Why A Young Hatter Madigan Animated Series Could Be The Next "Avatar: The Last Airbender"
I don’t know what has happened but in the past five to ten years the popularity of anime has exploded. While you could argue that anime was always massive, it was more of a subculture consisting of those kids who Naruto-ran in P.E. and those who watched anime but didn’t talk about it because they didn’t want to be grouped in with the Naruto-runners. What was once nerd culture is now popular culture. And I’m here for it.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, too; I was always here for it. No, I was not a Naruto runner, but when Cartoon Network switched to Toonami came on, I was locked in. (Specifically, I liked Bleach.) I knew I was about to watch something different from what I had ever seen before. Everything was new and exciting - the art style, world-building, action, and the themes that were being tackled. Before I had seen anime it never occurred to me that cartoon characters could bleed if the artist wanted them to. It was mind-blowing, it still is. When I’m in a creative rut I’ll find an anime series I’ve never seen before because the creativity is so different. It’s like a factory reset for me.
In America, the most popular anime genre is shōnen. Shōnen is manga/anime with a target audience of 12 to 18-year-old boys (girls obviously love it as well because it wouldn’t be as popular without them). Some of the most popular anime shows that have ever existed fall into this genre, Naruto, Dragonball Z, Bleach, Attack on Titan, Full Metal Alchemist, One Piece, and Hunter X Hunter. I want to keep going because I’m afraid I will miss your favorite show and you will leave an angry comment I won’t read but I’ve already mentioned enough shows.
A common trope in anime is taking a known thing, be it a historical event, fictional universe, and/or real or fictional characters, and tailoring them to the author's vision. Take the character Franken Stein from Soul Eater for example. In the show, he is an amalgamation of both Victor Frankenstein and his monster and uses electricity-centric attacks. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is obviously the inspiration yet, in the show, Franken Stein is wholly unique. Taking characters, IPs, or historical events and using them as a jumping-off point to create your own story isn’t uniquely Japanese. A perfect example of that is in Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars series and the Hatter M graphic novels. Frank took Lewis Carroll’s world and characters and created a unique realm. This is why I think The Looking Glass Wars would be perfect for a “Western anime” adaptation. Specifically, an animated series following his Mad Hatter character, the Master Milliner and Royal Bodyguard Hatter Madigan.
Frank Beddor’s Hatter Madigan is not your tea-sipping, seat-swapping Hatter of old. He is a badass blade-slinging, hat-throwing, supersoldier. His story is perfect for an animated adaptation. In Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars series, Hatter Madigan is introduced as the royal bodyguard for Princess Alyss and her family. The Hatter M graphic novel spinoff series follows Hatter on his wild and action-packed adventures around the world in search of the missing Princess Alyss. This alone is enough for a show but the world of Wonderland that Frank created is so much larger than this. We haven’t even gotten into the Suit families and their political battles, card soldiers, the mysterious and powerful skills of Dark and Light Imagination, creative tinkerers, looking-glass transportation, and the Crystal Continuum. The world that Frank Beddor built is massive, unique, and detailed. To have this world brought to life through animation would blow everyone away.
The show would follow the young Hatter who was orphaned at four after his parents’ disappearance during a Millinery mission, Hatter and his older brother Dalton lived at the Millinery academy for years before Hatter was allowed to attend the school himself. Burdened by the shadows cast by his talented older brother and his parent's reputation, Hatter strives to be the best. Did someone say training arc? The Millinery is the secretive military force of Wonderland, where the best Milliners are tasked with safeguarding the Queen and her family. Hatter is determined to succeed at the academy and make a name for himself in his own right.
What specifically would make this show a “Western anime?” Or for that matter, what even is a “Western anime?” The term itself doesn’t mean that much on its own because a “Western anime” is just a cartoon. But, there is one specific show that I and many others agree is specifically a “Western anime” and not just a cartoon. That show is Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Along with its Japanese-inspired art style, Avatar also did something that not many other Western cartoons aimed at young adults. The show’s themes and stakes were serious. Characters got injured, were in peril, and had to make truly difficult choices. The show had depth, which is much more common in anime compared to Western cartoons. So, while there is no such thing as a “Western anime,” an animated series about Hatter Madigan could sit beside Avatar: The Last Airbender and become a show that people call a “Western anime.”
There are things about the Hatter Madigan series as well as The Looking Glass Wars that are reminiscent of anime already. Starting on the surface, let’s look at the weapons. Specific weapons and tools are a common trope in anime. Gon from Hunter x Hunter has his fishing rod, Mitsuri Kanroji’s whip sword in Demon Slayer, and the Death Note in Death Note. The reason for these cool, unique, and unorthodox weapons in anime is that they allow the viewer to gain a sense of who a character is just by glancing at them. Milliners are known for their signature hats. While stylish, they are sentient, deadly, thrown weapons. Along with their hats, Milliners also utilize many other weapons, from belt buckles with a series of J-shaped sabers to backpacks that seem to provide an unending supply of different blades. A vast majority of these weapons are imbued with magical thread made of caterpillar silk to make them even more powerful.
There is something “weird” about anime. Now, when I say “weird” (and I’m going to say it a few times) I don’t mean that in a bad way. I would argue the “weirdness” is a drawing point for many of the viewers. The “weirdness” is originality. Even when a show is an adaptation, there is always some form of “weirdness” that takes something we all know and turns it on its head. When one takes a step back, it is easy to see that weirdness isn’t unique to anime. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is weird and Frank’s adaptations are weird as well. Again, weirdness is not a bad thing, it just means that it’s something that has not been seen before or is an original take on something familiar. The Hatter animated series would have the perfect amount of weirdness, attracting audiences and keeping them locked in. Weapons imbued with caterpillar thread are weird and awesome. If you want to zoom out more, turning Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland into this amazing sci-fi/fantasy world is weird…and awesome.
Finally, there are the stakes. As I mentioned before, Avatar: The Last Airbender is accepted as a “Western anime” not because of its art style but for its themes. The main character, Aang, is the last Airbender due to the Fire Nation’s genocide of the airbenders. In The Looking Glass Wars trilogy and the Hatter M graphic novel series people get hurt, people die, and characters have to make difficult moral choices. This, of course, would translate to the show. Hatter Madigan is an orphan who grew up in the Wonderland version of Westpoint before attending said school. While I’m sure he would have some happy memories of his childhood, that does not make it a happy childhood. The show, of course, will have its fair share of fun and lighthearted moments, but these will be balanced with the drama. It feels as though in animated shows, it is often forgotten that kids can handle a lot more than just the happy or silly moments.
A Hatter animated show needs to be made. There has been a massive vacuum left by The Last Airbender that has yet to be filled. Given the rise of anime, it’s obvious that people want more and they are going elsewhere to get it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most recognizable and successful IPs in history. People can’t get enough of Alice. So let’s give them what they want.
Meet the Author
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
All Things Alice: James Agee Interview
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have educator, writer, and artist James Agee 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 A few weeks ago, somebody came on frankbeddor.com and wanted to buy every one of my books, 12 in all. So I asked my trusty producer Sarah who this person was, and it turns out they had read The Looking Glass Wars books 15 years earlier in high school, and now they wanted to have the entire collection. I said, “Sarah, I'm really curious about this person. Let's have them on the show.” So today, I have James Agee. He is not only a fan of The Looking Glass Wars but also an educator, writer, and artist. He works in technology and is a big reader of all things pop culture. He has a very diverse bio. It’s my pleasure to welcome James to the show.
James Agee Good morning. I'm glad to be here.
FB Since this is an Alice in Wonderland-centric, I'm going to ask you a straightforward question. When were you first introduced to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, either through the book or through some piece of pop culture?
JA I feel like I was always familiar with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. From the time I was little, it was just one of those stories you hear over and over. But in terms of discovering The Looking Glass Wars, that happened when I was in high school. It took so long for me to find the books because, for years, I just was not interested in reading. I thought it had to be these prescribed readings from the school if I was going to read. Then, for whatever reason, I found out I could choose my own books. That's when I started loving reading because I could pick things I liked, and one of those was The Looking Glass Wars.
FB Did your parents encourage you to read when you were younger, and then you got these assignments in elementary and middle school, and it was overwhelming?
JA I never really disliked reading. My parents always read to me when I was little. But, once I started school, the majority of my time reading outside of class was reading something that had been assigned. Then, I got a Kindle for Christmas one year. That was when I started going through and finding all of these books that I had never given a chance to or even thought I would be able to get into. It started a lifelong passion for reading after that.
FB That's a very good parenting story. For those of us who have kids, sometimes you push too hard. Something similar happened to me. I wasn't doing a lot of reading, and my mother and my grandmother really wanted me to read Alice in Wonderland, but I just wanted to go outside and play in the woods. It really wasn't until high school and after high school that I discovered my love of reading. I was not a fast reader. The assigned reading in school took a long time, so there was no chance I was going to be reading in my free time. I lived on a lake in the woods in Minnesota, so I wanted to be outside.
JA I can definitely relate to that. I went to a smaller school in a rural area, and we had a school library, but it wasn't necessarily stocked with young adult literature. So I just didn't know it was there. But getting into reading happened when I felt like it needed to. At that point, I said, “I'd like to tell my own stories.” That’s what started me writing.
FB Was there a genre you read that you loved that you started writing in?
JA The first genre I fell in love with was fantasy fiction. There's so much of it, and I felt like it was this untapped world that I just didn't know existed. I'd always loved movies and television shows in that genre, so it was natural for me to gravitate towards those types of books.
FB What kind of movies, TV shows, or books did you start with that led you to writing fantasy?
JA Growing up, I was obsessed with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series. I grew up with Harry Potter as they released the movies, so it was pretty neat. Ironically, I had never read books, so when I finally got around to reading them, I was like, “This is even better than the movies.”
FB So, while watching the movies, you were the characters' age. How old were you when you started reading the books?
