad had a romantic idea. For example, your dad wrote Notting Hill, which was one of my favorites. There’s an ongoing joke with my stepkids because whenever they say, “What should we watch?” I’m like, “Well, what about Notting Hill?” I’ve been saying it over and over and over so many times that they’re dead. They look at me like, that is the dumbest joke ever. But it’s a good movie. The chemistry between the two leads is so amazing.
JC I remember once asking my dad, “Did you know when you were writing these films that ended up being big hits, that they were going to be hits?” He said, “Absolutely not at all. I really didn’t feel it. I just wrote and tried to stay passionate about it.” Then he paused and went, “Actually not Notting Hill. I was sitting at home and I thought, ‘What if a movie star fell in love with a random guy?’ And I went, Oh, that’s a hit.’”
FB Also, you have Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom with that smile that would just crush anybody. Then you have Hugh Grant, who’s a very contained performer and when those two come into contact, it’s gold. It’s wonderful.
JC I think one thing that’s worth looking at is that romantic comedy is being explored in other mediums successfully like the Amazon show The Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s a smash hit for a younger audience and that’s a rom-com, essentially. Even looking at someone like Taylor Swift, her songs are romantic, amusing, and comedic at points and that has gripped people. Obviously, people want these kinds of things. I think it’ll just take someone breaking a new way of doing it in movies.
FB Certainly in television. My daughter keeps telling me “Dad, it’s one girl, two guys. That’s what you need to do. Just focus on teenagers. Two guys, one girl. That’s the formula.” She’s watched all those shows you’ve talked about.
You have a funny story about your grandmother knowing the Liddells, Alice Liddell, which you have to share with us. That’s the first time I’ve come into contact with somebody whose family member knew the literal muse forall things Alice, for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,for my books, for your writing The Brothers Wilde.
JC It’s a bizarre and wonderful story. My grandmother, my mum’s mum, Lady Jill Freud, is an amazing woman. She’s 96 or 97 right now but World War II broke out when she was little, six or seven. She was living in London at that time with her family and they knew London was going to be bombed ruthlessly. So the British government enacted this thing they called “the evacuation,” which was an insane thing to happen. It could never happen nowadays. They literally took every child in London, took them to a train station, put a number around their neck, and put them on a train somewhere. They literally just shipped them off. When they arrived at these stations, people from the local towns came to the station and just went “Yeah, I can take two,” or “I run a farm, I can take two young boys to work there.” These kids just got rehoused for what was, at that point, an indefinite period of time.
So my granny was sent to Oxford and taken in by this family, the Butlers. Mrs. Butler was 100 and wasn’t allowed to know there was a war on because they were worried it would scare her. But the house was run by these three Butler sisters. Two of them were university professors and they were three unmarried older women. They had been three of the kids that Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, had taken down the Isis River in Oxford when they were younger. He’d done these long boat journeys down the Isis and he would read them stories every night. He would come up with stories and a lot of his early things were first tested out on these little girls. So my grandmother lived with the Butlers and they had these toys from their time with Lewis Carroll he had actually made by hand. He was a great craftsman and he had made these toys.
So every Sunday afternoon, my granny would be allowed to go into the drawing room and play with these Lewis Carroll’s toys. It was this incredible time in Oxford where all these great writers and poets and people who were allowed to not fight in the war for academic reasons would write. So she lived with the Butlers and she met Alice Liddell. Alice was close with them and would come over and she was this sort of enigmatic figure known and revered around Oxford. She had tea with J.R.R. Tolkien. By her memory, he was a friendly guy.
So it was just this amazing time she was around Oxford and absorbing it. But also it was a time of war and chaos and people dying. When she talks about it it’s this very mixed feeling of this beautiful time but so underpinned with fear.
FB Was she there for the entire war?
JC She was there for the entire war pretty much I believe. She was there for five years of the war. By the time the war ended, she was 16-17 and had been at C.S. Lewis’ house for a bit and she stayed on to manage his estate for another year or two, I believe. Then at the end of that, she was accepted into RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but couldn’t afford to go and C.S. Lewis paid for her entire education. He covered it and she went on to become an early movie actress.
FB What an amazing story and an amazing life.
