The Hatter was the first to break the silence. `What day of the month is it?‘ he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.
Alice considered a little, and then said `The fourth.’
`Two days wrong!‘ sighed the Hatter. `I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!‘ he added looking angrily at the March Hare.
`It was the best butter,‘ the March Hare meekly replied.
`Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,‘ the Hatter grumbled: `you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.‘
The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, `It was the best butter, you know.‘
Alice Liddell‘s personal copy of “Alice In Wonderland”, the story she inspired, will be auctioned next month along with other rare first edition fantasy titles including “The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz“, “Winnie The Pooh“, and “The Tale Of Peter Rabbit“. The first edition Wonderland text has been part of the private collection of former U.S. professional football player Pat McInally. The auction, featuring primarily children’s literature, is expected to generate over $1 million in sales.
Lewis Carroll‘s stories have inspired filmmakers since the dawn of cinema, spawning numerous adaptations of the original stories, not to mention a swarm of works based on and inspired by the characters and world of Wonderland (IMDB lists 100 titles featuring Alice based characters, not counting video games). This article won’t attempt to cover them all, but will touch on the most influental of these films.
Alice first stepped onto silver screen in 1903, portrayed by May Clark in Alice in Wonderland. The 8 minute silent film was written and directed by Cecil M. Hepworth, who played the Frog Footman in the film, and whose wife played both the Queen of Hearts & the White Rabbit.
In 1923, Walt Disney directed and starred in Alice’s Wonderland, a short cartoon based on Alice In Wonderland in which Alice, played by Virginia Davis, visits an animation studio where she is shown various cartoon scenes. Later that night, she visits a cartoon wonderland in her dreams. This short was the first of Walt Disney‘s famous Alice Comedies, series of animated cartoons created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a live action little girl named Alice and an animated cat named Julius (who bears a striking resemblance to Felix the Cat) have adventures in an animated landscape. Click the image below to watch Alice’s Wonderland on YouTube.
Speaking of Max Fleischer, Betty Boop stepped through the looking glass in the 1934 animation Betty in Blunderland. In the cartoon, Betty falls asleep while doing a white rabbit jigsaw puzzle and “awakens” just in time to follow the rabbit into Wonderland.