JA I was pretty young when the movies started being released. I didn't actually get into the books until late high school, probably 11th or 12th grade. It just never occurred to me to sit down and read them because they looked so intimidating, the size of them. Now, the longer the book, the better. But at the time, it was one of those things that kept me from approaching them.
FB It’s so funny you say that because I was the same way with high fantasy. Some of these books, like Game of Thrones, are like 1,000 pages. I’d look at these tomes and say, “Nope, I'm not taking that on.” But it was Game of Thrones that got me into reading high fantasy. I watched the TV show and was like, “Okay, I want to read the book.” In reading the book, I was stunned by how well laid out it was chapter to chapter and how it matched the TV show. I get the idea of coming to the book after the movie.
Matter of fact, with The Looking Glass Wars, Harry Potter had been out for a number of years, and a lot of kids were the age of the characters and watching the movies or reading the books as they were growing each and every year. From a publishing standpoint, that's what they were really looking for. So when I came with my book, they said, “Oh, well, your book has a seven-year-old; nobody wants to follow a seven-year-old. Then she's 13, but then she quickly turns 20. So, you won't get any of the Harry Potter kids. They all want to read their age.” I said, “Well, I think there are more readers out there. There's more diversity than that.” It took publishing it in the UK for it to be successful and come back to the States.
What about you when you're writing? Do you write adult characters, or have you written anything related to when you were in middle school? How do you like to come up with your characters?
JA I've written characters all over the place in terms of age. Generally, I write what to read. I haven't gone into specific demographics. At the end of the day, I'm just happy to have these stories out there.
JA It's been going pretty good. The process isn't too crazy. I prefer to spend most of my resources in the writing phase. I've worked with some great editors to try and get the stories where they need to be. I've worked with smaller publishers in the past, and, at this point, I prefer self-publishing over the small publishers I have worked with because I feel like I have a lot more control over what I'm putting out.
FB That's one of the great things about being a writer. You get to write what you want. You can have an editor work on it, but it's your final decision. If you can get the book out there in exactly the form you'd like it to be, then why not? If you could make a couple of bucks, it's even better, but it's not easy for anybody to make money publishing. So, the process of writing and the joy of creating and then sharing, and hopefully, somebody will read it and absorb the book in the same way you thought when you put the words down on the page. You get this back and forth and it’s really satisfying if you can connect with the reader.
JA Absolutely. That's pretty much how I feel about it.
FB You discovered The Looking Glass Wars on YouTube. How did that happen? Was there an ad? Was it one of my trailers?
JA I believe it was actually when the whole BookTuber phase was starting. I had so many connections I had made through commenting on videos. I was reviewing a few books at the time on my channel and meeting people that way. The Looking Glass Wars was one of those books recommended by a YouTube connection. Once I saw the cover and some of the illustrations, I was immediately drawn to it. I think it was about the time that ArchEnemy came out. That was the first book I ever pre-ordered because I just couldn't wait for it.
FB That's a very nice compliment. Do you recall what art you were attracted to? Was it the covers? You mentioned the cover for The Looking Glass Wars. That was Doug Chiang, who works on a lot of the Star Wars canon. You can probably see some similarities between the droids in The Phantom Menace and my Card Soldiers. But the publisher really liked that book, and it motivated a lot of boys to read. They were reluctant readers who would read The Looking Glass Wars because they wanted to see how the card soldiers would unfold.
JA That was part of it. Seeing that cover and just reading the synopsis, thinking, “How's this going to work? How will this tie in with the Alice in Wonderland that I'm familiar with?” I loved it because, pretty much from page one, you had taken something that I was familiar with and fleshed it out so much more. That was what hooked me from the start.
FB It was fun to have a starting point with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and then spinning everything. I took a lot of inspiration from Gregory Maguire and his Wicked series. Did you ever read those books?
JA It has been on my list for years. I’m probably going to do the audiobooks because I’ve heard so many good things about them. That's another thing I just recently went through for the first time. I listened to the audiobooks of The Looking Glass Wars series. It was like reliving it but in a different way.
FB Can you describe how experiencing the written word in an audio form impacted your experience? I'll just preface by saying that Gerard Doyle was so amazing. At times, I would say to myself, “I don't think I wrote that line. I wonder if he changed it.” I said, “Wow, this is so much better as an audiobook because of Doyle's voice.”
JA When I initially read the books, I had imagined things one way in my mind. Then, when I was listening to the audiobook, it wasn't necessarily that it changed, but I was able to sit back and relax a little bit more. He does the voices of the characters and everything so well that you don't have to question who's talking or what's going on because it brings it to life in a completely different way. I would encourage anyone who's read the books also listen to the audiobook because it is a different experience. Same story, different experience.
FB You also bought several Hatter M graphic novels. Have you been a fan of comics in the past? Or did you just want to complete the Hatter story?
JA I was actually a pretty big fan of manga a while back. I had read some graphic novels but was more towards the manga side of things. I didn't know Hatter’s side of the story even existed, but when I found out about them, it was definitely something I wanted to add to my collection. I wanted to know more about these characters. I love the fact that there's such a focus on Hatter because he's one of the characters in the original series that just kept me reading. The Cat was another one. I just love that concept because it's such a mischievous character to begin with. I just wanted to know more about what's going on in this world. Because the story of the trilogy is technically finished but there's so much left in this world to explore. I'm glad you're going back and doing that.
FB I am currently expanding the world. But the Hatter M graphic novels were inspired when I was in the UK promoting the book. I was at a school, and there were probably 100 kids, and one kid kept putting his hand up. Finally, I called on him, and he said, “Mr. Beddor, I'm very, very upset that you have not finished your first book.” I said, “I don't understand. What are you talking about?” He goes, “In your novel, you synopsize what happened to Hatter during his 13 years on Earth, and that was terribly frustrating because he's my favorite character. I really would like to know what happened during those 13 years.” This is a 10-year-old. I laughed it off, but I started thinking about it on the plane home. I thought, “I wonder if I could do a comic book filling in those 13 years?”
I wish I had the boy's name because I would have given him all the books for free and thanked him. I had a great time doing what now is six graphic novels in the Hatter story. It was fun to fill out what it was like for him in our world.
I'm really curious about your experience in teaching. I found doing school events and having the littlest impact really fulfilling. My favorite comment was hearing a kid say, “I read your book because you were a really fun speaker.” When you teach, how do you approach engaging the students so they can follow and absorb the lesson you want to communicate?
JA Keeping the student's interest is one of the most difficult things for every educator, especially when you have some classes that last hours at a time. At the school where I teach, I have students for half a day, and then the next group comes in for half a day. So keeping their interest for that long of a period can be difficult. But I've personally found that every group that I've ever taught is different. You have to take an individualized approach for that group to see what's interesting to them and what matters to them. The fact you've made your story so relatable is why students have such an easy time listening because there is something in the stories that they can relate to and connect with.
FB You don't have to entertain them the whole time, but you have to amuse them at least or make a connection so they can relate and understand why they should lean in a little bit. It's really a satisfying profession. Having done school visits, I thought, “Okay, I understand why teachers are teachers.” At the same time, as a country, we don't value teachers and how important and difficult it is to connect.
JA Absolutely. I'm currently teaching graphic design, which I've been teaching for the past year. The students tend to already be interested in it and have a drive to participate when they get there. The difficult part is keeping it throughout the year. I've freelanced in graphic design for years, so getting the opportunity to teach it to a group of high school students is fantastic.
FB You also teach at Marshall University, correct?
JA I teach part-time at Marshall University, and I also teach graphic design to high school students. For Marshall University, I teach instructional design to educators looking to get their graduate degrees. It’s a different approach to the design side of things, combining the instruction with the design, which I absolutely love and think is really fun.
FB You have a lot of right brain and left brain because you're a writer and very creative, but you're also heavy on the tech side. How did your parents prepare you growing up? I say this because I have an 18-year-old going off to college. I'm curious, from your experience, how your parents positioned what the world's like.
JA From about middle school, I decided I liked school enough to make this my career. I wanted to be on the other side of the desk teaching. I always had a bunch of other ideas for businesses and stories. Things would come up, and I would really want to do them. My parents supported me in whatever I wanted to attempt, whether they worked out or not.
FB Not everybody is inclined to stick their toe in and publish a book on Amazon or even start writing a book, let alone self-publishing and going out to indies. Also, having a really clear idea that you wanted to be an educator but then expanding and doing things that speak to you. I love that message for young people. I love the idea that, especially in your 20s, you should do everything you want to do. Whether you make money or fail or are super successful, push it because once you're a little bit older, you're gonna probably define where you put all of your energy, and especially if you have a family, then time is really precious.
JA I've noticed that a little bit more as I'm officially in my 30s. I have to allocate time a lot more specifically than I used to. Previously, I could do whatever I wanted when I came home from work—write, draw, or just relax. Now, I have to have a plan set out to manage time because things have gotten more and more busy over the years.
FB Do you do any of the illustrations for your books?
JA It's been a while since I did any illustrating for my books, but I design almost all of the covers exclusively. That's a really fun part because I feel like I know the stories pretty well, having written them. Getting to have that extra form of expression is something I always look forward to after I finish a book.
FB I need you to pick one book and give our audience the elevator pitch for the book, and then we will feature it.
JA One of the books I spent the most time on is Dead of Night. It's the first book of a series I wrote called The Blood CurseChronicles. I spent the most time on it because I wrote the book and then completely rewrote it. When I was working with the editor, it was such a process of going back and fixing every little thing we just got together, and we were like, “Should I just rewrite this whole thing?”
FB I know that story.
JA I spent the most time on that one, so I probably have the biggest connection with it. But it's the story of this family of vampires who live in a small Virginia town and own a funeral home. That’s their way of managing being vampires and getting the resources they need while providing a service to their community and fitting in. But the kids of this family find out that there is a way to break this curse that made them vampires. The whole series is about discovering how to break the curse and return to being human or just ending their eternal lives.