JC At that time in Oxford, there were so many incredible people, incredible minds all talking to each other. These were discrete authors. They all knew each other and they had writing groups.
FB Could you imagine those writing groups? Wow, that would have been intimidating.
JC “Yeah, I don’t know if this White Rabbit character is really working for me.”
FB “I don’t think a closet is where you want the kids to go through. No one is gonna buy that.” The video you sent me of your grandmother, what’s that from?
JC She’s an incredible woman with incredible stories. A few years ago, I sat her down and we talked through her life and everything she’d done. It was a really wonderful experience. It was something I wanted to do, obviously to have the footage, but also it is such a privilege to get to talk to someone who’s lived through wars and everything. I mean, ninety-seven is a lot of years.
FB You’re very fortunate in terms of being surrounded by so many creative minds and creative family members and having a template on which you can base your creative aspirations. It’s been really delightful to listen to you articulate what you’ve experienced so far, in your life and I really, I really appreciated you working on this project. I didn’t know you very well and you delivered. I think our listeners are really going to enjoy hearing this.
JC They’re good, fun people. There’s a quote from a Madness song written on our wall at home that says, “There’s always something happening and it’s usually quite loud.” That summed up our family well.
FB That’s great. I hope you’ll come back when your show is produced.
JC Thank you so much for having me. This was such an absolute treat for the day and just fun to get into all this and chat about comedy and things
This is Marco Arizpe, Lead Game Designer at Automatic Games, and occasional blog writer for Frank’s wonderful repository of All Things Alice. Recently I have been hard at work developing an exciting table top card game set in the expansive wonderverse of The Looking Glass Wars. In doing so, I have studied the wide world of Alice-Inspired games.
No stranger to daring battles played out among friend & foe, the enduring legacy of chess & the versatile deck of cards lend their imagery to some of Wonderland’s most iconic characters. The vivid familiarity of Lewis Carroll’s creation manifests continually in this medium. However, there are many varieties of games, some with more familiar rules & pieces, while others go a little mad along the way.
In this spirit, please allow me to bring to your attention a sampling of some of the best Wonderland-inspired board & card games you could play at your next tea party.
A card-collecting game where players cooperate or compete to create a hat collection that would make the Millinery jealous.
With a 42-card deck of seven different Hat cards to collect, a “tea table” board for exchanging cards, a dry-erase “napkin” to keep score, and a plastic cookie which is very much inedible (you have been warned.) With these delightful pieces in hand 2 players can enjoy a simplified version with 1 less card on the tea table and 2 fewer hat suits in the deck, while 3 or 4 players utilize the whole game board and have access to all 42 hats.
A turn is simple, players can exchange a hat from the board with one from the hand and place their newly collected hat in front of them, or you play a hat face-down in front of you as a “black hat.” Once all players have 1 hat in hand, they have made all their moves, and the true strategy of Hats is revealed. Your final hat is your “favorite” and if the players have favorite hats of the same style as the ones on the tea table, those hats are placed face-down and do not count towards the final score. The hats in your collection are scored based on the position of their matching styles on the tea table, your black hats counting for 1 point, and the player with the most varied styles earning that 5-point cookie previously mentioned.
Hats falls in a rare middle ground of colorful game pieces that catch the eye and a level of portability that allows players to enjoy the game out and about. Though admittedly the scoring system of Hats can be confusing initially as players get a handle on how to set up the tea table and their collection, even playing a round of Hats incorrectly still merits a good time. If you are looking to enjoy a quickly-paced game of cards with wonderful art Hats is a solid recommendation, but if you need more Wonderland read on.
Combining Carroll’s vision of Wonderland and the energetic card game designed by the delightfully named Looney Laboratory, Wonderland Fluxx is a game where the rules are made to go mad.
Starting with a very basic rule set of “draw 1, play 1” a game of Fluxx begins with very little but transforms with each card played. The Fluxx deck includes New Rules, Actions, Goals, and Keeper cards, as well as other advanced card types that ensure no two games play alike. Each round players can change the rules, perform special actions, set new goals, and collect Keepers to meet those goals. All this is merely the core of Fluxx as a game before it has been steeped in the imagery and themes of Wonderland.
