Who Put the Smile on the Cheshire Cat?

More than Lewis Carroll could have ever dreamed, Alice in Wonderland has crept up the rabbit hole and into pop culture consciousness. Thank Disney and thank that particular sort of blacklight-happy head culture, but it’s a book people tend to drop references to a lot more often than other works published in the last 150 years, to the point that falling down a rabbit hole now functions as a readily understood shorthand for accidentally happening upon some strange world and losing yourself in it. (And that’s handy, now that we have the internet.)

But just as it’s rarely noted today that the book’s actual title was actually Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a few of Carroll’s references today get lost as a result of Alice growing more popular than anything of-the-period that Carroll was riffing on. Take the Mad Hatter, for example. It’s somewhat well-known today that this particular tea party attendee acts so strangely because hat-makers in Carroll’s day used mercury to cure felt and therefore lost their minds. The whole character is a literalization of the then-popular expression mad as a hatter. As I said, a lot of people have heard this explanation, but a great many more people would have heard of the Mad Hatter than those who have actually come to understand why Carroll invented him.

And even fewer people know the logic behind the Cheshire Cat.

If there’s one thing to know about the Cheshire Cat, it’s that it smiles. It smiles even when the cat itself is not present, in fact. If you’re like me, you have unsettling memories of the Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland, which at one point sent the passengers through a dark tunnel and towards the Cheshire Cat’s grinning face, which vanished all but the grin, which then just wobbled back and forth in the darkness, detached from a body.

But why does it smile?

In the same way that the Mad Hatter arose from the phrase mad as a hatter, the Cheshire Cat comes from the phrase grinning like a Cheshire cat. And while a few theories exist about why anyone in Carroll’s region of England would have used it, the simplest and most widely accepted is this: Cheshire, England, had a lot of dairies, so plentiful, flowing milk would have made any local cats extremely happy. Barring a few theories to the contrary, that’s why the Cheshire Cat can’t stop smiling.

As far as making one more pop cultural connection, it’s worth noting that DC Comics has since 1983 had the villain Cheshire. And while she’s retained the same look more or less since her inception — long black hair and a green ninja dress, making her look more or less like a complementary color Elektra — she’s depicted more and more often with a grinning cat mask. Here’s how she appears on Young Justice.

It’s a nice way of making her costume reflect her literary origins, especially when consider how she’s a ninja that, like the Cheshire Cat, disappears whenever she wants to.

Disneyfied Jabberwock, Times Two

In posting that little nothing about that one nightmare-inducing movie version of Alice in Wonderland, I prompted a someone else to write a post on the Jabberwock, that nonsensical but nonetheless terrifying Lewis Carroll boogeymonster. It seems that that most familiar of Alice adaptations — the 1951 cartoon version — at one point was going to include the Jabberwock. It didn’t make the final cute, so we are left to wonder how this beast might have been rendered by Disney.

Two pieces of concept art survive. The first comes from the “Disney archives” and shows how the battle between the Carroll poem’s young hero and the Jabberwock might have looked, while the second shows the Jabberwock as he appeared in a “Little Golden Book” titled Alice in Wonderland Meets the White Rabbit.


Neither is especially scary, but should we have expected a true monster from Disney? I say yes, actually — the Disney Alice came out before its take on Sleeping Beauty, and the Maleficent dragon in that latter movie is pretty damn intimidating. Of course, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is a bit more mature of a film than Alice so maybe the eight years between the two films allowed the studio to summon the guts to create a truly evil villain — or at least to remember those guts, as Disney had in 1940 put out Fantasia, which pitted young viewers against the demonic Chernobog in that last segment, “A Night on Bald Mountain.”

Carol Channing Is a Scary Muppet

Last week’s post on the Jabberwock got a comment encouraging me to watch another scene from the 1985 Alice in Wonderland movie in which Alice interacts with the White Queen. The White Queen is played by Carol Channing, which should be motivation enough for you to watch in the same way that “Wanna see something gross?” will more than likely make you look at the something, even though you mostly didn’t want to and even though you know what the outcome would be anyway. If you’re still on the fence about whether to give a few minutes of your life to this clip, let me at least offer a glimpse at the strange, terrifying worlds that await you:


Yet more motivation: The clip consists of Channing’s unique take on acting, a musical number that begins so suddenly that it’s slightly startling, and finally a surreal ending that would not be out of place in a David Lynch movie. (Make Channing a midget and make the sheep Sheryl Lee and you’re there.)

And, finally, the clip itself:

I assume that Anne Hathaway only got the role of the White Queen in Tim Burton’s recent remake because Carol Channing was busy. Really, what other explanation could there be?

Jabberwock vs. Bunyip: A Fight for My Eight-Year-Old Soul

Herein: two videos depicting nightmarish monsters that I first experienced as a child, while watching a movie that I presumed would have been safe. They weren’t.

First, via Topless Robot’s countdown of inappropriately disturbing scenes in children’s movies, there’s the terrifying last scene of a 1985 TV movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, in which the Jabberwock barges in to Alice’s house for no reason other than to give children like me a reason to fear elaborately decorated sitting rooms.

And via Ectoplasmosis, there’s the creepy yet aesthetically pleasing “Bunyip Moon” musical number from Dot and the Red Kangaroo. I hadn’t thought about this film in years but instantly remembered the whole thing upon hearing the first strains of this song. What is a bunyip? I’m not sure, as the song and associated animated sequence only clearly conveys that it’s intensely unpleasant. Personally, I’d prefer to never find out first-hand.

Thanks for the memories, people who made these movies!

Fertile Tears

Worth it not so much for the music itself but for the fact that the music is apparently composed of mostly sound clips from Disney movies other than Alice in Wonderland. Well, that and the fact that it utilizes animation from my favorite of the Disney movies.

Love those dancing pansies.

Well, you know what I mean.

[ Source: Kottke.org ]