FB I like that. That's a very high concept. Very clean. You should go to Comic-Cons because I think people would respond to that. How many books are in that series?
JA There are four books. I would love to expand on that a little bit more, but I've never sat down and had a story that I felt was worth adding to it. Until that day comes, there are the four books.
FB You also like to work in multiple genres. What would be on the opposite side of a vampire story in terms of something you've written?
JA I wrote a memoir, I Once Knew Everything, about my life growing up. It was more of an exercise in putting my thoughts and memories on paper because I've found that the older I get, those little moments I like to reflect on aren’t as vivid as they used to be. I wrote that book more for myself than anything. It was a totally different experience than writing a story about vampires.
FB What were the challenges of doing that? Did you feel like you were tapping into a memory or an idea of a memory?
JA That was the challenge. I wanted to make sure it was as accurate as possible. How do you do that? How do you make it exactly like you experienced? I struggled more with writing that than any of the fiction books that I've ever written, simply because I wanted it to be as accurate as possible. But I also knew that, to an extent, it’s not even possible to have something be one hundred percent accurate to the events. We all experience things differently. We all remember things differently.
FB It’s very subjective, as well. How many books do you have available on Amazon?
JA There are currently 30 total. I was trying to do one to two per year for a while. A lot of that came from when I was working with a smaller publisher. They had more of a strict writing schedule. They wanted me to write as soon as I finished a book. They were like, “What's the next one?” Now, I'm lucky to write a book every two years but I enjoy the process a little bit more. There's no specific timeline for me to follow. It's finished when I'm done writing it.
FB What are you reading right now? Do you have anything interesting you're really into?
JA After I finished revisiting The Looking Glass Wars on audiobook, I thought, “What other stories that I really enjoyed from that time period are now available on audio that I'd like to go back to?” I'm currently listening to This Dark Endeavor and Such Wicked Intent by Kenneth Oppel. That’s another one of those series I love because it tells the story of Victor Frankenstein from a completely different perspective. It fleshed out the story more and gave more information, which is part of what drew me to The Looking Glass Wars. So I'm really enjoying going back and reliving a lot of those stories.
FB If you were a character from The Looking Glass Wars, who would you be and why?
JA That's such a tough question. I feel like I would relate to Homburg Molly the most. There was so much confusion with this character, but they wanted so much to be a part of this amazing story. You wonder for so long how she fits into this story, and then when she finally does, it all makes sense. I relate to her character so much because she's so in love with this world herself and wants to be a part of protecting the Queen that she's really willing to do whatever it takes. I love that about her.
FB That's great. Molly wants to be the hero, but she doesn't exactly fit in and doesn't know her father or mother. She has to come to terms with a little bit of the “Who am I?”. Then, when she finds out that Hatter’s her father, she's got to live up to that, which is a lot for her. So, you like to be the underdog?
JA Ideally, I would say Hatter, but realistically, I think it would be more Molly.
FB That's all of our fantasies. Could we really be a hero and a little bit flawed?
What was this trip you took with your students to France?
JA I’ve always loved France in general. It was my fourth time visiting, and it's something I offer to students locally. We live in a rural area, and I love offering them international trips, which I do about every two years. Also, I just love to travel in general. In about a week, I'm going to Ireland for a while and then to Italy for the first time. But this past time, being in France, when we went to Montmartre, I was thinking back to The Looking Glass Wars. There are so many real-world connections in those books that I had forgotten about from my first time reading them. I was actually thinking about The Looking Glass Wars when I was there because it's such a vivid part of the story. Having been there and seeing these things in person makes it so much more relatable.
FB I wish you were a doppelganger who could keep splitting and multiplying because you've said so many kind things and mentioned The Looking Glass Wars as being part of all different of aspects of your life. Your life seems incredibly rich with your travel, your teaching, your writing, your tech work, and your art. You seem to have a very full and diverse take on the world. It’s been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for supporting and sharing The Looking Glass Wars, which has been my life's work. I started the first book in 2000, so I'm coming up on 25 years of working in this world. I’m still looking to expand and fill in some of the blanks, and chatting with you is great motivation.
JA Thank you for writing these books because if it wasn't for authors like you, I don't know that I would have ever decided to write my own stories. I definitely wouldn't have jumped into reading like I did.
FB I'm going to check out this vampire story. It sounds like a very fun idea and also sounds like it could be a good TV show. James, enjoy the rest of your summer. Thank you, really appreciate it.
The Deck is Stacked: Alice and Wonderland in Card Games
Welcome back beyond the Looking Glass, where the many mad reflections of Wonderland and its denizens can appear anywhere and in any shape! You will be delighted to see many familiar faces appear in various trading and competitive card games that are quite popular on Earth. Some of these “visions” of Wonderland build off the fantastical interpretations of Lewis Carroll, while others are as strange and dark as the madcap reality of the Crystal Continuum.
“Alice In Wonderland” – Lorcana (Disney)
Leading the pack is perhaps the most obvious use of Alice in Wonderland- the Disney card game Lorcana. Set in a magical realm of the same name, Players wield “magical inks” to call on familiar heroes and villains from the Disney universe. Some of these characters and moments are pulled straight from established Disney lore, while others are transformed by the fantastical realm of Lorcana.
Players compete to be the first to collect 20 Lore, using their various cards to quest their Lore and challenge their opponent's characters. Character, Item, and Action cards allow a variety of play options and, while there are a variety of Abilities shared between different Characters and Items to shake up the basic rules of Lorcana, there is a unique spice to those that hail from Wonderland.
It should be said that in Lorcana, the first turn a Character enters play they cannot take any actions unless they have a special ability to do so. Following the White Rabbit, a majority of the Lorcana cards based on Carroll's Wonderland are focused on their ability to Rush, therefore skipping over that rest period so you're not late collecting 20 Lore.
In its early years and already possessing flavorful and fun mechanics, Lorcana provides a magical vision of Wonderland's madness. For those not too familiar with trading card games or the mad story behind the Looking Glass, this vision of Wonderland is an easy entrance for Players at any level of experience.
However, if mad-as-a-hatter gameplay is what you are after, then you should read on…
From the Japanese media giant Bushiroad, Cardfight!! Vanguard is set on Planet Cray, a nexus where many worlds overlap and influence each other, particularly with your world of Earth. Colliding realities and players using powers beyond imagining? Sounds quite familiar to anyone in the know regarding the wars beyond the Looking Glass.
In Cardfight!! Vanguard, Players call upon a “Vanguard” to fight their opponent's champion in a battle to be the first to inflict six damage. Your Decks are formed from a Normal unit and Trigger card types, at the most basic level of play, with additional types introduced with each new iteration of the game. While it would be a most intriguing discussion, the deeper realms of play will await those who feel the urge to card fight.
Hailing from the lawless Dark Zone of Planet Cray, we see a dark mirrored version of Wonderland in the maniacal Nightmareland cards. When choosing the grim forces of Nightmareland, your Vanguard's “soul” matters quite a bit. In Cardfight!! Vanguard, when a Player calls upon a stronger grade Vanguard, that new Vanguard is stacked on top of the previous Vanguard(s) and that stack is the Vanguard's soul.
The more powerful Nightmareland units benefit from possessing multiple units with the Nightmareland name while the supporting Trigger units place themselves in your Vanguard's soul to continuously power them up for battle. The deeper the cards are stacked, the greater your favor in battle. Here in Nightmareland, the Queen and her minions serve as offense while Alice and her companions focus on recurring resources and recovering damage.
Should the complexities of Cardfight!! Vanguard and the Gothic fantasy realm of Nightmareland not appeal, then perhaps a modern interpretation is what you're seeking in the Looking Glass.
“M∀LICE” Archetype – Yu-Gi-Oh! (Konami)
One of the original “Big Three” card games, the long-running Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise has paid homage to many imaginative worlds beyond its own. Now Wonderland is ready to duel! In the latest deck-building pack, the brand new “M∀LICE” archetype is set to take Duelists on a trip through a digital rabbit hole.
Before diving deeper, a cursory explanation of Yu-Gi-Oh! is necessary to appreciate the little touches done to bring Wonderland into this card game's space. Players (or Duelists) make their Main Deck with 3 different card types: Monster, Spell, and the often parodied Traps. Unique monsters typically played by using Main Deck monsters are stored in the Extra Deck. On the field, Players use monsters to do battle and Spells & Traps to change the flow of play in their favor as they try to reduce their opponent's Life Points from 8000 to zero.
In an appropriate portmanteau, this series of cards gets its unifying name from “Alice” and “malware,” adding a sci-fi cyberspace aesthetic to the M∀LICE cards. The monsters are themed after chess pieces, with the Pawns in the Main Deck and the Queen in the Extra Deck, and each monster takes on familiar names with hacker motifs. The Cat, the Rabbit, & the Dormouse all appear as Pawns with their own Suits, benefiting your Queen with protection from card effects or specialized ways of removing your opponent's monsters while on the field.
Presently, the cyberspace of “M∀LICE In Underground” has several Queens; “Hearts of Crypter,” “Red Ransom,” and the “White Binder” Queens rule. Each Queen can remove your opponent's monsters by cycling your own and you can add a M∀LICE Spell or set a M∀LICE Trap to further your control of the field. Aside from the pleasant theme of Pawns protecting the more powerful Queen’s moves, all M∀LICE monsters can take a trip down the rabbit hole.
In Yu-Gi-Oh! there is a concept called Banishment, wherein a card is removed from the game and sent to a special limbo zone that can't normally be interacted with. However, the M∀LICE monsters can move themselves in and out of Banishment, often triggering their effects to further confound your opponent. Just be wary dear Duelists, this is a dense game that contains many ways to counter-play your opponent and the Red Queen would be displeased to see you give Wonderland a bad name.
With the draw of a card you can unlock victory or suffer defeat, but along the way with some clever play, you can show your personality and creativity. That is the beauty of a card game: there are set rules and designs to guide you through the basics and once you've mastered those, the existence of cards that bend or break some of the rules gives Players the opportunity to have fun and express their skills. Who knows where Wonderland will pop up next? If you have seen through the Looking Glass, then you can expect to see more things Alyss in the cards.