Between 100 different cards, there are many flavorful links between Fluxx card mechanics and the iconic tropes we associate with Wonderland, perhaps my favorite is the use of the Jabberwock as the sole “Creeper” card of the deck. In Fluxx, one of the additional types of cards that can be found are Creepers which force themselves to be played when drawn. These cards tend to be “opposites” of the Keeper cards players need to collect to win and depending on the version, Creeper cards can add further chaos to your game. The Jabberwock is Wonderland Fluxx‘s only Creeper which adds a level of mythic menace to the creature that I find charming.
Wonderland Fluxx is an excellent choice for a group of players who enjoy thinking on their feet and are comfortable with the rules changing at any moment. Admittedly, Fluxx as a system can have linear win-conditions as players merely need 1 or 2 Keeper cards to complete any Goal. The fluctuating variables might keep newer players away but fits the madness of Wonderland that fans of LGW would appreciate an easy recommendation.
In this cooperative puzzle game, players must use their wits please to outsmart the Queen of Hearts, which is no easy task.
Published by North Star Games, Paint the Roses has players taking the role of royal gardeners toiling under the vicious Queen of Hearts who demands that the palace gardens be arranged to her mad whims. Based on these secretive Whim Cards, players must create a garden using Shrub Tokens to give their friends clues on what patterns to develop before the Queen’s ax can reach their neck. These whims come in a trio of difficulty and must be kept secret by the players, only using tokens to leave clues for your fellow players that the Shrubs on the board to lead you in the right direction. Once the planting of shrubs and clues has taken place, Players must take their guesses as to what is on the Whim cards. Guess correctly and move your gardener token along the board, but guess wrong and the Queen begins her mad march.
Now the win-condition of Paint the Roses is straightforward enough, however working to stay ahead of the Queen’s ax solely on you and your teammate’s ability to read each other’s clues can make this game fly by or slow to a crawl. For those who’ve mastered the base form of this game, North Star Games has released a deluxe version which includes the Escape the Castle expansion. The deluxe version boasts 6 unique modules that introduce familiar faces to Paint the Roses to assist players in their quest.
Returning to the meat of this review, the core retail version of Paint the Roses is an enjoyable romp around the palace grounds and is an excellent addition to the collection of those who appreciate all things Alyss. Even without the deluxe version’s expansions, the number of play variations available grants Paint the Roses a lifespan at your gaming table that is hard to match.
A 2-5 player game where each faction leader meets at Hatter’s Tea Party to gather resources before going to the battle against each other to lay claim to Wonderland.
Set in a Wonderland where the Looking Glass has shattered and the inhabitants have lost the madness that fuels them, players have a number of options to gain allies and advantages before the battle. During the Hatter’s tea party, players move around the table drafting cards to add to their army, build their tower, upgrade their faction leader, or complete Quests to gain bonuses in the various regions of Wonderland they’ll be fighting over. The tea party phase can be quite involved with each of these options, but for players who appreciate a steady progression of resources & abilities, this is your time to shine. After the tea party is over it is time for a bit of warfare, going region by region players will clash based on whose forces are present while other players can wager on the outcome or complete Quests in that area. Depending on player preferences, either phase could be the thrilling gameplay they were seeking or the dreadful drag as they wait for the other players to make their move.
Like the previous entry, this is a tabletop game for the gaming group that enjoys a long game with many moving parts and a focus on gaining & controlling resources and is not quite suited for a casual night in. Visually this game is ahead of the rest, pulling from a darker vision of Wonderland with an emphasis on battle, Wonderland’s War is as close to the Looking Glass Wars that is currently available. For the advanced tabletop game enthusiast, if you still have room on the shelf for some Wonderland madness, do give this a look.
From simple card play to table-creaking boards, it is clear that Wonderland remains an evergreen realm for gaming and will continue to be so for fans present and future. It can be mind-boggling to see all the various ways that the iconic characters have been incorporated into card & board games, but how the madcap thinking and imagination associated with Wonderland have influenced some fantastical game mechanics worth experiencing with friends.
Some or all of these tabletop offerings might satisfy your desire for gaming in Wonderland, we here on this side of the Looking Glass do hope you have an appetite for more.
Meet the Author:
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.
