Victorian Visual Culture

I really enjoyed many of the annotations in The Annotated Alice.  Others were less than necessary, in my opinion.  But one sticks out in my mind as something I just can’t agree with.  In note 3, on page 62, he says, “Whoopi Goldberg was the Cheshire Cat in NBC’s undistinguished, boring television version of Alice in Wonderland that aired on February 28, 1999.”  This strikes a chord with me, not only because it seems totally out of place, but also because that is my favorite film adaptation of Alice.  It is neither boring nor undistinguished.  The cast is fantastic, and one of the things I love about it is how they make the characters in Wonderland resemble those in the real world.  As Gardiner mentions in his notes, many of the characters in the books are meant to allude to actual people.  While this is a little bit nit-picky, but it’s been bothering me since it was pointed out in class.

In this clip, Alice sings the Lobster Quadrille to a group of her parents’ friends, who all bear uncanny resemblances to characters in Wonderland.