Marco Arizpe graduated from the University of Southern California and The American Film Institute with degrees in filmmaking and screenwriting. His brand of borderland gothic horror stems from his experiences growing up in a small town where Texas and Mexico meet. Culturally steeped in a rich history of all things terrifying, Marco never fails to bring forward indigenous folklore in contemporary and fresh settings.
All Things Alice: Interview with Ken Markman
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Ken Markman, managing partner and CEO of KKM Global Brand Strategies, join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Ken Markman, welcome to the All Things Alice podcast. I’m really appreciative and excited to have you on the show and to talk about your contribution to the vision that became The Looking Glass Wars franchise and brand. You’re the Manager Partner and CEO of KKM Global Brand Strategies and you've worked on some big movies. You worked on Empire Strikes Back and Scarface. You told me a couple of stories about Barbie when you worked at Mattel. You have all sorts of wonderful stories and you used these stories to help me see a vision for The Looking Glass Wars. But I cannot remember how we met or who introduced us.
Ken Markman I think I may be able to put a breadcrumb on the water for you. You were thinking that you needed to begin to put a corral around this omnibus piece that was sprawling outward and you wanted to be in the licensing business, as a lot of producers and IP owners did at the time. Around that period of time, I had been in very serious conversations with what was then the senior management of WMA. As a result of Edward Scissorhands and several filmmakers at the time who were turning pop culture storytelling into merchandise, the water cooler conversation became “Who's got your toy line? When is your t-shirt coming out?” It was no longer, “What Ferrari do you have?” Nobody cared about that. They wanted to know who had your toy line.
As a result of that, you reached out to a colleague of mine at what was then called LIMA, the Licensing Industries Merchandiser’s Association. You had spoken to a gentleman, I believe his name was Marty Brochstein and you were describing how you needed an entertainment guy, a merchandising guy, a marketing guy, all of that. Marty was very, very kind to have volunteered my name. I was thrilled that he did and I was even more thrilled that you picked up the phone and called. I remember sitting in your tobacco leather chairs in your office.
FB I love those chairs.
KM I love those chairs too and I have been wanting to get a set. My brother-in-law has a beautiful pair but he won't release them to me. But we sat there and I was completely mesmerized by the visual stimulus. That's a word that came out of Mattel. The visual stimulus is very often what we as the acquiring company would have to look at and how potentially toy-etic it could be, something you can play with. When I was over at Universal looking at Casper the Ghost, I turned to Mark Taylor, who was the Head of Development at Boy’s Toys at Mattel, and I said, “We got to pick this up. This is great. It's omnipresent. It's in culture. Every kid has a ghost story.” He goes, “Ken, how do you play ‘Ghost’?” I couldn't answer the question.
That was a telling tale of learning for me while at Mattel. Then when you and I talked, we saw all your card soldiers and Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter and the magic mushrooms. It was a cornucopia of visual stimuli. You had spent an inordinate amount of time with the extraordinary artist Doug Chiang. I immediately fell into this immersive embrace of Alice in Wonderland, and in so doing, I think what percolated immediately into our conversation was not, “How do we play Alice?” but, “How could you claim this as your own?” Or was this just going to be another derivative story in a long merchandising tale? It became incumbent upon me to want to reinvent your story so that you, Frank Beddor, the author, could take control of what had been a classic story owned by somebody else and perhaps even other filmmakers.
That story then became the backstory or the real story, that was so compelling. I know when you told it at meetings at William Morris and CAA and others, invariably, somebody would lean over to me and say, “Ken, is that true?” I always responded, “If Frank said so, it has to be true.” So you became the legend, the mouthpiece, and the face of a new brand of a classic tale that had been mythologized and storied through folklore, which are the underpinnings of Joseph Campbell and the arc of the hero, and everything else from which you've learned and have excelled at.
FB I tried to answer all of the questions you had posed. It's funny for me to think back to 2002 when I met you because my book wasn't published until 2004 in the U.K. and 2006 in the U.S.
KM I knew her because I had been working on The Future is Wild with a documentarian from the U.K.
FB She wasn't a traditional agent. She was a book packager so she she knew all of the publishers. We went in and met all the different publishers and we took the approach that you do in the movie business. You go to the highest possible person and then trickle down. Turns out that in publishing, editors don't like that. Editors want to find the writers and then bring the writers to the publisher, so there was a bias against my book. It wasn't until I went to Egmont, where the publisher had just been given that job and she was previously the lead editor. She said, “You're going to be the last book I edit before I become the publisher.” The combination made it okay for her. Everybody else passed until I worked with Cally Poplak at Egmont and the book became successful.
But I want to go back to the point of our meeting in my office in Hollywood. One of the things I learned from working as a producer was the power of visuals, the visualization of the world. But I couldn't figure out in my mind how the card soldiers could unfold and march and be compact. I just didn't see it. So I asked Doug Chang, who had worked on Star Wars, to do that sketch. (Doug’s Card Soldiers Sketch) That was the first sketch I put on the wall. I loved it so much that I asked him about who he worked with on his movies that did environments. Then I hired Brian Flora, who did the Valley of Mushrooms and the Chessboard Desert. It became a little bit of an obsession for me to visualize the world while I was writing it, as a kind of collaborative effort between artist and author. Then you came into the office, one of the first people who came in who had a business perspective. It was sort of audacious to think, “I need some kind of branding or I want to build a franchise.” I knew I wanted to do that but I didn't have anything ready yet. Your reaction to the world and to what was already created was really inspiring. I thought, “Okay, I might have something here.”
Then you wrote your proposal, which started off with the perspective of branding mythology and pop culture. Then you wrote, “Cultural myth, storytelling, and reoccurring themes bond culture.” I was like, “Okay, what is he talking about?”
KM My wife is still asking me that same question.
FB Then you said, “The multi-generational social condition is called the Cultural Evolution Theory.” I would like you to explain to our listeners what your job is when it comes to branding stories in culture and trying to catch the zeitgeist and make it your own because basically, that's what you were telling me to do. Give me some examples.
KM You’re quoting some phraseology, which are the cornerstones of a book I have long tried to write, which I've shared in bits and pieces with you over these many, many, many years. It's called BrandCulture, and it comes from the multiple disciplines of my career, which are marketing, media, communication, corporate identity, design, and licensing. I just happen to be on the cusp of this epoch of culture right now, which we are living in thanks to the movie industry and other media that preceded it, where we're kind of losing words. Once they were the poetic juice of a culture and right now we're living in an experiential culture which is experienced visually. It's no wonder that social media has captured the next generation.
I was often asked by my students at UCLA, “How'd you get into the business?” And I said, “I love design. I love the expression of storytelling. If I could be in a business painting on the largest canvas in the world, putting words and pictures together, and make a living doing it, I would be very grateful, and that's what I did.” So as an English major on one side and a graphic design wannabe on the other, it was natural that logos, iconography, type, faces, messaging, hidden or overt, would become part of what I wanted to express in a brand.
Then along comes a gentleman from Sarah Lawrence College named Joseph Campbell. Many people who may be listening to this have read his books, such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If they haven't, they ought to pick it up or Google it and drill through some of his things. There's a wonderful book, The Power of Myth, authored by Bill Moyers of PBS, where he interviews Joseph Campbell and he gets right into the arc of the storytelling and arc of the hero.
These stories that are hardwired into our culture are expressed and handed down, interestingly enough, as memes. Not the memes we think of in the 21st century today, but memes that are passed on from one person to the next, as they were religiously. The Catholic Church was the biggest organization of theater 1,500-2,000 years ago. The equivalent of that theater today is no longer the Orpheum in Manhattan, nor is it Radio City, where it once was maybe in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Now it's the fandom that happens at a football stadium, where the collective catharsis of that experience is handed down. “Do you remember last year? It was fourth and three…” They remember it religiously and it gets passed down and it goes from father to son to grandson, all the way through.
We rode that wave through Hot Wheels, interestingly enough. I was at Mattel during the twenty-fifth anniversary and it was just at that time when dads were beginning to have sons. Just like my son-in-law had two sons and my two young grandsons, who are five and three, have now inherited my set of fifty Hot Wheels that I collected. What I'm saying is that memes are stories. Some of them are wildly exaggerated, and some of them are very explicit. Folklore becomes a mythology that gets passed on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Then if it's connected to iconography, whether it's a signature or a voice, a dance, a sound, or a musicianship that then gets placed against twenty-four frames a second, and turns into a motion picture or a theatrical play, this is what we're dealing with today
The experience economy is the expression of story. One of the things we learned through the study of human psychology is that people don't remember facts. If I gibberish to your audience today and say, “Well, you know, seventy-three percent of albinos never reach the age of fifty, it’s going to go right over their head.” If I said to them, “Have you ever seen an albino cat land on their feet after falling off a thirty-foot-high roof?” They'll remember the story. They're not going to remember the fact. So the very beginning of mythology and meme storytelling, which becomes legend and then expressed and changed over time and modernized through technology and media, is the art of storytelling. That's where you began with one of the great stories of all time, Alice in Wonderland.
One of the things I want to amplify about branding is that you begin with the story, and we wanted you to own your story. We wanted to carve it out as unique and separate. This happens whether it's BMW or Nike or Coca-Cola. If you and I were in Atlanta sipping a Coca-Cola in their corporate headquarters, and I said, “Wow, that was a great meeting with the management at Coca-Cola, wasn't it Frank? They got it right away.” If we went back and did a post-mortem and we asked Coca-Cola, they'd say, “Well, was it the meeting that was so good? Was it Frank's presentation? Or was it the Coke that we shared because we enjoy Coke and Coke is life?” That's how ingrained it has become over the last 120 years.
Advertising helps that to a great degree with BMW. “BMW, the ultimate driving machine.” It doesn't get any better than that. There's another axiom that falls into branding, and we talked about this early on, in order to own a brand, you want to be able to own a slice of the consumer's mind. You want to own a word. You want to own a phrase. You want to own a color in their mind. Red, indelibly, boom, Coca-Cola. Nike with the swish. It's simple. It's straightforward. It gets right to you. So when you think about BMW, “the ultimate driving machine,” it couldn't be any better than that. The axiom here is, you want to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. That's what BMW did. It's an automobile. Starbucks, it's coffee, man. But the reality is, they've taken the ordinary and turned it into the extraordinary, and that's what branding is all about. You can take that experience and own it.
FB You tasked me with that when you simply said I should come up with a different spelling for the name Alyss, so I can own Alice. That was the moment I started thinking about broadening out from the names that Lewis Carroll had created and Disney had made familiar. So I changed the spelling of Alyss and the Mad Hatter became Hatter Madigan. Another thing you did that was also very, very helpful is you were posing this question of, “How do we suspend disbelief in this world, in this reality of a fantasy world?” Because The Looking Glass Wars is set both in Wonderland and Victorian England, that gave me a little bit of balance. I also was mindful of creating a Wonderland where people could suspend their disbelief. That was something you kept saying, “We need to be able to suspend disbelief so we can land and live.” As if Jurassic Park is actually in Hawaii, or Wonderland is just up the Five. If you drive long enough, you'll find yourself in Wonderland,
KM Exactly. How could you refute the simplicity of the idea that in a grain of amber, there was a mosquito that contained the DNA of a dinosaur? Only Michael Crichton, with his scientific background, could create it. He created the myth and he turned it into a story that became irrefutable. It's so believable that how could you not want to believe it? That's where metaphors and storytelling become this immersive fabric in the consumer's mind. That's how we started our story. There’s enough believability in the past to shape-shift, to use one of your words, shape-shift some of this so that you can take ownership of it and it becomes irrefutable.
FB You wrote, “A new reality for a new generation, borrowing from the past and making them their own, a form of branded history with its own images indelibly marked in the minds of a new global audience.” So I tried to convey that in a less Professor-ish way
KM I can't get away from myself.
FB That whole idea of creating a new reality, telling a story in a different way but taking ownership of it, I found when I started to go out into the marketplace with The Looking Glass Wars, that was happening. People felt grounded in the world and the story because, the premise of Lewis Carroll getting it wrong was easy enough to go, “Let me just turn my perspective on history and what I think I know.” The other thing that was really important was, that you said, “You have to change their perception of what they think Wonderland is right off the bat. You have to have the meta-story, the story behind the story.” So suddenly I had more work to do.
KM I remember that. It's really true. There are a couple of axioms that have always found their way into my thought process when working on a movie or any branding objective. You do want to suspend disbelief, which is what entertainment and storytelling do. You want to find the universal truth in a message that is not so far out of reach that you can not believe it, it's just beyond my grasp of reality as I know it. By penetrating your world, you're going to show me how I can conclude that reach.
To get back to Coca-Cola for a moment, If you ask Coca-Cola, they want to be, the refreshing drink at the end of your reach. They want their product, their brand, to be at the end of your reach, no matter whether you're at home, the movie theater, or a baseball stadium. A great storyteller and filmmaker does just that. You suspend disbelief. You can almost break through the fourth wall, but by sliding into that world, you will take me magically to a place heretofore I've never been permitted to go. So you become my guide, my sherpa, and through your storytelling, you're telling me how to survive, how to succeed.
That leads me to the universality of it. I was making a presentation to a number of licensees in Los Angeles and California. I was working on a show when I was at MTM called The Blanket Show. There was this Rastafarian sheep who would sit down and unfold a blanket that looked like a book and he would invite all the animals in the woods to sit around while he told a story. It was basically a practice and a runway for parents to help their little ones get off to sleep. At that time in the industry, you had to have 22 or 28 half-hours to be able to syndicate something so that the repetitive nature of viewership would incline a purchase decision for merchandise. I decided I couldn't do that because Bill Melendez, who famously did the Peanuts animated specials, was our animator. We couldn't afford to do 22 or 28 half-hours with Bill, so we decided to do one, but the one was going to be the reprise and the kickoff every night for The Blanket Show at home. So we started off with the Rastafarian sheep. We're jamming and the kids would be dancing the putting their jammies on. “What are we doing now, boys?” “We're going to go brush our teeth and comb our hair. Then we're going to put the music on and then Mom's going to come in and read the book and then Dad's going to shut off the light.” So my pitch to the licensees was, “Here's the universal truth, would you like to be in a business that happens in every household in the world, every night? That's a big business. Or you could take a risk and hope that Batman 47 is going to be as successful as the first two or three?” No, I'd like to be in the bedtime business.
So the book was born and the night-lights and music were created. We had everyone from Rosemary Clooney up and down the ladder singing nighttime songs and the universal truth was irrefutable. You don't want to be in a business that happens in every household around the world at least once a day? We had 35 licensees signed by the end of our first six months based on one half-hour. It was unheard of in the business, an absolute breakthrough.
The first question I invariably asked you was, “Why do you want to tell this story?” Whether you're talking to Alan J. Pakula or Steven Spielberg, both of whom I had the highest regard for when I worked with them, “What's the story you want to tell?” Then I get into that conversation with them, and I say, “What's the promise and what's the takeaway?” It becomes really simple. The promise may be a little abstract. If you ask Christopher Nolan what his promise was on his many movies, it would probably be a very esoteric and dense response, but nonetheless very curated. I then say, “What's the takeaway?”
I put it down to this, your audience just saw your movie in a theater. As they're leaving the theater, the lights and the smell of popcorn are going to hit them in the head. What is the thing they're going to say to their significant other or the person they just shared that experience with? What is that football fan going to tell his son? What's that boy going to tell his dad he just saw in the Viking game? What's the fandom response? That's the takeaway. That's your job as a filmmaker. What do I want them to say, and how does that correlate with the promise I'm going to give to them, so they can enter the sphere of my chapel, my theater of communication, and over the next hour and a half I can take them on the ride of their life? Whether it's at a theme park, in a church, in a synagogue, in a baseball stadium. Your job becomes, what's the takeaway?
FB I remember you posing that question and it was very challenging to reduce it to something personal. That was another aspect of our working together, I started thinking about the power of imagination and the power of getting back to your inner child, where you have wonder and curiosity and anything is possible. I thought, “I'm writing this book because of that. Then you asked, “How do you play imagination?” Then it became about good and evil and Joseph Campbell stuff and you're pivoting to, “What kind of mythology am I creating? What myth do I want people to walk away with that's different than good and evil?”
Now in this culture, as I think about what I'm working on, I think about what's real. Is this real or is it not real? That's powerful with Alyss, because people tell her that her backstory is not real, and she loses her belief in her history. The world is so divisive right now. Facts are no longer facts. With respect to Alyss, I thought it was a really powerful idea that people want to understand that this is real and they can hold on to this. It's not going to be pulled away.
KM That reinforces the etymology of “looking through the looking glass.” At what end of that am I seeing reality? Is it closer to me or further away? Is it giving me the right optics? There's subliminal messaging in that statement that you could run and almost code the brain to be able to say, “I'm looking through this lens. Which media am I experiencing today? What's truth, what's not truth?” If I'm sitting in a football stadium, I'm sitting with 100,000 people who believe in the same thing I do - the “Fandom of the Exalted Play.” We're going to be warriors and win this year's season. This cathartic experience economy is not new. It has lived for over 3,000 years. It's tribal. It's part of our DNA. We're hardwired to it. It's just that it has evolved as technology has evolved and as we have evolved ourselves as we need stories to survive.
FB When you were asking me, “How do you play imagination?” you went to Barbie and the playability of Barbie and how Barbie evolved. You were talking about the different ways you could manipulate the clothing and then the kinds of Barbies. I remember that it was about the playability and how successful Barbie had been and then it tapered off and they had to reimagine it. Now, with the movie having come out, it must have come full circle.
KM Barbie is a portal. She's like a magic wand. They can cut her hair. They can dress her, and once they take off her clothes, they’re impossible to get back on so you have the use-up rate, as we used to call it, in the cosmetics business. Barbie has a usability rate and it wasn’t about how long a girl plays with Barbie. It used to be from the ages of two to eleven, but that has diminished greatly. Eleven-year-old girls are gamers now. They don't play with dolls anymore. The compression of age and the acceleration of adulthood for young kids has grown exponentially. But what has also grown is the number of Barbies. There’s a Barbie astronaut, Barbie policeman, Barbie fireman, Barbie whatever. She's the portal for play. She has costumes, just like the characters in any one of your stories. That all enhances it. Then you have Barbie's house, Barbie's car, and Barbie's friends.
I wanted to give an homage to Hot Wheels for a bit, knowing that you have little babes in your family now. Have you ever noticed a Hot Wheels car just about perfectly fits the width of a little boy's hand?
FB I did not.
KM Do you know that General Motors and all the car manufacturers give Mattel a royalty-free agreement? If you want to do Jeep, if you want to do Corvette, royalty-free. Why? Because that's the next generation. “I'm playing with the Ferrari, Dad! Look at me! Look at me!” When your big sister or big brother is telling you what you can play with and what you can't play with, and your mom and dad are telling you what to do. I have no control over anything but I do have control over these big machines that make loud noises. I can control this. It’s the sense of empowerment and wonderment of imagination. That's how toys work.
FB I wanted to go back to the Jurassic Park story because Michael Crichton came up with that amazing universal premise and then with Steven Spielberg, they took ownership of dinosaurs to the point that nobody is ever going to take dinosaurs back. Do you agree with that?
KM One hundred percent they own dinosaurs. When I was at Mattel, we were looking at this secret property from Steven. We wanted to encourage Steven to do some color configuration so the dinosaurs could be branded. What that means is, that when Mattel did Mermaid Barbie other companies would go out and do a slightly smaller version of a mermaid and dump it into the Targets of the world and whatever. Meanwhile, we would be selling Barbie for $12 or whatever and they were selling theirs in a bin near the checkout line for four bucks. We were being cannibalized.
So mermaids, dinosaurs, puppies, all generic. But you can own it. And Steven looked like he was by the popularity and the size and the sound of his dinosaurs and the maturation of his technology, which he fused into his filmmaking brilliantly. We wanted a color distinction. I remember being in the meeting, going around with all the engineers, must have been in a boardroom of 25 people, and they convinced me we would not be able to go beyond a generic dinosaur and therefore we were afraid we would be cannibalized and our investment in the toy line would never pay off. Hasbro, smartly so, picked it up and made gazillions of dollars. That all down to the power of Steven Spielberg, the storytelling, the sound, the sensation. The rapture of that story was incredible.
But to your point, you want to own a character. You want to own everything about that and close it off so nobody can cannibalize you up and down the toy line by size, material, or channel of distribution.
FB As this podcast is called All Things Alice, what do you think the reasons are that Alice in Wonderland has lasted for so long in culture but hasn't been centralized in the way that Jurassic Park centralized dinosaurs?
KM You can't deny the story is ever present in culture. It's a little like Madeline. She kind of weaves in and out of culture. I think you have made it more accessible across media, which is what's necessary, as opposed to being a classic novel from an English writer steeped in a bygone era. But Alice has captured the imagination of adults and young children. If we can remember going back and saying, “What's real? Is it under my bed? Is it in my closet?” So I think Alice has the potential of wonder, fulfillment, of tripping the light fantastic. Of what is real and what is not? What is make-believe or not? Where does our imagination begin or end? It’s very tribal, watching the flicker of a fire in a cave and acting out the hunt of the day. These are truth serums that flow through our bloodstream. I think that is what has made Alice in Wonderland last for so long. It is a classic tale.
FB What was your first introduction to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Did you read the book? Did you see the movie?
KM It was reading the book, not watching the movie. I had, and have always had, a literary bent, whether it was Charles Dickens or Edgar Allan Poe. I was drawn to that period of dark things and things. I was always drawn to that sort of Nether World. With Alice, I identified with this unknown of possibilities.
FB What's under the bed?
KM What's under the bed? There were several toy lines I reviewed that were everything from dust bunnies to “What's under the bed?” You know, this mythology of “Who's in the shadows?” It plays to our deepest fears and grandest imaginations. We're hardwired to it.
FB This is a part of entertainment and culture that people don't really understand and you've done a really beautiful job of articulating it and the two aspects of your interest in life, literature and art. I can only encourage you, for all of us listening and out in the world, to finish that damn book of yours. Where are you on this book?
KM I have been talking about it relentlessly and just when I don't think I have anything to say about something that supercharges my jets, a conversation with somebody such as you ignites that fuse. I know there's something. I know storytelling and myth are part of our culture and have made what we have come to know as modern life for the last 3,000 to 5,000 years. I'd like to comment on it, to develop a rationale as to why people react a certain way. I've seen it and I know it to be the truth. That's why Alice is a perennial. She's not going away. It's beautiful and you will own imagination however you wish, to define it by color, by shape, by sound, by musical note, soon to be. Through your literary prowess, you will be able to turn these cards over, like your tarot cards, for the public to be able to penetrate the World of Imagination, as you want people to see it, because they may not recognize it by themselves. You are our Sherpa. You are our wise man at the fire telling us the story of Alyss, and that's the takeaway.
FB Well, we need your book. We need your book so all the storytellers can have their roadmap and we can leave the breadcrumbs behind for our audience. What was really enlightening about the conversation was the way you contextualized your experiences and contextualize how other artists have taken their ideas and brought them into pop culture, going all the way back to your story about being in a cave and telling the story of the day’s hunt. All of that is really a powerful road map for creators to own in their own stories. It doesn't have to be a franchise. It just needs to be you expressing your truth and that comes through the writing and the process. That's what you helped me to clarify. You asked strong questions, which helped me make strong choices.
KM Tell me, Frank, if you can give us a pre-teaser. Fragrance is one of the most powerful branding tools in the quiver, because of where the brain senses smell. It's in the center of the brain. It’s very, very powerful. So is music, and you seem to be on the cusp of something rather extraordinary because you could own a sound, just like Mission Impossible. It doesn't have to be an entire orchestra. It could be three notes, whatever.
Are you hoping that your musical will be able to bring a new audience to your franchise and the storytelling of Imagination? I wish I could have front-row seats. I can't wait. I want to be humming the song. Sammy Cahn has one of my favorite quotes. He was once asked, “What is one of the happiest things as a songwriter?” He said, “When I'm walking down Fifth Avenue and somebody is whistling one of my tunes.” I share that with you because you're not too far away, my friend.
FB That’s a great quote. My fantasy was that somebody would dress up as one of my characters for Halloween. When I was first writing my book, I didn't realize what a broad and beautiful world cosplay is and when I went to Comic-Con and people showed up in costumes based on my book, not a movie or a TV show, that was a highlight. But to answer your question, it’s timely because today I received a video from my composer, lyricist, and book writer, and they sang a little song to me, saying, “We're starting!” So, the process of The Looking Glass Wars musical has officially begun today.
KM Bravo. Congratulations.
FB Fingers crossed. I've been thinking about this for a long time because I was friends with Gregory Maguire and I went to see Wickedin San Francisco in 2003 and thought, “I wonder if I could do that with my book.” So I've been thinking about it for 25 years and here we are.
KM I was working on Curious George with Universal for a couple of years and the next up on their hit list they wanted me to undertake was Wicked. Then there was a management change and NBC spun off so the rest is history, as is often the case in Hollywood. But I would have loved to have gotten my hands around that.
FB My understanding is that Wicked was not even on their books. It was a miscellaneous item because originally it was developed as a movie. They couldn't make it as a movie and then they made it as this musical. Now, many, many years later, it’s one of the most successful musicals of all time and apparently, the movie is quite good from reports that I have heard. I'm excited to see it and maybe it'll rub off on folks thinking that The Looking Glass Wars and Alice in Wonderland could be the next.
KM We don't have to own the genre. We just want to participate.
FB Thank you so much for hanging out with us on the show today and sharing your wonderful stories and, most importantly, thank you for your contribution to my work that you initiated and so kindly imparted in 2002 and continued on through all these years. It has really helped me to create what I've created to date. So thank you, Ken.
KM That warms my heart. That has the most meaning. H.L. Mencken, the journalist, was once asked, “Why do you write?” And he said, “I write first, to make a living, and secondly, and more importantly, to win the respect of those I respect.” So your comments are very dear and important to me. Thank you so much.
Amazing Alice in Wonderland Pumpkin Carving Ideas for 2024
Halloween, aka the Met Gala for people with Jack Skellington tattoos, is right around the corner. With the 31st fast approaching, we must prepare a few things. First, we single folks need to come up with the PERFECT costume. Personally, I believe in striking a balance between funny and attractive. If you lean too hard on either side, you look like you’re trying far too hard, and the opposite actually happens. That’s right, going as any character portrayed by Johnny Depp is uninspired, and we all know you did it just to be hot.
Second, you must get candy for the kids lest you suffer the wrath of an egging. I guess egging houses doesn’t really happen anymore. I blame TikTok for stealing the joy of ovum-based vigilante vandalism from our youth. Without egging, how will houses that hand out fruit learn to stop pushing their hippy ways? Finally, and most importantly, you have to decorate your house. Whether you like to go all out and create a full haunted house or prefer the minimalist approach, there is one decoration that will always appear: the jack-o-lantern.
Frank allows me the privilege of coming out of his basement on one condition. I carve the pumpkins. Naturally, since we are talking about our glorious leader, Frank wants his jack-o-lanterns to be Alice in Wonderland-themed. If the designs please Frank, he allows me the privilege of eating those fibrous sodium bombs known as pumpkin seeds that everyone shoves in their faces around this time. This year, I wanted to show you all my favorite Alice-themed jack-o-lanterns I found while researching designs for Frank. These designs may inspire your pumpkin carving as well.
Card Suits
Maybe you want to be subtle with your Alice in Wonderlandjack-o-lanterns. You love Alice and want to show the world, but you only want people in the know to recognize your Alice-related easter eggs. Or maybe you don’t have the best pumpkin carving skills and want something easy. Either way, this first pumpkin is perfect for those who prefer subtly, and it’s easy enough for an Alice-obsessed kid to make. The card suits are a trope that has been in every Alice iteration from the very beginning. Why not give the card soldiers the love they deserve?
Card Suits Plus
No, Card Suits Plus is not a streaming service for poker. Well, it actually might be. But as you can plainly see in the accompanying picture, this is the upgraded version of the card suit jack-o-lantern previously shown. This jack-o-lantern has the four card suits, but what’s so cool about it is that poking out of each suit is a giant Alice holding the “Drink Me” bottle. I love that the person who made this took a simple idea and elevated it.
Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!
Pspspspspspspspsps. Those who have owned cats know what this means. While researching Alice in Wonderland-inspired jack-o-lanterns, I was inundated with Cheshire Cat designs. This makes a lot of sense, as cats, specifically the black variety, are synonymous with Halloween. The design can be simple enough for most people to pull off, and the idea of the Cheshire Cat is actually a little spooky. Eyes and a mouth surrounded by darkness is a horror trope that has been used for as long as the genre has existed. I pulled some of my favorites I found online.
Of course, we have the Disney Cheshire Cat jack-o-lantern. Cartoons are naturally quite easy to execute in the art of pumpkin carving due to the necessity of the designs being simple enough to be hand drawn repeatedly.
Okay, now let’s make it scary; it’s Halloween, after all. Adding jagged teeth to the traditional Cheshire cat’s smile amps this pumpkin to a new level.
Now, this one is actually a twofer. We’ve got the March hare from the Alice in Wonderland Disney cartoon, which is incredibly detailed and executed perfectly, and we’ve got a more realistic-looking Cheshire cat’s smile. If you want to take a crack at a more complex design, this one seems like a fun project.
Off With Your Head!
Of course, the Red Queen would make it onto a pumpkin. The decapitation-obsessed matriarch is perfect for Halloween. I wonder if she is friends with Ichabod Crane. Well, I guess they wouldn’t be friends since Ichabod was a recipient of the head removal that the Red Queen is so crazy about. But I digress.
Though this design is quite complex, the person who carved it gets an A+ from me. I didn’t know you could do shading on a pumpkin.
Since the previous design was complex, I wanted to add something that might be a bit easier, though it’s also not technically a jack-o-lantern.
This gourd sculpture of the Red Queen from the Disney movie is perfect for an Alice-themed Halloween decoration for two reasons. First, it’s obviously the Red Queen, so there is the Alice portion. Second, it kind of scares me, especially the weird gourd arms.
Doorknobs and Drink Me
I’ve been struggling to come up with a fun title for these jack-o-lanterns, so if the title is not as inspired as the rest, it means I gave up, and the placeholder is now the title. But, just because my creative energy is lacking here does not mean these designs are.
I especially like the "Drink Me" pumpkin because there is something inherently spooky about a potion bottle with no description that reads “Drink me.”
Alice, Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, and the Blue Caterpillar, on a Pumpkin
This pumpkin is one of my favorites. It’s the perfect Alice in Wonderland jack-o-lantern. It’s straightforward and executed perfectly. Plus, it’s got the famous quote, “We’re all mad here,” carved into it.
The Jack-o-Lanterning Glass Wars
If I did not include some jack-o-lantern designs inspired by Frank Beddor’s Looking Glass Wars novels, I would be forced to sit in the mistake box. So, here are two blueprints (Orangeprints?) inspired by The Looking Glass Wars and the Hatter M graphic novels.
We’ve got this simple yet elegant design of the Looking Glass Wars logo. It features the four card suits that, if done correctly, would look like a stained-glass window on a jack-o-lantern.
And now we’ve got a design that, at first, was a bit confusing to me because if you follow the directions as written, the part you cut out would also have the design on it, and that wouldn’t really work because you would just have a hat-shaped hole in your pumpkin.
BUT, I realized if you place the hat cut out back into the whole with the scraped rind, then you would have a really cool outline of Hatter Madigan’s top hat.
Ok…So…This is Just Art…
Do you fancy yourself a pumpkin artist? Do you walk around on Halloween scoffing at the amateur jack-o-lanterns these plebeians proudly display because they don’t know any better? Do you understand the “rule of thirds?” Well, then, do I have the Alice designs for you. This jack-o-lantern is carved in the original art style from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. So much detail is carved into it, including the blue, well in this case orange, caterpillar.
Hey, I’m Not Good at Carving Pumpkins, but I Love Alice in Wonderland and Halloween
If the previous jack-o-lantern made you doubt your skills or made you want to give up because you’re carving your first pumpkin, worry not, for I have the simplest Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland jack-o-lantern that literally anyone can make.
Step One: Cut a circle into a pumpkin.
Step Two: It’s a rabbit hole.
I hope this collection of Alice in Wonderland jack-o-lanterns inspires some whimsical creativity at your next pumpkin carving party. Happy Halloween, everybody, and for those who were not born on October 31st, Happy Unbirthday!
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
Hope Renewed: Princess Alyss Embraces Her Destiny - Part 4
Back in 2007, we collaborated with noted Alyssian historian Agnes MacKenzie to publish Princess Alyss of Wonderland, a stunning collection of letters, journal writings, and art from Her Royal Imaginer, Princess Alyss Heart. These breathtaking documents chronicled the incredible childhood of Wonderland’s exiled heir apparent and future hero of The Looking Glass Wars.
Part One spanned Alyss’ flight from Wonderland and how she survived her first days on the rough streets of London. In Part Two, Alyss recounts the horrors of the notorious Charing Cross Orphanage and her disappointment at being adopted by the unimaginative Liddells. Part Three follows Alyss' pain and indignation when she is betrayed by her good friend, Lewis Carroll.
When we last saw Alyss, she was slipping into despair over the gross falsehoods contained in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” She thought Lewis Carroll believed her when she told him about Wonderland, Redd, and Hatter. But he had just twisted her words and now she had to admit that “Alice” had won.
Yet Alyss wouldn’t be down for long. A surprising message from home soon arrived and helped remind Alyss of who she was meant to be…
(*As always, I am indebted to the tireless and exhaustive research of the eminent Wonderland historian Agnes MacKenzie. Her dedication has helped keep the true story of Queen Alyss alive!)
Diary Entry - October 19, 1865 Since the BETRAYAL, I have been in the darkest of moods, unable to smile or even enjoy a delicious toffee twist. Wanting to be alone and as far away as possible from any mention of “Alice,” I decided to walk to a meadow where I often go to think about Wonderland when a ray of brilliant, almost crystal, sunshine cut across the meadow and all of the flowers lifted their faces skyward and began to sing. It was the most wondrous sound I had ever heard. Unbelievable, perhaps, to anyone from this world but for me. I was immediately aware of the presence of Wonderland.
Diary Entry - October 19, 1865 (continued) I now realize that flowers are the link to Wonderland and that they are the purest receivers of Imagination. Everything and everyone else I have encountered has been rather lacking in spirit, form, and IMAGINATION compared to what exists in Wonderland. In this world, animals are treated as if they have no mind of their own and respond by being inarticulate while in Wonderland so-called animals hold public office and play instruments. And the buildings here are so SQUARE and SOLID. Who could bear to live in a box all of their life? Boxes are for transporting items, not a place to live, laugh and dream! My mind continued to race as I recalled the creatures and streets and shops of Wonderland. I became so dizzy with color and space and Imagination that I immediately began painting and by teatime had covered every inch of my bedroom walls with art.
Diary Entry - October 27, 1865 I was in my room today when suddenly and very clearly I heard Bibwit Harte’s voice call out to me, “Princess! You must check your pockets!” What could it possibly mean? Thinking hard all day I went to each of my pinafores and coats and dutifully checked every pocket. Nothing but one stale peppermint twist which I immediately ate. Hmmm? It was very puzzling. And then I knew! My birthday gown from Wonderland! I went to where it was stored in the closet trunk and pulled it out. I checked every pocket. NOTHING!!!
But wait…
Letter from Princess Alyss to Royal Tutor Bibwit Harte Most Honorable and Learned Bibwit Harte,
Of course, it would be you, the knower of all of Wonderland's secrets past, present, and future, who would find a way to contact me. Unfortunately, I possess no such knowledge so I am forced to use the British Post. Dear, dear Bibwit Harte you have no idea how thrilled I was to hear your voice and receive your message. But it wasn’t until I remembered the secret pocket sewn inside the right wristband of my Birthday gown for keeping treasures that must never be lost that I made my discovery. I unbuttoned the tiny pocket and immediately felt the cool, clear roundness of the Imagination Sphere! I remembered how you would leave the sphere on my pillow whenever you wished to summon me for Imagination Training. Now that I have found the sphere I will begin training immediately. Expect updates.
Your most promising student,
HRI Alyss
Diary Entry - November 22, 1865 After training all day with the Imagination Sphere, I fell asleep and immediately began to dream of traveling with Bibwit over Wonderland in an enormous illuminated bubble. As we floated to all seven corners of the land, Bibwit told me the Secret of Finding Your Imagination. I have tried to record them exactly as he told me because I am certain this information is vital for everyone.
The Secrets of Finding Your Imagination
What you see behind you is as important as what you see in front.
Do cartwheels twice a day while humming your favorite song.
Laugh very loud if you cannot remember something.
Walk backward if you are in a hurry.
Never hurry to something unpleasant.
Eat something delicious before bed.
Look out the window immediately upon waking and say hello to the twin suns.
Bid the Thurmite moon goodnight before sleeping.
Remember to dream.
Dream to remember.
Tickle your imagination when stuck.
Agnes MacKenzie Dear reader, you see before you one of the most valuable documents ever given to our world. It is with the utmost sincerity that I encourage each and every one of you to practice the secrets revealed here and be prepared to experience an imagination that has no bounds.
Letter from Princess Alyss to Royal Tutor Bibwit Harte Most Honorable and Learned Bibwit Harte,
I have been faithfully training with the Imagination Sphere three times a day and am very happy to inform you that my Imagination is becoming very powerful. The skies are bluer and the sun brighter and people smile much more now. When I see with my Imagination I see things that are hidden and I am able to assist others with their searches. For instance, Lorina lost her favorite doll and by simply imagining where she could possibly have left it I was immediately able to find it. And most importantly, I breathe in the air and imagine that it fills me so much that I can float above the trees and see all the best puddles. I will continue training each day and hopefully will find the puddle that will return me to Wonderland in time for my next birthday. I have also learned many new ways of imagining that are useful here in this world. Painting and drawing are very much like imagining in Wonderland, only here I use a brush with colored paints or a piece of lead to make what I need to see or feel or remember. My imaginings must stay on the page here in this world but they feel no less real to me than what I once imagined in Wonderland.
Your forever grateful pupil,
HRI Alyss
Diary Entry - January 1, 1866 When mother ordered Royal Bodyguard Hatter Madigan to take me away from Wonderland I begged her to let me stay. Her last words to me were “No matter what happens, I will always be near you, sweetheart. On the other side of the looking glass. And never forget who you are, do you understand?” Since arriving in this world I have spent much of my life staring into looking glasses and hoping to see my mother but it wasn't until my powers of Imagination began to increase that I finally understood what she had meant. I must first IMAGINE that I see her. Trembling and nervous, I approached the looking glass and imagined my mother smiling back at me, within moments a message appeared!
Aces, Spades, Diamonds and Hearts
Lost their princess off the charts
Your Majesty's subjects await your return
So the light of imagination can continue to burn.
Someday, sweet daughter, you'll find your way home,
Hurtling out of this mundane realm,
Even though I cannot tell you how far,
A way can be found if you remember who you are,
Regal destiny is yours to win
Take Heart and always remember to….Imagine.
Agnes MacKenzie Fascinating! What Alyss describes is an advanced form of 'mirror scrying' or receiving messages from other realms by images that form in your mirror. Known to every culture, 'magic mirrors' were used throughout history to enable one to see the present, the past, and the future. But the mind boggles at the concept of having a personal message written in such a lyrical manner suddenly appear in a looking glass. Some may question the authenticity of the message, but if not Queen Genevieve, who else would have sent this message of hope to a long-lost daughter? I wonder what messages await me in my own looking glass should my Imagination ever grow strong enough to see them.
Diary Entry - Undated Today upon waking I realized that I no longer cared about Lewis Carroll's book or what others believe to be true and that all that matters is what I believe. As soon as this thought flashed through my mind I felt incredibly confident and decided to go puddle hunting. Towards late afternoon, I saw IT, shimmering in the center of Queen's Lane, a puddle where no puddle should be! I am certain that, this is the puddle that will take me home to Wonderland. I will always remember my mother’s words: “You will be the strongest Queen yet. Your Imagination will be the crowning achievement of the Land.”
Go back and read Parts One, Two, and Three of Alyss' Letters to discover how the Princess of Wonderland adjusted to her rude awakening on Earth.
Lewis Carroll, Traitor to a Princess: Princess Alyss' Never-Before-Seen Letters - Part 3
Back in 2007, we collaborated with noted Alyssian historian Agnes MacKenzie to publish Princess Alyss of Wonderland, a stunning collection of letters, journal writings, and art from Her Royal Imaginer, Princess Alyss Heart. These breathtaking documents chronicled the incredible childhood of Wonderland’s exiled heir apparent and future hero of The Looking Glass Wars.
Part One spanned Alyss’ flight from Wonderland and how she survived her first days on the rough streets of London. In Part Two, Alyss recounts the horrors of the notorious Charing Cross Orphanage and her disappointment at being adopted by the unimaginative Liddells.
When we last left Princess Alyss she was in trouble again, having been caught trying to break into Buckingham Palace to rescue her mother from Queen Victoria. As Alyss’ angry foster father took her back to Oxford, Alyss doubted if she would ever return to Wonderland.
But hope was not dead. It returned in the form of a shy teacher who would change Alyss’ life forever…
(*As always, I am indebted to the tireless and exhaustive research of the eminent Wonderland historian Agnes MacKenzie. Her dedication has helped keep the true story of Queen Alyss alive!)
Diary Entry - April 1, 1862
I mark the date April 1, 1862, with a white stone, for it is when I first met Mr. Charles Dodgson! (In Wonderland it is custom to always mark days of great imagination with a white stone.) His name was a blur of sound until I heard 'Dodg-son' and I thought of my best friend Dodge. I looked up and saw the kindest face I had seen since leaving Wonderland, Charles Dodgson. I liked him immediately, but it wasn't until Lorina introduced me very grandly as Princess Alyss Heart (mocking me, of course) that I knew he was to be my best friend in this world, for the man bowed quite seriously, took my hand and whispered, “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Princess Alyss Heart.”
Diary Entry - April 10, 1872
Today, Mr. Dodgson invited Lorina, Edith, and I to his studio for our first photographic portrait. What we all enjoyed most about the portrait setting was being able to try on the costumes that Mr. Dodgson had collected. I told him that I had not seen such imaginative costumes since I had left Wonderland. He became very interested and said he would like to hear more about this land called Wonderland.
Agnes MacKenzie
Charles Dodgson's aptitude in the nascent art of photography made him a popular portraitist of children for Oxford's better families. Choosing their costumes for the various portraits was always left to the girls and might I suggest that the photograph of Alyss in the white dress appears to be her tribute to her time spent with Quigley and the others as a street urchin.
Diary Entry - July 2, 1862
I closed my eyes so I could see back to Wonderland and began to remember. I wanted to tell him about the Inventor's Parade and the giant mushrooms that were as tall as ten of London's greatest trees set end to end and the caterpillars who knew everything but only told you what they knew you needed to know but instead, the words that came out were the story of my last day in Wonderland and the Cat and Redd entering the palace and her ear-shattering cries of “Off with their heads!!! At this point, I opened my eyes and saw poor Mr. Dodgson absolutely pale with fright. He asked, “What my dear is so wonderful about Wonderland???” I smiled and told him there was much, much more to tell…
Agnes MacKenzie
I cannot help but be moved by the beauty of the friendship shared by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Alyss Heart. As devastating a betrayal as the eventual outcome may have been, for a period of time, two kindred spirits found each other in the same world and proceeded to have a riotous good time. Charles Dodgson was a young mathematics don at Christ Church when he first met the daughters of Dean Liddell, and, as history has voluminously recorded, he was particularly in awe of the daughter supposedly named 'Alice.'
Diary Entry - July 30, 1862
I believe Mr. Dodgson is finally coming to understand what is so wonderful about Wonderland. We seem to talk about nothing else, though it is easy for both of us to get off the subject whenever the topic of sweets comes up.
Letter from Princess Alyss to Charles Dodgson - 1862
Dear Mr. Dodgson,
You must remember to write about the Inventor's Parades that are held in Wonderland to honor the imaginations of Wonderland's most inventive inventors. All of Wonderland gathers to watch the parade while the Queen decides what is ready to be sent on as inspiration to other worlds. The Queen’s Trampoline was invented as a gift for my mother so she could jump high enough to reach her favorite cloud. I have drawn some of my favorite inventions which all had to do with travel and I was hoping that maybe you could pass these on to whoever is in charge of London's traveling conveyances. Perhaps if they were more imaginative with regard to this vital service I would be home by now.
Your Friend, Princess Alyss Heart
Princess Alyss' sketches of Wonderland inventions, including (from left to right) the dragonfly windjumper, crystal miner, furry parashooter, Queen's Trampoline, jollyjellywings, marching drums, lampshade roller coaster, and umbrella pogo.
Agnes MacKenzie
On the back of the valentine from Charles Dodgson, Alyss had written the cryptic message, “This is the day that I began REMEMBERING…” And thus began her own literary effort to assist Lewis Carroll in saving herself and Wonderland. It is sad to think that a venture begun with such high spirits and hope would in less than 2 years meet a wrenching conclusion!
In November of 1864, Charles Dodgson proudly and dare I venture, a bit shyly, presented 'Miss Alice Liddell' with his handwritten manuscript of ALICE'S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND. This historic manuscript contained 37 illustrations drawn by the versatile and prolific Mr. Dodgson. As you shall soon discover, Alyss's reaction was not quite what the poor man had anticipated!
Diary Entry - November 27, 1864
And at long last, the promised book was delivered. What can I say?
HE GOT IT ALL WRONG!!!!
He even spelled my name wrong! What makes me want to scream, “Off with his head AND both arms!” is the fact that he actually seems to believe HE told ME this nonsensical children's story when the truth is (and he knows it!) that I told him.
Letter from Princess Alyss to Charles Dodgson after reading his manuscript - 1864
To the Very Cruel Mr. Dodgson,
How could you betray me with this pack of lies? If I were not so furious with you I would certainly be sobbing at the loss of what I believed to be my one true friend in this grey world. Be warned, for the sake of Wonderland and everyone I love, I cannot allow this book of lies to go unchallenged. And who is this 'Lewis Carroll' that you are now calling yourself? Are you ashamed to put your own name on this book? I should hope so! As if a royal princess would ever travel through a rabbit hole! Thanks to your efforts my reality has now become this world's fantasy.
Your Un-Friend, Princess Alyss Heart
P.S. Now you shall never be invited to Heart Palace for tarty tarts! And no, strawberry jam tastes NOTHING like the oh-so-delicious squigberry jam. Your loss!
Agnes MacKenzie
The first published edition of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” appeared early in July 1865 and featured illustrator John Tenniel's iconic artwork. Alyss now had to adjust to the fact that the betrayal was no longer an unpublished manuscript but an actual book that would soon find its' way into the hands and hearts of the literate public.
Diary Entry - August 17, 1865
Oh that horrid ALICE! Now she has stolen my life forever!!!!! I must do something to stop this disaster. Lewis Carroll is not the only one who can hold a pen.
Letter from Princess Alyss to Alexander MacMillan, Co-Founder of MacMillan Publishers, publisher of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - 1865
To the Attention of Mr. Alexander MacMillan,
HALT!!! In the name of Imagination and Truth, I am sending this decree to inform you of a dire betrayal by the author masquerading as Lewis Carroll. The book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is nothing but a pack of lies! It is imperative that this book be labeled UTTER FICTION and the true story be told so that those searching for me can find me and return me to Wonderland to rule as Queen.
Her Royal Imaginer, Princess Alyss Heart
Agnes MacKenzie
Despite Alyss' attempt to halt the publication of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” the book continued to spread from country to country and would soon be found in the hands of both children and adults around the world. The fantasy of this world was threatening to overcome the reality of Wonderland and Alyss was feeling the pressure.
Diary Entry - September 22, 1865
Since the publication of THAT BOOK, I have been pushed into an actual rabbit hole, chased by a pack of boys wearing fake rabbit ears shouting, “I'm late! I'm late!” and taunted by the local bully girl (a redhead, of course!) who stands outside our gate and screams, “Off with Alice's head!” whenever I show my face. Complete strangers approach me and express disappointment that my “beautiful blonde hair” has turned such a “dull brunette”! Dull??? When everyone insists on saying up is down, it is very difficult to continue pointing out that they are wrong. It seems that “Alice” has won after all…
*Stay tuned for Part Four, in which Alyss starts the journey of recovering her imagination with the help of an old friend...
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).
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?
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
